Updates

Hello everyone!!

Again, sorry that it has been so long since I have blogged. We have now been in Turkey for 4 months. The time has truely flown!! Because we have been here for 4 months and it is the way we are...we moved. It is awesome to finally have a bigger house! Nick had some long email battles with housing and we ended up finally giving up because according to the rules of the housing gods, Bella and Sophie do not count for how many bedrooms we get. (Even though they are on the orders and dependants, etc.) So...just when we had almost given up, we found a loop-hole and the housing commander signed a new ruling that if housing is avaliable, each child should have their own bedroom. We have two children (that won't have their own rooms until they can sleep with out a night light, or something like that...), so we technically qualify for a three bedroom house. This was great news to us!!! We were put on a waiting list for the three bedroom houses and were told that we were 3rd on the list. Easy Peasy!! They just opened a new area in housing with brand new 4 bedroom houses. The moved all the families with 3 or more children to that new area. Because they did this, it opened up almost all of the 4 bedroom houses in our area...(you may see where I am going with this...) So last Tuesday, the end of March, we picked up the kids from school and went driving around our neighbohood...we stopped in front of a house and I told Nick that it looked empty just like all the others that I had pointed out on our drive. He asked me what I thought of that one and handed me the copy of the email that he received. We signed for it the next day and moved in last weekend. We were without phone and internet for almost a week, but we are back on-line now!! Because of some great helpers (Dave and Jen Anthony (our friends from Offutt), Mark (a guy that Nick works with that just showed up to help), and the Gardners (the WIC lady that I replaced...we have become friends and they live two houses down...her daughters babysat the kiddos while we drove back and forth and her husband picked up all our outside stuff with his truck), we got almost everything moved on Saturday and stayed in our new house Saturday night. Nick had to work for awhile on Saturday, and was shocked at the progress we had made when he came home at 12:30. Nick and I went back on Sunday and got the last few things. I hurt my knee again on Sunday, but was still able to get a few things done on Monday before I had to go back to work on Tuesday. So far, we have the living room and kitchen put together, and all furniture is assembled and in working order. :-) We hope to start hanging things on the wall next weekend so we can find out in another couple of months that we have to move again...(just kidding, hopefully!)

One other awesome thing about our new house is the kids. There are kids all over and always outside playing. We know most of them (the Gardners that I talked about earlier live two houses down, the Knapps live next door and that is Nick's boss-man). All the kids are a range of ages and luckily for us they are all right around all of our girls ages. Bella and Sophie will have a busy summer.

I started work alone on Wednesday. My two days alone without Carrie started with a few clients (I think 4 total on both days,), I ended Wednesday with 10 clients and Thursday with 6...I was busy and it felt good to be somebody that these young moms and moms whose husbands are deployed, can talk to. I think I am really going to like this job!!

That is it for now. Talk to you all soon!