First day living in D.C.....

Oh my.

This place is, for lack of a better word....special.

And when I say "special"....I mean crazy, frustrating, and if I leave here with all my hair in tact it will be a miracle.

We left for the final leg of our trip at 4:30am this morning. After being up since 3am with Marvi because she had a bad dream and refused to go to sleep, and then Syd woke up at 4:15 due to a bad dream too....we figured, since we're all already up....we just need to leave. So we did. Which was good because we wanted to get on the road early (not that early) just in case we hit traffic or got lost. We didn't want to be late for our appointment with the housing office on base, where we had a house reserved for us.

So we pull into town at 10:15am. We are 10 minutes from the base. No traffic. Easy enough directions to follow so far.

And then.....and then....we.took.one.lousy.wrong.turn.

And it wasn't even a wrong "turn"....it was more like, veering slightly to the wrong side of the fork in the road right where the highway just happens to split...all of a sudden, with no prior notice whatsoever.

That one wrong "turn" proceeded to take us 40 minutes out of the way.

One lousy wrong turn. I thought I was gonna kill everyone on the freskin' road at that point. Because we couldn't just turn around. And every time we tried, to ya know, turn around, like regular people do, in regular cities when they take a regular wrong turns....we would hit a dead end. Or a one way street. Or find ourselves on another highway. And then another highway. And then another highway.

It was quite the detour.

We bought a GPS about two hours later at the BX...cause I ain't getting behind the wheel here alone without one of those.

So that was a fun homecoming.

An even a more fun homecoming came when we got to the housing office on base about three hours earlier than our 2pm appointment.

Well....lesson learned. What lesson you say? The lesson being you don't show up for appointments here early. People will get down right mad at you. And tell you what an inconvenience you are.

Which was the case with the housing employee we had an appointment with. Not only was she incredibly perturbed that we showed up early, she took us to our home, opened the door, and then left, telling us we could look around, but couldn't unload our car until we singed our lease, at our scheduled apt time....in three hours. And then left. With the keys.

She would not budge. She showed no mercy. She would not be inconvenienced. She would not let us sign our couple of papers a few hours in advance.

So....we walked around the BX and then the library, for three hours. But I got a new GPS out of it. And got to visit the library. Which had a very impressive three bookshelves.

While at the BX I had another fast lesson in D.C. life.....you don't get whatcha pay for, and nobody really cares.

Case in point...the $4.50 I splurged on a kids meal for each girl at subway bought me a piece of bread with two pieces of turkey. No apple slices. No cups for drinks. When I asked for the cups that come with the meal I just paid for....the reply, "we don't have cups". Oh. Okay. Well that woulda been nice to know, but no biggie, I'll just swallow a whole bunch of spit and call it good.

When we were finally able to move into our new home....there was broken glass all over the dining room floor. There was a mysterious sticky substance on the floor next to the toilet in one of the bathrooms, that I had the good fortune of bending down to touch, fining out it was sticky, which led me to believe it was probably old pee. That was nice. I have all of one bar of cell phone coverage here and when I am fortunate enough to be able to get a signal, the call gets dropped within the first three minutes, and is unrecoverable for the next hour or so.

So in addition to probably never driving anywhere while I'm here, I also, after a half day, have given up hopes of being able to speak to anyone on the outside world.

There were some highs though....it wouldn't be fair just to highlight the lows of our first day...so.....in no particular order.....

The girls have a view of the Washington Monument from their bedroom window. Which is good because that may be as close as they ever get to it while they're here. So that's a high for sure.

One of my all time favoritess people lives here...and I will seeing her sunshining face tomorrow.

When, by the way, we will be getting our household goods. Door.to.door baby.

It is really windy tonight, which makes it feel like nebraska, except without the snow and below freezing windchill.

We learned how to be really creative when your sick to death of eating take out food and just want to eat something' made out of your own kitchen. So we made sloppy joes. Except we had no utensils to sloppy up the joes in the frying pan I did think to pack. So, isaak used a putty knife to cook the meat. It worked great, actually. And we used the two rubbermaid containers I packed as tables. We feasted on the floor. And we were perfectly happy. Once we cleaned up all the shards of glass that is.

And then we celebrated Marvelly's birthday....who turned four years old this very day. We had cake and ice cream and opened up the gifts we packed. We sang and celebrated and marveled at our littlest treasure. And it was nice to do it in our house that will be our home, even if it is only for the next five months.

So....today, had its challenges, and frustrations. But it also had some fantastic moments. And, based on what we experienced today, we understand that D.C. is gonna be hard. But Africa is going to be harder. And if God can use these next five months to begin to slowly prepare our hearts for a harder life to come....than we gladly welcome it. D.C. is for real not for the faint of heart. But, Africa probably isn't either. So we better get used to some differences and challenges now....because its only going to get harder.

At least here we speak the same language....well...most of the time. :)