Packing Day

After getting home from Camping on Sunday, we had Monday to get ready for the movers to come. They had called to confirm that they would show up between 9 and 10 a.m. on Tuesday to start packing our stuff into boxes. Alan and I stayed up until around 3 a.m. Monday night preparing for them. Making sure everything we wanted to take was organized.  We set our alarm for 8 a.m. so that we wouldn't sleep in too late. (I don't know why we thought we would, we have 4 kids) We were in awake, but in our bed at 8 a.m. talking to our kids when my dad called down the stairs to tell us that there was a moving van in our front yard. We hurried and got dressed and ran over to let them in and start the marathon of packing and wrapping.

 For insurance reasons, Alan and I weren't allowed to pack anything. They had to do it all, and they had to wrap everything. This is Maddie's bike that they had to wrap up.
 Here is our kitchen all packed and ready to ship
All of our kids toys.
 Ethan's bedroom.
Our office.
The girls bedroom
 This is a picture of our back storage room. I couldn't get in there very well, but they had our food storage packed and they even let us take our canned food.

Camping with the Erickson's

We got back from New Jersey on Thursday night, and Friday we got together for an Erickson Family Reunion. We went camping in Woodruff.
 The kids loved having their very own tent. Alan and I slept with Savannah in the trailer, and Ellie, Maddie and Ethan were so excited that they got to sleep with the cousins. In this picture left to right is Ellie, Megan, Bailey, Jessica, Maddie and Machesney.

 It was pretty cold and rainy, but we had a lot of fun.

 We had already set up our tent when Cleve told us that we were sleeping in the trailer so the baby wouldn't get cold. We left our tent up, and Maddie quickly made it into the "Candy Store". She was selling all of our treats and snacks to everyone, but she made sure people knew it was "for FREE". She also hired Peyton and Machesney to help run the store. They also had Jackson walking around advertising for them.

 "It's all fun and games until someone get's their eye poked out"
We ended up here on Saturday after Ellie was riding on Tyus' Motorbike. She got out of control and ran into Cleve's truck. I didn't see what happened because I was in the trailer feeding Savannah, but Cleve, Ryan, Chad and Chad were all there. They say that she was going about 20 mph when she ran into the tailgate. It was down, and she got closelined off of the Dirtbike.  Luckily she was wearing a helmet. Cleve said that she is really lucky that all she ended up with is 6 stitches in the chin. He thought for sure something else would be wrong. I started to think so too when we were on the way to the hospital and she was complaining that it hurt when she would breath in.
 After they stitched her up they took some chest xrays, and they say it was all normal. Just a few bruises. She has been pretty sore for the past few days, but is starting to feel normal again today.
 On Sunday when we were packing up to leave, it started to down pour so Sheila took all the girls to her house to play while we packed up camp. My girls love to hang out with their cousins.

More from New Jersey

Here are a few pictures of our New Jersey trip. Alan and I were in New Jersey for a night, and we decided to take a bus to New York. 

 If you look in the distance there is Ernst and Young's office on Time Square.

 We saw a candy store and thought of Maddie. We had to take some pictures for her.


 This is me in Time Square. If anyone knows how to rotate pictures on here, please let me know so that I can fix these.

We walked down Broadway and decided that we should go to a show. 

We decided to go to...

We ate dinner at a pizza parlor across the street from the Theatre.

The next day we had an "orientation" for India. They talked about our Insurance, Banking, Pouch mail, our flights, our housing and a whole lot more!! 

Thanks Mom and Dad, and Amy for watching our kids one more time!

New Jersey

Wow, I'm realizing that the last time I updated our blog, I was on the other side of the world.  Now, we're just on the other side of the US.  Alan and I have come to New Jersey for an India orientation.  We have a busy week scheduled this coming week. Today and tomorrow, we are in New Jersey, and then Friday, Saturday and Sunday we are going to have a fun Family Reunion in Woodruff. Then, Tuesday and Wednesday the movers will be here to ship all of our stuff to India. We have recently moved over to live with my parents so that we can organize and keep organized.

Tokyo

We are now in Tokyo Japan and heading home. We had a few minutes so I thought I'd update if I can get the pictures to work. These are from Alan's phone so they are a little blurry

This is Rajgopal our driver for the week. He was full of information. He told us all about Snakes, Monkeys, cooking, remedies for various illnesses, honey bees, and many many many more things that we could barely understand. A very funny man!! We asked Alan's boss if he knew where we could find a GPS system with India on it so we could find things and he said "Hire a driver." After having Rajopal this week, we decided a driver can find ANYTHING!!

This will be our church.(If we get into Ozone.) We had Rajgopal searching for it.


This is the cow that is wandering in front of the church building.

The baptismal font that we heard use to be the bakery. It was converted into the baptismal font when the church bought out the bakery, or so goes the story. Apparently the smell of hot baking bread was too distracting during sacrament meeting especially on fast Sunday. This is where Maddie would be baptized if she decides to get baptized here.


This is the chapel.

This is the ping pong table in the chapel

This is Johnny and Baby. We have agreed to hire them to help us while we are here if we can get into Ozone, otherwise it is too far for them to travel.

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday Cleve!! Thank you for watching our kids!!

Bangalore Airport

It's now 9:00 ish at night here in Bangalore and we are waiting for our plane which will leave around 11:00.  I can't wait to see my kids!! When we left the hotel this morning I remembered that I needed to get the camera so I went back to our room to get it, while I was getting it, Alan also had forgotten something, so he came back too. I handed him the camera while I got some papers, and we were off. We got to our car, and I started to get the camera out of the bag, but could not find it...long story short...somewhere between our hotel room and the car we lost Ellie's camera...shhh don't tell her, she'll never let us borrow anything again. We didn't have a camera today to take pictures, but we had Alan's cell phone. The pictures aren't quite as good, but I'll tell you what we did. We went and saw some furniture from a lady leaving India this summer to see if we wanted to buy any of her things, then we went to the Lundquist house. We hired her help to be ours when we are here. Johnny is a houseboy who cooks and irons. He will also help with other things around the house. Baby is a lady who will do whatever we want she also cooks and cleans, but will also take care of kids as needed. We still have to find a driver and a car, but as for now...we took pictures of both of them so that the kids could see who would be helping in our house.  They both come with high recommendations. After we left the Lundquist's, we headed to the office to finalize our home and school. We've decided to live in Prestige Ozone (if we can get it to the right price), and the kids will go to Indus School.  After the office we were off to shop for a little while why we waited to go to the airport. Alan had a fun time bartering with the people selling ties on the side of the road, I also shopped for some surprises for the kids when we come home. As we were shopping in the mall, it started to rain. It was so weird because it has been so hot here, and today was no different. It was sunny and bright one minute, and the next it was pouring. They say the months of June, July and August are the rainy season. Or Monsoon season. Hopefully it won't be too miserable the first little while that we are here. I've been trying to download the pictures from Alan's phone, but it's not working right now. I'll have to post the pictures later, maybe in the Singapore Airport.