Home again

Okay, I think I might be in withdrawal. My toilet flushes too quietly, people drive too slowly, my shower isn’t anywhere close to hot enough, and my mattress is soft like butter left out of the fridge too long. I had to put on an extra blanket because my usually pleasant 68 degree house is now an icily frigid 68 degree house. And in even better news, I tried on a pair of pants that were in the “I have a dream” part of the closet and they once again fit this fat body, well slightly less fat. Maybe I could market a Kumis and horse meat diet…

Welp, I guess now that I’m “home” I should be telling you about what a relief it is to be back around people who speak English. Seriously, I think I about cried when the flight attendant spoke to me in clear English and asked if I wanted an orange juice at 5 in the morning local time. It’s okay though. I think he just thought I was real attached to citrus fruit drinks. But hearing someone who was obviously from the US was a great feeling to know that I was getting back home to see the boys.

And it was great to get to see that they were happy healthy and largely intact. On the ride home from the airport, I was stroking Ben’s head and musing his hair and found a rather large lump on his head. When I asked him what happened he whispered “They told me not to tell you about that.” Turns out running in socks on wood floors can be hazardous to chairs in the general area. And to the little skulls that go crashing into them. But not to worry, the chair doesn’t even have a scratch.

I’m kind of disappointed in my boys in a way. We’ve gone eight straight years with out a visit to the emergency room for either of them. No stitches, no casts, no pins, plates, or any kind of surgery to speak of. It’s like I’ve failed them some how. I mean they’ve got a tree house in the back yard so we can’t be too far from that kind of stuff, right?

The 21st was a long day for me. I got up at 1am local time to get to the airport. Hopped on a few planes and crashed into my bed at home at 10:00pm local time 37 hours later without the calendar flipping a single page. Yeah. No wonder my eyes still feel blurry. In Denver I realized that jetlag has a nasty effect of turning off my foul language filters. I cursed at some poor payphone for not dialing the right number for me. Now I realize that I was the one to blame. If only I could apologize.

So here’s the status update. I leave to take the boys to meet their sister on Sunday. The passports are in the mail to get visa-ed and I have a huge list of gotta do’s that need attention before I go. Jamie and I are skypeing often enough that she doesn’t miss me too much and we have optimistically aimed at coming home right on St. Patrick’s Day. Soon we’ll be one big happy family of five. But for right now we’ll settle for having the boys on one side of the planet and the girls on the other. It is kind of cool to think that the sun never really sets on a member of the Morningstar family. Kind of like the British Empire. But without the tea. Or large impressive navy.