And now, for a brief break from our birthday bonanza, here's to catch you all up to speed on life here. It's been crazy and hectic and wonderful and blech! A lot has happened in a short amount of time, so to keep myself on-topic I'm going to make a list to hopefully make this review more conceise.

1. We moved!!! This one is/was a biggie. We were seriously considering buying land and building our own house, until that repeatedly fell thought each of the 10 (ish- OK maybe it wasn't that many) times we tried to purchase land (family dispute over who owns the land, wasn't actually registered with the government, decided not to sell it after all, etc.) we decided to also consider renting a home. And lo and behold- here we are! We found a nice home in a neighborhood we really liked. Our previous home was in a fairly busy area so it was hard to motivate myself to take our kids out and about when we would get SO many stares because we lived near two major roads and different people were always coming through. And I didn't like having our babies out near those two busy roads because of safety concerns (cars, drivers, etc). We did make some wonderful friendships in that neighborhood which made moving bittersweet, but we're so happy to be in our new home. And. I am so gosh.darn.excited.estatic to actually have a kitchen that also doesn't double as a dining room/glorified hallway combination. Our old house was a long long hallway with three rooms off of it. Not ideal, but do-able. Our new house has three bedrooms, a nice big living/dining room, a kitchen, and a nice big storeroom, and two bathrooms. It's awesome. It's been a ton of work to get moved in here (a lot of changes had to be made to the house- like building a house for the guards, getting the house painted, making sure the electricicty/water was working and so on.- Seth totally blessed me by taking care of arranging for those changes so I didn't have to stress about it- what a guy:). The kids were a little stressed out from all those changes, and it's been taking us a while to get adjusted. But we're hanging in there.


2. We said goodbye to our sweet team member Jenni. We found out at the end of last month that she would be moving on to other adventures. She's getting married and wanted to leave to start preparing for marriage. We miss her tons already, but we're excited for all that lies ahead.


3. Beach vacation! We just returned from four days on the beach! We were in definite need of some heavy duty R&R and relax family time. And hello heat, I was instantly dripping in sweat as soon as we stepped out of the air conditioning. And yes, four days of no cooking for Mrs. Mully Loopers. It was nice. And the beach is consitently always beautiful. We also made two very good changes to our time at the beach. One- we started driving from our hotel to the beach. Previously we walked, which we really loved doing, but it took us so long to get out there. Now we just hop in the car and head out. Two- we started having suppers delivered to our room. It usually gets late by the time we're all showered after our day at the beach, and by the time we make it to the dining tables to eat it gets late, and the kids get cranky. Now, we figure out what we want and Papa Clarkson tells the waiters what we need and they bring it for us. And Eden thinks its special to get to eat in our hotel room. So yeah, beach vacations I love you.


4. Papa Clarkson not feeling well. This started late last night. We're not sure exactly what is going on with him, but the doctors are running some tests to figure out what has been going on. He's thankfully feeling a bit better, but still weak. There's quite a few illnesses going around right now, unfortuantely, but it doesn't make being sick any funner or any more tolerable.


5. My house helper decided to quit. I won't go into all the details, but it has made life a wee bit crazier for me. In the US we have laundry machines and dishwashers and other such delightful appliances to make life easier. Here, those machines aren't available, so we have people help instead. And we decided not to try to find someone else before we moved to our new house because we wanted to find someone from our new neighborhood to help us out. So, its been a bit crazy, imagine if all your favorite appliances quit working at the same time and you had a very energetic 2 1/2 year old and a crazy crawling 7 month old to chase after, and try to move your home in the meantime. You get the idea. Luckily one of my friends came over to help us out and washed our dishes for me. I don't know what we would have done without her.


6. Ok, I've got nothing else. Time to go to bed. Sweet dreams.