We had a great time at the Texas Rangers baseball game!
The Deckers filled our car with balloons and what else but chips and salsa! What a wonderful welcome!
It was pretty easy to pick out our car in the hotel parking lot after the Deckers painted the windows for us....HOWDY YA'LL!!!
Kasey's friends Courtney and Emily surprised her at the DFW Int'l AirportWow, where do I start? This summer was one that we shall never forget. The anticipation leading up to our trip home was almost as good as the trip itself! Seeing familiar faces, eating familiar foods, driving my own car around - it was all good! It was amazing how our perspective on some things had changed; for example, the weather. In Texas everyone was complaining about how hot is was (near 100 degrees!) but it felt pretty darn good to us because there wasn't the heavy humidity that we have every day in Singapore! We loved the Texas weather! Another thing we noticed was how friendly everyone was, and I don't just mean people we know. People say excuse me and make eye contact in the states, which is something we had taken for granted. Good manners are hard to find in Singapore! And I have to admit, when we lived in Texas we used to gripe and moan about how small our yard was, and how close the homes were to one another. When we drove down our old street and past our old house (which still had our bunny statue in the garden), we each commented on how much SPACE there was and how wide the streets were and how spacious it all felt. Yep, we've been in Singapore with over 5 million people on a tiny island, where high rise condos are the norm. Living in Flower Mound, we didn't really appreciate a lot of the little things that now we would love to experience! I absolutely LOVED driving in my car on the right side of the road. Just like riding a bike, it all came back to me! (well okay the first night behind the wheel was a little scary, right Trevor?) We also loved seeing all the US flags flying everywhere. It was good to celebrate 4th of July back in the states for sure! It's been like a party with no end! The kids went to 6-Flags, Hurricane Harbor, and to camp with their friends. Wesley went to camp first, while Kasey and I had a week together, then Kasey left for camp the day after Wesley got home and Wes and I had a week together. Luckily for us, the Rangers were in town before we left Dallas and we got to go to a game. :)
I liked listening to my old favorite radio stations and driving with the windows down, going through drive-thrus! I hadn't been to a drive-thru restaurant or bank or anything in over a year and blew right through the pick-up window, I was so out of practice! ha! And pumping gas! Can't say that I loved it, but then again, that was something I haven't done in a years time. In Singapore it's all full-service stations, not to mention I hardly ever get to drive. Back in April, we put my brother-in-law Brent on a mission to find us an SUV - and boy, did he do good! You know the saying "It takes a village"? Well it took a village for us to get this car. First of all, Brent scouted out the perfect car and made the purchase for us, kept it at his house in Jenks Oklahoma, drove it to my in-laws house where they kept it for a couple of weeks and my father-in-law helped us with getting car insurance and also getting the keyless entry fixed, then my nephew Hunter picked up the car in Tulsa and drove it to Stillwater, where our friends from church, the Cospers, happened to be enrolling their daughter Kelsey (GO POKES!), who drove the car back to Flower Mound for us and took it to our neighbor Amy's house across the street from where we used to live, she let us park it there for over a week then took it to another friend Sue's house, and it was Sue and her family who painted the windows, filled it with balloons and chips/salsa and drove it to the Springhill Suites parking lot so that it would be there when we arrived. AMAZING! The logistics of that was mind-boggling, but how blessed are we to have family and friends who would go to such trouble for us!!!!!!
The welcome we received this summer was wonderful, words just can't describe. Our family and friends were so good to us, bringing us baskets of goodies and gift cards to our favorite places, hosting barbecues and sunday school get-togethers and bunco get-togethers, having a family "Christmas in July" gathering, not minding if all we wanted to eat was mexican food, my mother-in-law Marlene making my favorite cranberry relish just for me, since we missed being together at Thanksgiving. She even froze the cranberries last November, planning ahead! Homemade jam from my mom which Wesley absolutely loves, and the freezer at the Waychoff's house stocked with every flavor BlueBell ice cream you can think of, just for us. We enjoyed our nightly bowl of ice cream with Handy and Marlene, just like old times. Too bad Sugar wasn't there to lick all those bowls!
Speaking of Blue Bell ice cream, I had one of my "moments" in the Tom Thumb grocery store one day when Shelby and I ran in to get some things. I stood and stared at all the different flavors of BlueBell ice cream and it was very overwhelming to me. I'd gone a year without so many of our favorite things, and here they all were, and more. In a clean store that smells good and not "fishy" like our wet markets, I might add. There were so many choices! So many types of cereal! We are used to having our ONE row of American products at our local market(kind of like the Asian food row at your Walmart), so to see it all was just too much and the tears wouldn't stop coming. How many varieties of Triscuits does one really need????? :)
