we are here...

well...we are here! i can't post pics yet because it will take hours to get them on here, but i will try soon. at night is a bad time. it took me 10 minutes just to get to this page...so you will just have to use your good old fashioned imaginations...gasp!
i am totally going to write stream of consciousness, but then again, i always do...so these are my first thoughts.
our flights were all really great! the hardest part was waiting in the airports in different lines and trying to contain the kids, but on the actual flights, the kids pretty much sacked out or watched tv. they were super great! we got here at 2 am on saturday, which was friday night for you guys. the kids were so excited and chatted the whole hour and a half drive back to our new hometown. they were so funny! we then slept until 10 or so and then got up and spent the rest of the day looking at a couple of houses and tooting around town. can i just say though that it is beautiful here?! i know you all don't believe me. but there are wildflowers (red poppies, gladiolus, white ones, yellow ones, purple ones...it is my goal to learn everything that grows here...it could be a good homeschool project) all over the place right now and the hills are green. the mountains that surround us are amazing...breathtaking really! i LOVE them and i am trying to find a house with a view...pretty much every house has a view from their roof top, but it would be nice to have one from our bedroom or from the kitchen.
we are so impressed with our kids...they have been amazing! they have been at their peak behavior...which includes several melt-downs, but we were gearing up for more, so we feel like we can at least call off the high alert for now. even annie has not had any anxiety. she was nervous when we got off the plane and saw they were checking everyone's temp for swine flu and then nervous when she saw the first gun, but since then we have been through multiple check points and she has not batted an eye. toby though is the one we are so impressed with. the very first day, he pulled out his soccer socks, which are tim's and VERY baggy on him and his cool Nike's that he got from our friend John Russell back home and headed out the gate into the street with boys ranging in age from 4 to 13. he got right into the thick of things and had a blast with his funny little transitional lense glasses! he comes back, red, sweaty, thirsty and so happy! he just talks to them in english and they talk right back to him in Kurdish! i love it! jesse however, hangs on the fringes and says they don't like him and won't go play. isn't that so surprising?? we totally thought it would be the other way around. annie has met several girls and has sat down with them to try to write out and learn a few new words. mostly she does her own thing though and just gets really silly around them. i think it is a 6 year old thing. she is feeling confident enough already to start insisting that i don't need to homeschool her next year, that she is ready for school. i however am way to excited about home schooling and feel it is in all of our best interests to stick to the plan...not to mention the $800 we spent on the curriculum...she is a fickle pickle!
so we are house hunting like crazy. we have seen several houses but haven't found the one yet. however we have 3 to go see tomorrow which tim has already seen and feels that one of these ones could really work. the main things we are looking for are: a large "hosha" or courtyard, on a street that the kids can play and be with other kids and me with moms, and of course room for all of us...which means 2 or 3 bedrooms. we have seen at least one house that kind of met these standards, but there are weird things in each house that kind of make you cringe like the bathroom in the kitchen or really uneven stairs with no railing...that would mean the death of my kids and probably me at least once a day...so we press on in the search and are hoping we walk into "the" house and just know it.
today we went to the big city and tried to register ourselves, we are through step 1 of a 4 step process...we had to wait in many lines and annie got her first exposure to try to use a squatty potty. she was thoroughly disgusted. it was pretty funny...but she found the humor in it all as we realized that we forgot our little toilet paper sachet and had to drip dry...
we have found that they sell really cool ice cream for less than a quarter for the kids...so far we have seen "ninja" (a teenage mutant ninja turtle head on a stick) and superman, spiderman and a variety of others. the kids are super excited about that. today they tried out the "swifty" one which was basically watermelon on a stick. i loved it, however tim and annie couldn't get it down.
so far we have only had a few moments of....oh no...what are we doing here? for the most part, my only complaint is that i am ready to learn the language and dig into the culture and it just takes time. we are so excited to be here and love it already!