If a tree falls on your house but no one is around to hear it...does it still make a sound?

Well, it finally happened! Our house got hit by a tree.

Fortunately it wasn't a very big tree, but we will need to have that gutter replaced.

Luckily, our real estate agent called someone for us.

One week

We have now been in Qatar for a week—and what a wild week it's been! 

On the one hand it's quite the relief to be here—to have all the waiting and preparation work over and done with. It's shiny and new and exciting and everything feels full of potential. We look out the windows at the twinkling skyscrapers surrounding us and think, "Wow! We did it! We're here!" 

But on the other hand, we (or at least I) find ourselves asking, "What. Have. We. Done?!" We used to know what life was like—it was a patterned, predictable, stable. And now...let's just say that I'm beginning to feel overwhelmed. 

So I thought perhaps was a good day to share pictures of our old home (as we contemplate what we need in a new home, which has so far been a rather major stressor for me). I still can't believe we managed to empty this house. 

Here's Benjamin in his room upstairs. Several children also have claim in this bedroom. I think Benjamin, Alexander, Zoë, and Phoebe all were in this room at some point, in various configurations:

Doha Eve: The Chattahoochee

When we first moved here, I was quite excited about living so close to the river and we really did enjoy going to Jones Bridge Park and splashing around and walking the trails. But then COVID happened and the park was shut down and then tore up "Paradise" (a big bush the kids used as a fort) and then they closed the whole creek area for "conservation" (and turned a natural creek into what frankly appears to be a manmade disaster) and then they closed the bridge that makes the park be so close to us (quadrupling the time it takes to get there). But we decided we should go today and it was beautiful...but we were a little annoyed to see that the sewer project from last summer (which also closed a large area of the park again) meant that they also shut down half the trail. So the entire hiking trail is now about 200 feet long. 

Perhaps one day the park will be better again, but it has been a bit of a disappointment every time we've gone these last few years. 

That said, the river really was beautiful:

Pictures from the waterslide party

I realized I never posted any other pictures from our neighbourhood party on July 18. It was such a wonderful day! Our neighbour Lynne rented a blow up waterslide (and at the behest of her daughters made sure to get a double one so the kids could race).

The night before school starts

We enforce curfew for the first time all summer,

say no to kick-the-can, and drag the children

inside for baths at 8:30. They don't want to

say goodbye.

It's the night 

before the night

before we move halfway 

around the world. The children organize

a hugging ceremony. They huddle up, 

strategize ways not to

say goodbye. 

Five more minutes, we say—

then proceed to talk for ten

while mosquitos feast and the 

children's feet collect more magic 

cul-de-sac dust. 

Even I don't know how to

say goodbye

so I end up ugly crying with my mom

friends under the streetlight

while we imagine how to raise our children

without each other.

*****

Anyway, here's a picture of the hugging ceremony huddle:

Doha Adam

It's the day before the day before we leave. 

The kids had a water fight at John's house this morning and then we went to the pool for the very last time—so we have time to wash, dry and pack everything we got wet today. 

A few good lasts: Church, swim friends, PTC bridge

Sunday was our last Sunday in our ward (and our last Sunday at church for a while since our ward in Doha will meet on Fridays). Nothing too far out of the normal happened, except our primary children were each gifted a rather large bag of leftover Easter candy (which they were thrilled about).

Xylophones and Pinckneyville: Crossing things off the bucket list

Downsizing is an incredible amount of work! 

I suppose one could simply rent a dumpster and empty the contents of their house into said dumpster and call it a day. But even that would take a bit of work (unless one also hired workers to carry the contents of the house to the dumpster for them). We don't have the luxury of a dumpster—and doing something like that would eat away at my conscience forever—so we've had to figure out what to do with everything. 

We took a load of old paint cans to be recycled here. We took old electronics to be recycled there. We took 20-year-old towels to the animal shelter. We took dozens of loads of stuff to goodwill. We've given away a billion items on the Buy Nothing Group. We left a bread machine in the kitchen for a friend who is in Mexico until after we leave. We meticulously disassembled our broken organ and snuck it piece by piece into the church dumpster over a number of weeks. We sold a few things. And yesterday we took all our glass to the park to recycle it.

*****

Years ago—in 2022—we got a case of ginger beer for Christmas. We kept the bottles so that Miriam could make a xylophone. By October 2023 she still had not done this, but she did manage to smash an entire box of said bottles on the cement floor of the basement while we were recovering from the Great Flood of 2023. That experience must have really taken the wind out of her sails because the rest of the jars sat for another nearly three years. 

I came very close to simply loading them up to take them out to recycle but then I thought to myself, "Come on! It will take all of two minutes to make a xylophone!"

So I grabbed the cracked funnel (that we haven't tossed yet but which we knew we weren't going to pack halfway around the world with us) and filled those bottles with varying levels of water. 

Boom—xylophone done! 

Extremely scientific. 

If I had wanted to take more time on this project we could have used a tuner to get actual notes. Or I could have used a larger variety bottles to make it trickier to know what order they would go in (though we did throw in an experimental bottle or two into this activity). Or, I suppose we could have done any number of things.

After holding onto these bottles for, oh, four years, however, I was simply proud of us for doing anything with them at all (aside from smash them on the floor). 

Alexander had the most fun playing with them, I think. 

Nature-y stuff

Going for "one last" walk on the trail at Pinckneyville was wonderful and heartbreaking because really, truly we won't have this in Doha. We will have many interesting things, I'm sure. But we won't have this and I have such a soft spot for moss and ferns and all things moist and verdant....

Highlights of our time in PTC

Making a list of what we've loved about living here was much easier than coming up with a list of things we were happy to say goodbye to. On the other hand, writing about all the things we've enjoyed and will miss has made me feel a lot more melancholy than writing about all the things we were ready to say good riddance to. I'm not sure items on this list will warrant as much rationalization to make you understand why they made the list (as opposed to the "lows" list), but we also know that I get...chatty...so I will probably tell too much about things anyway. Once again, they are offered in no particular order:

These are a few of our LEAST favourite things

We are in the single digits before we close this chapter and open the next, and that...kind of gives us the butterflies, honestly. We still have quite a lot to do. And the time we have left here feels both oppressively long (can we just be there already?!) and far too short (and ever shorter—how can we say goodbye?). 

Our house is getting echoier and echoier and I feel pressed to make every day be The Best Day Ever (although today we mostly stayed home because Phoebe was up all night complaining of a sore tummy and trying to make herself throw up...she did have a low-grade fever...and all the kids have had their run with this summer cold that is going around...so I'm sure she didn't feel fabulous, but it would have been nice if she had tried more sleeping and less gagging. She seems fine now though). 

Before Miriam left, we sat down to make a list of our favourite things and least favourite things about living here. Today I'll present the lows, which I'm not sure that I can necessarily rank in importance...so here they are in no particular order:

Killing time in an empty house: rain walks, nature wreaths, and craft dates

We have been blessed with a very wet summer, filled with plenty of thunderstorms. It's sometimes made our walks a little difficult to take, but it's been lovely to literally soak in all the rain while we can.

I took Alexander and Phoebe for a walk last week after a storm and they enjoyed exploring their wet world. Here's Alexander pointing to a little herd of deer wandering through our neighbourhood (they've eaten everything in my garden that we would have liked to eat—such a nuisance).

Miriam's last day (last week) and giving away the last of our food storage

Miriam had Andie and McKenna over on Thursday night (July 16) to play a few games and say goodbye. Tonight the kids are having a sleepover down there because that room is 100% empty (except for all the stuff the kids just dragged into it, I guess). After this picture was taken I made Andie and McKenna fill a box of food to take home to their families.

How are we old enough to have been friends with people for this many years?

 

Between the county swim meet and attending Sam Lewis's mission homecoming/report, we've missed the last two Sundays at our ward, so I'm sure we'll surprise some people by showing up again!

Waterpark with swim team friends

One of my swim team mom friends started a group chat with about a dozen swim team families, suggesting that we meet up at a water park this afternoon. So that's what we did! 

When we took this picture we had about 25 kids (though some more came later). You might think it would be difficult to gather 25 kids from several different families together for a picture, but this waterpark enforced "adult swim" for the last 15 minutes of each hour. 

Adult swim is not my favourite concept, but I do admit that it has a few perks. It forces the kids out of the water so they check in with their parents. You can reapply sunscreen, make sure kids go to the bathroom, take a group picture...and so on. 

We really took advantage of the first adult swim that was called. 

"Come on, moms!" one of my friends called. "We've got the pool all to ourselves. That's right—all of us. Miriam grab Phoebe. Who will take Baby Red?"

She marched us all over to the water slide and demanded we head up the stairs. It was really quite fun! We all went several times. 

And then the kids suggested a jumping contest off the high dive. 

It was also fun to just float around in the pool, taunting the children that we were swimming and they weren't!

Sparklers, take 2

When Phoebe saw the pictures of the kids playing with sparklers on the 4th, she was like, "Wait a minute—when did that happen?" 

So we had to tell her that it happened...after she had gone to bed. She immediately began to have some serious regrets about bedtime, so Andrew promised that we'd pick up some sparklers at the store on Monday and do them again for FHE. 

This sounded like a good plan to her.

Could she remember what they were called?

Absolutely not.

Sprinklers? Spracklers? Spritzes? Sprinkles?

Twinklers? Twizzlerss? Twirlies? Twinkles?

If she was talking about something yesterday, it was highly likely that she was talking about sparklers. 

Or trying to...

Unfortunately for her, there were no fireworks left in the grocery stores on Monday morning—zip, zero, zilch!

Every last firework display had been replaced with back-to-school displays. Yuck!

So I sent out a plea on the good ol' Buy Nothing Group to see if anyone had any sparklers left for my poor youngest child who had slept through the late-night fun the big kids had in the cul-de-sac. 

It took a couple of minutes but soon I had offers pouring in. 

"I have a few boxes!"

"I have so many left over! TAKE MINE!"

"You should have just asked me! The big kids didn't burn through my entire stash on the 4th!" (this last one was from our neighbour who had supplied the sparklers in the first place).

We ended up with plenty of sparklers—enough for Phoebe and all the cul-de-sac kids to enjoy another evening of pyromaniacal mayhem!

Here she is anxiously waiting for her first sparkler to...spark:

Miriam's last Sunday

 

Today was Miriam's last week at our ward. Technically she still has one more Sunday left in Georgia, but we aren't going to our ward next week. So this was it for her. 

Oh, what do you do in the summertime?

It was hot today.

Our swimmers were hosed down with cold water while they swam because the pool was a little too warm to work out in. It was hot yesterday morning—hot enough that we got hot just playing around and had to go home to cool down. 

We didn't plan on extra pool time today because...it was just too hot.

But our little neighbour knocked on the door asking if they could have phase two of the water fight they started last night. 

"Only this time can we use your hose?" he requested. "Because my dad is working. I can bring all my water balloons! I just need a grown up to fill the tub with water!"

So that's just what we did because...it was hot!

We brought out one of our empty bins as well. I haven't decided on the fate of this bin yet (it doesn't have a lid) but it made an excellent little pool today. 

Here's Phoebe dancing around in the arc of water from the hose (I had to keep making water rainbows for the kids to run under while I filled the bins with water).

Mountain mint

It is wild how quickly the mountain mint I planted has taken over my garden. Not that I mind! 

It's native to Georgia, the deer don't eat it, pollinators love it. 

Our relator was like, "And we'll have to get some landscapers out to remove all this weedy overgrowth..."

And I was like, "Sure...weeeeeds..."

I don't want to seem like I'm attached to this house or what happens to it. I'm not. I don't really care what the future owners do with the yard. But I am also a little morally opposed to overly manicured lawns when we could be planting things that could do a little more for the ecosystem. 

So I have this huge swath of mountain mint on one of our terraces and I think it's great. It's absolutely teeming with pollinators. The kids joke about how bad it would be to fall into the mountain mint and make all the bees angry...but they're mostly content to sit nearby and watch the bees and things buzz around. 

Now, you might be asking, "Why on earth would you want this in your yard? Isn't this The Summer of Stings? Don't you feel responsible for drawing all these bees to your yard and endangering your children?"

Not at all!

Doha preview

It's hot today. For reference, wunderground.com tells me that it's 100°F here, with a "feels like" temperature of 115°F. So of course we had to go outside to feel what that feels like—just for reference.