As most of you now know we are again in France for our 8th season! Wow, I can't even believe it. This December Kit and I will celebrate 11years of marriage and when I think that we will have spent 8 of those 11 years in France it's startling! All 3 of our children have been or will be born in France ( #3 is due in February), we don't really even know a whole lot about all the little stuff you have to do back home( our expenses are covered by the clubs, health insurance, pregnancy and medications by the government, they also send you $1000 at your seven month mark to prep you for new expenses not to mention a government paid vacation for the family. We also get around $800/ month just because we have 2 kids and it most likely will jump up a bit with our third) I must admit it is a bit overboard. But I think we will soak it up while we can.
This past summer was a roller coaster ride for us as we were not planning on coming back for another season. But for some reason I felt like we should just put my player resume back on the web and see wt kind of offers we got. At this same time Kit announced on Fathers Day this wonderful news......
Yep from our 8 year drought of trying and trying and two invitro tries to 3 kids three and under! And on Fathers Day too! I was soaring.
We were then contacted by a team and it all sounded good so we decided to sign with them. As we waited for them to send the tickets we frantically packed at a blurring pace filling boxes and boxes with toys and clothes, shoes and clothes for the new baby. We now have filled the basement of my parents house to go along with their already filled garage ( and it's a huge garage:) It's hard for us to believe that we have never even used half of the stuff we got for our wedding. And all though our washer and dryer (presents from Kit's parents) were brand new and have only been used maybe a total of one and a half years, we wonder if they will still work after all this storage time. Nevertheless when I finally hang up the sneakers and we do dive into all those boxes we will be sent back in time to the late 90's and wonder what we are going to do with all this out dated stuff. But it should be fun!
Back to our story we bought a new car this summer and had decided to drive down to Texas before leaving for France so as to spend some time with Kit's siblings. Right before we left, and I mean literally days before this happened........
Oh yes our first traumatic injury experience. I was at the library and Kit called,of course hysterical saying
Ryn and Elle were playing tag and
Ryn fell and hit her forehead on one of my Moms pots and that blood was everywhere. I sped home and couldn't get the image out of my mind of our beautiful angel girl with a Frankenstein scar across her forehead for the rest of her life. I screeched into the driveway and I loaded her up to take her to an
IHC clinic. It was pretty bad all the way to the skull and bleeding all over ( as you can tell from the picture and her cute, sweet little bloody hand print on Mommy's shirt). They had to wrap her up in sheets and pin her arms behind her in a pillowcase and then Kit, myself and 2 other nurses held her down while the doctor stitched up first the two bottom layers of skin next to the skull and then the top layer.
Ryn cried non stop form the pain I'm sure but also because she was so scared and didn't understand why her Mommy and Daddy were not helping her escape this straight jacket. Sh just kept crying for her Mommy and Daddy and saying she wanted to go get in the car. "I'm stuck, I'm stuck." It broke our hearts and I vowed that day to create the perfect sleek
nerf body armour to protect our precious children. But I do know that the bumps and bruises, cuts and scrapes that come with life are only there to make us better and to help us learn.
Ryn now knows what it means to be brave and whenever someone gets hurt she says, "it's
ok, just be brave." She also knows that as painful as stitches are a big giant bowl of strawberry ice cream at
baskin Robbin's makes everything just fine.
I love road trips and love packing up the car and driving. So
thats what we did as we left for Texas. The only difference this time was that I had torn a muscle in my calf playing in a pro-Am league about two weeks earlier and so the big task of staying awake and driving fell on my sweet wife. She did great getting us all the way to the outskirts
Albuquerque. I took over from there and they slept. I plugged in the
ipod and lucky enough for me my girls are all sound sleepers so I could still just sing away. I noticed in the
rear view mirror that
Ryn was even singing along with me at times in her sleep. She loves it when I sing
Groban,
Buble or songs from Enchanted or Disney songs. We finally arrived in Austin and had fun playing on Joy and
Darrels miniature golf course (
Ryn is a natural), I even set the course record which was quite an honor. I stayed for a few days and then flew to France for training camp and a month away form my precious girls. I knew it would be hard but I was in no way prepared for how bad it was, they are my lifeline. I missed singing to them and reading to them ( our girls adore books) kissing them and snuggling with them, this includes Kit too, as she loves when I read to her. j/k :)
Kit will provide part II of our summer recap in the next post( remember I post in blue and Kit posts in yellow)
