Crazy Weeks

Ben told me last night that I'm behind on my blogging. I know that I am, but truthfully this past month has just been crazy; it's left my head spinning and given me very little time to sit down and think. Here is a five week timeline of our lives this March and April:

March 3: Ben leaves for Europe (Germany, Turkey)
March 10: Ben arrives home at midnight
March 13: Ben flies to Portland
March 16: Ben takes a red-eye flight home to Mexico, arrives at 9 am the next day
March 18: Our family flies to Puerto Vallarta to kick off three weeks of vacation
March 23: Our family  flies to Portland to visit home for the week
March 31: Drive to Lakeview to visit my parents
April 3-April 5: Family road trip with my parents to Yosemite National Park
April 6: Fly home to Monterrey

The hardest part was Ben being on business trips 12 out of 14 days. It was a lot of exhausting traveling for him, and a lot of single parenting for me. As the kids have grown older, in some ways it has gotten a lot easier when Ben is out of town. However, this time in particular, Josh really struggled. In fact, he began struggling the week before Ben even left. We had two parenting errors regarding this business trip for Ben. First, we thought it would be wise to "mentally prepare" Josh for Ben leaving by talking about it periodically starting a couple weeks before. Unfortunately, that led to Josh being extremely anxious every time Ben left in the morning for work, because he thought that it was Ben leaving for his trip. Error number two: I usually try to stay super busy while Ben is out of town, for my sanity and to help the time go faster. Well, for an already anxious Josh, this was just too much to handle...and he was so socially overwhelmed that he was throwing massive, screaming and crying tantrums every time I tried to leave the house. Thankfully, I finally put all the pieces together, dialed back our social calendar and had some quiet, routine days at home. Josh (and I) had a much better week 2 with Ben gone. However, many of his new anxious habits are continuing, even with Ben home and we're having to adjust old parenting techniques and learn many new ones in order to help Josh function within the chaos of our constantly changing and traveling international life. It has been the most humbling parenting experience I've had yet, and we still have a long way to go with many of his anxious behaviors. 

It was difficult to have Ben gone for days in a row, but I sure am thankful that this didn't happen six months ago, before we had a chance to meet a community of people to support us. Our community here in Monterrey is so wonderful and it was amazing to have their help while Ben was gone. Two of the weekend days we were able to swim at the consulate with friends. One Saturday afternoon we picked up my Northern Ireland friend, Cassie, and her kids for dinner and a movie night. My friend Megan, whose husband was also out of town on the first week, came over several nights for dinner and to help out. She played games with and read to the boys. We spent another weekend day out at the Leonards' on the Back2Back campus. Our Sunday alone was broken up with church service. I hosted a girls night one evening and a moms of minis Easter egg hunt one afternoon. We ate at our favorite restaurant, Frida's, twice. After school one day, we hosted one of the boy's friends from school, Nico, to play for the afternoon. I chaperoned a field trip for the boys' class to Planetario Alfa. The kids jumped on the new apartment trampoline almost every evening. We spent a Friday evening at a super fun birthday party at Josh's gymnastics studio. All of that was packed into those twelve days that Ben was out of town!

It's amazing to think of how full our lives are in Monterrey with such awesome families...all in the span of a year. We are so thankful.

Saying goodbye to Daddy is so hard!

Easter egg hunt at our apartment. I can't believe that it was a cloudy and cold day...rare for Monterrey March.

Most the kids in the group are around 2 years old, so my kids hid the eggs instead of searching for them.

That's a lot of moms and kids!

The boys with some of their classmates on the field trip. It was fun to see them interacting with classmates.

Consulate pool time with friend; the twins are doing some acrobatic thing with their buddy, Kyler.

My friend, Megan, playing Candy Land with Josh

The boys loved Megan reading to them: she had great voices for James and The Giant Peach

Joshy playing at the park with buddy, Harvey.

Girls night with friends from church (photo credit: Seth)

I was thankful for the twice weekly gymnastics class. Josh continues to do really well there.

The twins had SO been looking forward to the birthday party at the gymnastics studio, because they always have to sit and watch Josh at class, but never get to play on all the cool equipment. This is Seth playing on the trapeze swing. 

The Lord blessed up with the most beautiful sunset after Liza's birthday party.

Ben came home from Turkey with cool gifts for the kids. Josh got a dagger which he now brings everywhere with him...including the store and bedtime.

For the twins, he brought the most beautiful Turkish chess set. They loved it!

*More detailed posts of the happier parts of these five weeks (our vacations) to come!