We made it!

The kids and I and my dad made it to Kuwait. We're trying to take advantage of the time with Dad here and showing him around so we haven't spent much time on the computer. The kids do check their emails daily--they miss their friends.

The most eventful part of the trip happened before we even got on the first plane. We were plenty early to the airport (we flew out of the Boise airport). We waited for a while near our gate then decided we should eat a little something before getting on the flight. We walked down to the McDonalds at the airport. I had the kids sit up against the wall while my dad and I ordered the food. After getting the food, we went to a little food court to eat.

After eating, we all got up to go back to our gate and Batman (our 9 year old) couldn't find his carry-on backpack. It was nowhere to be seen. We were now close to our boarding time so it was a bit of a panic. We all raced back to where they were sitting waiting at McDonalds and the backpack wasn't there. We thought maybe he'd left it back at the gate so we raced back there. Upon arriving back at the gate, we didn't find his backpack, but we did realize we were missing Nic and Red (our 3 and 4 year olds). So before even leaving Boise, we'd lost a backpack and two kids.

I told the kids to stick with Grandpa by the gate and Batman and I went searching for the missing kids and backpack. We found the kids back where we were eating. They were sitting with a nice older couple who were feeding them nachos, just waiting for us to return and retrieve the kids.

Then we started looking for security to ask about the backpack when I saw my dad going for a phone. Apparently, they'd paged me and I didn't hear it. The page was concerning the backpack--it'd been found. So my dad went up to get the backpack from a security office and I took all the kids and waited by the gate. By the time I got back to the gate, everyone else had already boarded.

I gathered the kids around and gave them a lecture about sticking together, not getting separated, staying with me at all times, keeping their bags with them always, etc. Then we waited for Dad to come back because he had all our boarding passes. As soon as the kids saw their Grandpa, they all went running down the hall to him. So much for my lecture about staying with me.

We got on the plane and we were finally on our way. The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful compared to that. We flew to Chicago, then to D.C. Then from there we flew to Kuwait. The oldest 4 kids all got sick on the last flight. They were so looking forward to playing their new DS Lites and watching TV (each seat had it's own screen) but those things just gave them a little more motion sickness.

Upon arriving in Kuwait, we quickly found our way to the Visa Issuance desk but they weren't quick about getting people their visas. It had been approximatly 24 hours since we left my parent's house in Boise so the kids were pretty antsy (we all were). We were finally at our destination--the place we'd been looking forward to for 4 months--but ended up waiting nearly an hour and a half to get our visas. It seemed like forever.

After getting the visas, the rest went pretty quickly. We found our way to baggage claim and had to show our visas to get through to it. There were several Indian men there with baggage carts asking to help us. We chose one and he came with us to find our luggage. We had checked in 18 bags and had marked each bag the same way so they were easily identifyable. He threw them on the cart and we counted but they were piled in such a way that they were hard to count. We kept coming up with only 16 or 17 and he kept saying, "No! 18. 18 bags. 18." He finally convinced us that there were 18 bags on the cart. Even as we were loading them into the cars (Todd brought 2 friends to help transport all of us and our luggage) we counted again and he still convinced us there were 18 bags. It wasn't til we got home that we realized we really were short one suitcase. Todd and my dad went back the next day but the United baggage claim was closed so we have yet to retrieve that particular bag. Fortunately it doesn't have anything that's irreplaceable.

So that's our trip over. I'll post more later about the house and the "washer"--if that's what you want to call it. Bless Todd's heart for trying to save me some laundry headache. It did backfire on him. More on that later!