Beginnings and Endings in Taipei

Sunrise, our first morning in Taipei 

The sun sets on our time in Taipei

First and last day of school

2009

Shilin Night Market

2013

"Hosting" (Part 1)

It's my Birthday week. So at the very least our visitors timing left something to be desired. But after 3 rounds of notes coming home from one of the kid's class with the cheerful message, "Someone in your class has lice!" I wondered how long we'd make it before our luck ran out.
Click, click, click, BANG.

There are so many moments in motherhood that you never forget:
The first time you hold your child in your arms.
The first time they head off for school.
The first time you find lice crawling in their hair.

This morning I discovered one of my children had become a host to some unwelcome guests.
In my horror I immediately used a life line and called a friend. She-who-shall-remain-unamed recently endured the same trauma with her kiddos. She was calm and collected and told me exactly what to buy and how to proceed. Our heads started itching like mad just from the conversation.

It took me 2+ hours to clean and comb through Ground Zero Child's hair. It was highly memorable, but more in the "remember to work through this with my psychiatrist" kind of way. I'm treating all of us even though no one else (yet) has any signs of it. I want to minimize a reoccurrence since, in the words of Sweet Brown, "Ain't nobody got time for dat!"
Before today I had no idea that terms like "lousy" and "nit-picking" were so nasty and insulting.
They say you learn something new everyday. I feel certain I could've done without this knowledge. On the bright side, I'm extremely grateful we sprung for the large capacity washer/dryer.
Good. Grief.

Love in the Time of Lice (Part 2)

After 7+ hours on my feet treating and combing through all 5 of the children's hair (and finding nothing, thankfully, other than the initial discovery) Nathan and I had finally gotten the laundry started and the children down to bed.
Though we were bone-tired we still had to treat each others hair.
Now I don't know about you but when I was falling in love and imagining Nathan and I's grand life together, I never could have conjured the scene we found ourselves in that night.
After an extremely exhausting day, watching my husband part, comb, and search through my wet hair like a mama chimpanzee, both of us without shirts, in the garish light of the reading lamp we'd brought in to help with the inspection, culminated in about the most unflattering reflections I could ever hope to see of the two of us.
At one point Nathan got my long hair hopelessly tangled in the de-lousing comb, and I mean hopelessly. As  he held up the giant mess of hair and comb from the back of my head, he shrugged his shoulders and said "Sorry!" in the best Gilly impression ever, and suddenly we were both laughing hysterically.

Later that night as we got ready to end one of my least favorite days of parenthood yet, I reflected on what true love is.
I want to teach my children that when they are looking for their future spouse that sheesh, there is so much more to consider than just "love". You have to choose someone you not only want to share your best times with but someone who you want to go through the very worst and hardest things in life with.
It's like picking a partner for the Amazing Race. You are gonna see some unforgettable things and have some breathtaking experiences. But there will also be times of disappointment, frustration, functioning through mind bending jet lag, and stress enough to test the strongest relationships. So the question is, who do you want to go on that journey with?
Who do you want delousing your head? And better yet, who could you actually laugh hysterically with in the middle of the whole sordid experience? Because that my friends, is true love.

Anyway, if all of this talk of lice has your head itching like crazy, I have just one word: "Sorry!"

Mother Scarlett

Only one of my 5 children has been much into dolls and babies. However, Scarlett is SO into babies that she has made up for everyone and then some. At Christmas when she spotted the shelf brimming with dolls she was distressed and pointed to them saying, "My baby!" and then doing a couple of panicky breaths as if we might just move on. As soon as we handed her one baby she would repeat the chubby finger pointing at the remaining babies and be stressed until we placed another in her arms. Then the whole scene repeated until she had a solid dozen babies in her arms. 

We have entered a phase where I struggle getting her into the car without several babies tagging along. And then another struggle of how many babies are coming into the store. Me: none. 

Scarlett: Just these 8 that I brought!

She and Ander got the bitty twins for Christmas but Ander shares custody. Ooor Scarlett kidnapped the baby boy, whichever way ya want to see it. She calls the girl "baby Scarlett" and the boy "Diego"... there is a striking resemblance... 

She gets defensive sometimes when I try to take pictures of her and her babes, look at that mother lion glare! 

Last week Nathan and I were at Ikea. We stopped in the kid area to let the littles play with the toys they have out. It didn't take long before we noticed Scarlett was involved in a pattern, setting up the Ikea-Home-for-as-of-yet-Unpurchased-Babies. She had discovered the big bin of plush baby dolls. Gender or race matters not to her. She was very busy lovingly tucking babies into all of those empty beds. 

 She found a basket of food and set off to feed every baby.

 Then she discovered a ladle and was giving them all drinks before bed. Nathan and I just sat there in awe of her. It was one of those (rare) moments as a parent that seem to make it all worth while. For a bit anyway.
Here is a short video showing all of the baby dolls in the beds. When she ran out of beds you can see at the end of the video on the left side she has started putting babies to bed on the shelving. A friend had commented, No child left behind, and that is exactly right. Her little heart seems to have room enough for all.

Moving Makes Me Mental

I've realized a lot in the last seven weeks, mainly that I'm not nearly as detached from worldly possessions as I would have thought I was. Turns out, I want my stuff! Or at least my bed. I've been in an abusive relationship with an air mattress for almost a month now and I think it's time to break things off.
Some trials become so tedious and heavy that you start to wish for a change of hardship just for something different, I call this request a trial transfer. A good example would be pregnancy. By the end you are saying, "Please get this baby out of me!" Even though you know that just rings in the new trial of Zombie Motherhood where you function without sleep, with sore everything, while serving tiny minions at all hours, day or night.
Moving internationally is a lot like that.
I'm so ready for a trial transfer from this empty house where a 4 year old Ander is, not figuratively, but literally climbing the walls. I'm so ready I may weep tears of joy when the moving van pulls up this morning. Sure, it heralds in untold piles of boxes and innocent movers endlessly asking "Where should this go?" until my ears bleed and my head answers, "I DON'T KNOW!" But my mouth is forced to give a civilized and decisive answer. There will be lot's of "Why did we keep this?" and even a few regretful, "Why didn't we keep that?!" And at the end of the day the movers will drive off into the sunset leaving me with piles of "things". And by then I may start to feel repulsed by all of our "stuff" and "things" closing in on me. I will probably think to myself, if I was asked to walk away from my worldly possessions right now, it would be the easiest decision ever.
That, good people, is the insanity of moving. I've wondered why few of my friends have talked specifically about how difficult it was for them to move. Then I thought, maybe they just have more self control than I and don't talk about it publicly. But I think the answer has more to do with how the very instant it's over, you lock those memories behind a very sturdy door and throw away the key.
So today, I'm just hoping I find that key in my shipment.
And my bed...
I really miss my bed.

Nomads

Nomads, wanderers, gypsies, aaand Jensens. Over the last month or so we have felt akin to those in the world who roam and move often from place to place.
After our our delayed flight in Japan gave us the "opportunity" to spend the night and day there, we finally made our way to Houston. Our dear friends the Furni offered to watch our jet lagged kids while we house hunted in Dallas, because they love us. We took Ander with us because, well, we love them.

We lost a day house hunting but over the next few days we were able to find a lovely house not even a block away from the elementary school(!). Next on the list was to gather our chicks up so we headed to Houston and then we were able to spend a day with our friends back in Dallas.
The next couple of days were spent running errands...

(photo creds go to Kennedy)

...And car hunting... with 5 kids in tow. On a separate but related topic, I was struck with an idea of how we could really punish the non-violent criminals in our nation.
Not wanting our children to spend hours (I'm talking double digits) on the iPad we let them work on their "problem solving skills" and "interpersonal skills" for large chunks of time while Nathan and I left the car to wander a car lot. Those were long days for everyone. Eventually we found what we needed, and it was in the nick of time before we had to pack up and go to Boise for our first Christmas there in about 6 years.
In case you're wondering what it looks like to live in a small space and then try and do the laundry/organize/pack all in the same small place? Umm, something like this:

(I'd like to title this picture "Erin's personal hell")

But the next day when our 2 short little flights had us to Boise by early afternoon, we were all in awe of how slick the travel was. Glorious! Punctual! Short! 

We arrived in frigid Boise (about 26 F/ -5 C.) and all of my kids were ecstatic to see snow, even if it was the dirty weeks old mounds left about. Ander had a cruel shock when he excitedly shoved his hands into snow for the first time and got two big fist fulls. It took about 3 seconds before he was crying in pain from the cold. Ouch! And there were other signs that they were novices, like when I found Kohen warming his hands in the exhaust of the rental car. We had some teaching to do!

Nathan's sister Tara met us at their parent's house with head to toe snow clothes for all 5 of the kids that she had gathered for us (she is my hero!). We were teaching the kids how to put on the clothes so they'd know the best tricks, when it suddenly started SNOWING. We couldn't believe it. 

It was a Christmas miracle! It was like heaven sent that snow just for my kiddos. What a great memory. It was the perfect way to start off our Christmas vacation.