Baking Therapy

Okay, okay. I know I wrote a new post yesterday. But something's happened between now and from when I hit submit.

My mom went a little crazy.

See? She put on an apron!

But who can blame her? Her husband left for Iraq and her daughter got blue hair extensions and went to a school dance all in 24 hours. 

So, for therapy she decided to bake food. Most moms would go to a salon and get their nails done and call it nail therapy, but not her. She baked food.

Which is a miracle in itself since we don't bake food. If I want cookies or brownies, I make them myself. We don't even bake food for holidays, we throw parties and let people bring us deserts.

But yesterday, some strange bell in my mom's head went off and she got out recipe books and googled food conversions and went to grocery stores.

It started with pumpkin pie.

And then two pumpkin pies.

And then cookies.

And then frosted cookies.

And then bread,

brownies,

pretzels,

and pumpkin cheesecake.

 And meanwhile poor Ike scavenged around waiting for something to fall on the floor.

 We had to bring in another table to hold everything.

But frankly? My mom can do the baking therapy as many times as she wants. It benefits me anyways. She cooks, I eat. Everyone is happy.

And now we have deserts ready for Thanksgiving. I hope it's okay to put pumpkin pie in the freezer for a month.

Field Trip Trouble

Some of you may have hard about the unrest over here right now. Just might have glimpsed it on the news. Well there's stuff like that here too, in Jordan, it's not as bad as Egypt and Syria, but it's not a once in a lifetime thing. So now that that's settled, let me tell you a story.

There once was a girl named Hannah in seventh grade who had a field trip to one of the old crusader castles in Jordan. All of the middle school was going on field trips that day in fact, and they were all so excited. The sixth grade was going over to our friend the Dead Sea, and the eigth grade was going on a trip to another crusader castle, farther north than the seventh grader's castle. So the day before the field trip came and as Hannah was eating dinner, her mom got a text. It said something along the lines of this:

Due to the protests, road blockings, riots, and unrest in the ______ Castle area, the seventh grade field trip will be postponed to a later date. We are sorry for the inconvienence but the student's safety is our top priority, have a good day.

Okay, I'm done being narrator now, I don't know what the text said, something along the lines of that I bet but anyways, yeah. Our field trip was canceled becasue of protests and road blocks and danger.

Now there's a lot of crazy reasons for why field trips get canceled, maybe the weather was bad, there was a freak tornado, the whole class got sick, the place shut down for revamping, I don't know.

But for the most memorable field trip canceling, I bet I win the prize.

Old Dogs and Their Stories

Patton.

I've mentioned him before. Like here for instance.

He's dead.

Just like that.

I learned today at dinner. I cried. That was four hours ago. I think I might start crying again from writing this. But I have to. It's important.

We got him when I was one and we lived in Englnad, we got to choose him from the whole litter of English Bull Terriers. We chose him because I liked him the best and he was the calmest one there. We figured he'd stay that way. We were wrong.

He was rambunctions. He was wild. He was crazy. He was the best dog in the whole wide world, and he's in half of our photos, and all of our videos. Whether he's barking or knocking something off the table. He was family, he was ours forever.

Then we moved to Florida, Patton played in our backyard, caught tennis balls, chased after frisebees. He loved the frisbee. He went to the beach with us, and parks and lakes and playgrounds. Then we left and went to New Jersey.

He learned what snow was. He chased us down sledding hills, kicked snow on us, jumped up on sleds with us and then hopped off when we were going the fastest, tumbling in the snow and sneezing. He ran Colin and I over multiple times when we were trying to walk in the snow drifts, he caught more tennis balls, ran after more frisbees.

He finally learned to 'sit' and 'stay'.

I taught him 'lie down'.

That was as far as his trianing got.

He came with us to Virginia, where he got arthritis in his two front paws and an enlarged heart, we learned we were moving to Jordan. He couldn't come with us. He would've died on the plane, they said.

We took him to New Jersey, where he stayed with a lady that took him in for us. We e-mailed, but not nearly often enough, just enough to know that he was doing pretty okay, just enough for us to hope that he'd last until next summer, when we could see him.

Well, he didn't.

He's gone, just like all those houses that I still remember how to walk through with my eyes closed, except he wasn't a house.

He was our dog. He was our family.

When we move, we'll go to New Jersey, but not to pick him up, to pick up his toys, which I will keep forever.

Or maybe longer.

He's baried there, in her backyard, and I'll put a flower on it, maybe put his favorite dog treat on it, or paint a stone with a poem or something and rest it on his grave.

I'll do it all, even if I am a lousy poet, just for him. Because he deserves it.

I don't know exactly why I wrote this post. I guess I wanted to put it all down somewhere where people can see it, so they can know a little bit about him too, not enough to make them love him, or want to see him, just enough to let them know that he was here. That he was with us through it all. All of it up until now.

But he's still here, in a way, from his dog hair that's buried in our old blankets, stuffed in the back of closets, to his pictures and videos.

I'll see him this summer still, not in the way I imagined, but I'll see his toys and his crate again, and I'll see that chair that he used to always sleep in, once we get it out of storage, unless we've gotten rid of it already, I think we have actually. He ripped that thing to shreds from jumping on it so many times. But he liked it.

Patton. I'll miss him. Everyday. He never got to meet Ike. For some reason, it seems very important that he should've met him. I think I'm going to be saying that a lot.

Good bye Patton. We loved you. The people that got to meet you loved you. Everyone loved your stubborn, crazy self.

Rest In Peace, buddy.

Awards and Homecomings

Today there was an award ceremony at my school, where teachers nominate kids for doing a good job and stuff. When we walked into the MPR I saw my mom, dad, and brother sitting in the back with other parents. I've been to these things before, I knew what this meant.

This meant that I won an award.

This also meant that my dad was home.

I ran over and hugged him, tears coming to my eyes at the surprise, I wasn't aware that people were watching, I was only aware of my dad being there.

In the end my friends were asking me why I was hugging my dad, and I had to reply that I hadn't seen him in two and a half months because he had been in Iraq. Some of them were pretty shocked, others were smiling and gasping, "That's so exciting!"

Yeah, it is.

He's here. He's staying. For a while at least.

He's home.

October?

It's already October. Which means that we move in seven months.

Seven months.

But right now, Colin's sick. He's been sick for a week now, off and on with the stomach bug and the cough and the fever. I was sick for two days, in which I could barely talk, but I'm fine now. I don't know how he does it. I wish I could stay home from school this long. Dances and events and halloween partys and concerts are being planned at school, and visits from Dad, ski trips, and orthodontist appointments are being planend at home.

My third and fimal Halloween in Jordan is coming, and I'm really going to miss it when we leave, we don't go to other people's houses trick-or-treating, but instead we go to the embassy, where the offices are decorated and haunted houses are created.

The leaves aren't changing colors.

But it's getting colder, you can feel it when you go outside in the morning, clouds are appearing, hopefully we get the first rain of the season soon.

October's here. October means pumpkins and bats and ghosts. Here it means rain and cooler weather.

Halloween's coming. Rain is coming. More school-work is coming.

Boo!

October's here.

So, We Got Our Next Post

Denver.

Denver, Colorado.

You know that place that we visit every summer? Where my uncle and baby cousin live? That place in AMERICA?

Yeah. There.

Denver.

Next summer along with all the other moving families, we'll fly out of Jordan for the last time and go to...

Denver.

Where there's fields with real grass, mountains, Walmarts, Targets, lakes, parks, dog parks, lacrosse, and family.

Denver.

Where I'll be able to see my old friends that I actually met over here, where my dog, Ike, will have a yard to run around in. Where I'll be in the U.S.A for two years.

And you know what else? My old dog, Patton, gets to come too. Yup, we're going to go to New Jersey and pick him up.

And I'm happy that we're going to America, that we got a good post, that we're getting Patton back, but at the same time I'm sort of conflicted.

Now that I'll be living in America again, I'm not really going to be a foreign service kid anymore am I? I mean, my dad's job is still the same, we just got the America post, which means we won't be overseas.

So what does this make me? That girl that Moves all the time but only lived overseas twice? Once that she doesn't even remember?

I guess it does. But the thing is, after our two years in Denver are up, we might move overseas again. So what exactly am I? Not a foreign service kid, right? I'm probably just a diplokid. Okay, I'm fine with that.

So now our days will be filled with searching for a house, working out getting Patton back, and just trying to enjoy our last days here.

Dever.

I think I'm still in shock.

Embassy Family

I consider myself to have two families sometimes. There's the blood-related family that I live with, and then my embassy family. You see, the embassy in Jordan is huge, with about 300 families working in it. But it's also a very close community, where everyone knows everyone, and all the kids are friends. It's also kind of like a middle or high school. With the different groups that usually hang out together.  Those kids will all know each other, and the parents will all be friends.

I don't know every single person at the embassy, but I know quite a lot of people. If someone usually goes to the pool or the restaurant, I'll know their name. It's kind of interesting actually, how connections are made over here. You could know someone from another post, from school, from work, from training. In the foreign service, it really is a small world. Even though we're living all over it.

I especially know my parents very close friends and their kids. They're like my second family. And the kids in this "group" have all different age ranges. But somehow all of us clicked together. The parents from work and stuff, but what really amazes me is how us kids did.

We range from 3 to 12 years old. There's Sa, from a differnt blog post, who's three years younger then me, but really mature for her age. We really are like sisters, and then her brother and his friend. His little brother who's one of my brother's best friends, and then even more.

We've been to the Dead Sea and Red Sea together, we've been to practcally every embassy event together. All of us really could pass as siblings, if we didn't look so different. (We probably could pass anyway, Sa and I have convinced people that we were sisters before.) And then there's everyone else at the embassy, who I also know, even if not as close.

So during the year, it's like coming to a big house when I go to the embassy, escept for the summer.

In summer, people leave. They move on to other countries, other adventures, and new people take their place. Now when I walk through the embassy, I don't know half the people, and it's kind of confusing at first, when you realize that you haven't seen someone in a while, until you learn that they're gone.

But by winter break, I'll adjust, I'll know for sure who's gone, and who's here, I'll know everyone again.

We really are like a family. A diverse, odd, smart, and very, very interesting one.