Hey Ya'll! It's Hot in Oklahoma and Texas!

On Memorial Day this year, my twin sister and I turned 35.  I figured the best way to celebrate would be to head on over to Oklahoma where she lives so our families could be together on our birthday.  So that's what we did!  My parents came along and we had a wonderful time.  This is us before dinner at Red Robin.  I got - what else? - a caesar salad, my absolute favorite thing to eat, which is also hard to come by in Kenya.  Can I just say that I love eating in America?

The holiday weekend was filled with plenty of fun despite the Oklahoma heat.  And it was definitely hot!  Our boys loved playing at their cousins' house.  A playground, a sandbox, a trampoline, a kid jeep just the right size for Asa...  What could be better?

And of course the hotel pool was a hit.  Thank goodness for extra adults on hand to manage our three kids who don't know how to swim!

On Sunday we hit up the Oklahoma Zoo.  That place is huge and wonderful.  Caleb would've stayed all day and night if we'd let him.  We started the day off right by feeding the parakeets, then riding on the zoo train and seeing oh so many animals.  We really do love a good trip to the zoo!

After napping through the heat of the day, well, there was still more heat.  It was Oklahoma after all.  But my sister had the brilliant idea of pulling out this beauty and letting the kids run amuck in the water.  They were huge fans, of course.  Even Asa with his swim trunks that refused to stay up :)

On the morning of our birthday, we visited "the horse hospital" as my boys call it, to see what my brother-in-law does every day at work.  He's an equine surgeon who specializes in orthopedics.  Yep, you read that right.  He's got one of the coolest jobs in the world.  Our boys particularly loved seeing the horses in their stalls and hearing about why they were there.  One broke its foot and was recovering from the surgery to fix it, another was scheduled for a c-section (a rarity in the horse world), yet another had an infection and was being treated, and so on.  It is a fascinating place!

And then dinner at Red Robin, as I mentioned.  My darling niece is into crafts these days and made me this beautiful necklace for my birthday.  I love it!

After all the Oklahoma fun, we then traveled a couple hours south to Wichita Falls, Texas, to see some friends we met at Tenwek.  They lived in an apartment below us for several months last year.  The Benacs have two boys similar ages to ours who became fast friends with our kiddos.  Their mom taught a preschool class that Kai was in, and their oldest son was in a Social Studies class that I taught at the same time.  We really cherished their friendship at Tenwek and were delighted to discover how easy it would be to drive down and see them in Texas.  So we did!  And it was so so good to spend time with people who have also lived in Kenya and who've done medical mission work cross-culturally.  Our boys dived right into playing with their buddies Lane and Cooper, and we adults enjoyed good fellowship together!  

And, as you can imagine, it was blazin' hot in Texas.  But it was nothing a sprinkler under the trampoline couldn't fix!  Or a visit to the nature center.  Or a swim in the pool.  Or ice cream after yummy birthday cake :)

So we loved our time in Oklahoma and Texas, and since then we've already been to Kentucky and back (sans kiddos), and are off to Chicago this week!  Life on the road has its ups and downs, as you can imagine, but there are certainly more ups than downs and we are so thankful for so many people who love us so much.  And besides, when else can you justify eating so many cookies and donuts and drinking frozen cokes except when you're constantly bouncing from one place to the next???  There are definitely perks to this nomadic lifestyle :)