I just can't seem to escape having backhoes in front of where I live.

A Family Affair

We have been busy bees introducing Charlie to all of our extended family. I just counted and between Kyle and I we have 45 family members living in Georgia. Thus far we have gotten to catch up with 23 of them and by Saturday that count will be 33. Out of the four possible sides (my mom and dad and Kyle's mom and dad), Charlie is the first grandchild on three of the sides. No wonder he is so popular! I don't have photos of Charlie with everyone, but here are a few sweet ones. We are looking forward to meeting up with everyone that hasn't met Charlie soon!

Hanging out with my Dad

Meeting Kyle's brother Brent and his friend Lydia

Chillin' with my aunt Debbie

At my sister Sarah Kathryn's office, learning tips on how to make the ladies smile. (Check out her business http://www.8at8.com/ )

It was wonderful to see all of our family with Charlie but the sweetest visits have been with Charlie's great-grandmothers. (Unfortunately we forgot the camera on our visit with Kyle's other grandmother, Nanny).

Charlie and my Dad's mom, Moa.

Charlie and Kyle's Dad's mom, Jessie.

Buyer Beware

Everytime we mention that we are looking for a house people say, "Oh, well this is the best time ever to be looking. You are going to get a great deal." Thus far, this has not been our experience. Instead, my friend Susan (who also just bought a house) said it best, "Everyone says it is a buyer's market, but no one seems to have told the sellers that." Perhaps once we get into negotiating then we will be able to find a real bargain, but the list prices seem to be the exact same as they have in previous years. (One complete teardown in Virginia Highland was still listed at $469,000 -- just to tear the house down!)


Kyle's theory on this is that people are willing to accept that they have taken a loss from a stock market investment, but no one wants to think that they have lost money on their house. No one is going to start out listing their house at a low price because everyone still thinks, "Maybe there is some sucker out there that will pay full price for this."


Again, once we get into negotiating we might find the price will change drastically, but for right now, houses are still really expensive.


We have been spending lots of time on a fascinating website. If you are bored, click around on http://www.zillow.com/ You can see what a house is listed for, pictures of it, what they paid in taxes, the school district and so much more. But the best part (and what I hope will help us in negotiating) is that you can see what the person paid when they bought it. We have looked up every house that we have visited and each of them are (on average) listed at $100,000 more than what the owner paid.




Other thoughts as I re-adjust to life here (if you still live in Belgium you might not want to read some of these):

**Customer service is so wonderful. The other day a Target employee just walked up to me and asked if I was finding everything I needed, without me even asking him. I couldn't believe it!

**The U.S. just makes it so darn easy to do things. There have been drop-down changing tables in every place I have been to with Charlie. One even had a Purell dispenser right next to it so I didn't have to leave him on the table to wash my hands. Those tables are very rare in Brussels and resulted in me becoming very good at changing him on my lap, in the car, on a restaurant chair, on the floor of a restaurant and so many other odd places.

**The other day Kyle and I saw two guys almost get into a huge fight in a parking lot. One guy was pulling out of a parking space as the other one came around a corner too fast. They didn't even have an accident, but they both got out of the car and started screaming at each other. Who knows if either of them had a gun in their car. I hate how unsafe I always feel being back in Atlanta. Kyle says I should have felt this unsafe the whole time I was in Brussels too. However, since I didn't/couldn't read the news there, I never knew of any crime. I personally think there was just less crime there too, but he disagrees. Even if there was crime in Belgium, it just seemed to be more tame than it is here -- the worst thing I ever heard happen to someone there was having their purse stolen as they walked down the street. In Atlanta, I am constantly on guard about being carjacked, held up at gunpoint, road rage, robbed, and so many other things. I am constantly scared and it really, really bothers me.

Y'all come back now, ya hear?

Throughout our time in Brussels, whenever we mentioned that we were waiting to have kids because we felt like we should be living closer to our families when we had them but that we really liked being expats, we would often get the same response: "This is your life! Don't worry about your family. Do what you want to do and they can come visit you wherever you live." I understand these points, but I have a feeling that anyone who said that just doesn't have family like we do.

While we were busy packing up in Brussels, my mom and dad took a huge task off our list and spent the better part of a month finding us a temporary place to stay. Yes, we could have stayed in a furnished apartment, but instead we are getting to live in a very nice house in a great neighborhood with a park, sidewalks and great restaurants nearby. The owner is trying to sell it so it is partially furnished, but there were still a few things missing to make it feel like "home." Both sets of our parents got together and completely outfitted the house so that we could walk right in and get going with our lives. And they thought of everything from the big stuff to the minutiae. We walked in the door to a fully stocked fridge, our bed made and a room for Charlie all set up (including a changing table with diapers, wipes, a Diaper Genie and a bouncy chair). My Aunt Missy had been taking a suitcase full of our clothes back with her on each of her trips between Brussels and Atlanta (she is a flight attendant) so our closet was even set up with our clothes on hangers! They thought of everything from lightbulbs to toilet paper.

It was so wonderful to come home to such a warm welcome. We have had a great time introducing Charlie to most of our family and can't wait to introduce him to all the rest of the family in the coming weeks. Charlie meeting two of his great-grandmothers was a really neat memory.

Kyle has had last week and this week off, and that has been wonderful. We have filled our time with looking at houses, looking at cars, touring elementary schools, getting cellphones set up and all those other little life things. I have definitely had some moments of culture shock and realizing how much has changed since we left, but I knew that would be part of the deal. (I gave Kyle precise directions to a gas station only to arrive and find out that it is now a Walgreens.)

I still get overwhelmed by all the choices everywhere. My coping mechanism is to stare at the ground as I walk through a store just so that I don't have to take it all in. However, today I got so overwhelmed that I just had to take a picture of the bread aisle at a grocery store. You would think you could just go pick up a loaf of bread, right? But then I had to decide between thin slice, thick slice, extra fiber, extra protein, honey wheat, oatmeal, white, rich in Omega 3, low cholesterol, extra oatmeal, 9 grain, 5 grain, buy one get one free, wheat, and who knows what else. I finally just stuck my hand out and grabbed whatever was in front of me. (In case you what to know what all they can fit on just the front of the package, this is what is listed on the loaf I bought -- Grains & More, 19g of whole grains, Good source of fiber, Hearty multi-grain bread, Double Protein, A blend of wheat and rice protein, 14g of protein in 2 slices, Heart healthy.) No wonder I am so overwhelmed by trying to process all the information! I just want to see white or wheat.

I have had lots of thoughts about being back but I don't have the time or energy to put them all into a nice post, so here they are in bullet form:

*Southerners are so darn nice and I love it.

*I've already gotten my first mosquito bite. I had forgotten how much mosquitos like me and I am now dreading being outside in the summer.

*Although it is nice not to have to bag my own groceries, it really bothers me how many plastic bags get used. The bagger today put three bananas in their own plastic bag and then two greeting cards got their own separate bag as well. I wish I had brought back more of my reusable Carrefour bags. I plan on buying reusable ones here, but they are not as big. As a side note, I once read that a plastic bag on average gets used for 30 minutes and then takes 400 years to decompose in a landfill.

*I love how friendly everyone is.

*It feels crazy to me that even though it is around 75 degrees every day, I still bring a pashmina everywhere I go. But now it is because I have to wear it when I go inside because of the air conditioning and take it off when I go outside.

*I thought I was finally done with a foreign language but the second day we were back I found myself saying, "Do you speak English?" A Spanish speaker had dialed the wrong number and yet again I couldn't communicate with the person on the other end of the line.

*It is wonderful to be back with so many great friends and family. Kyle and I were remembering how lonely and hard it can be to arrive in a city and not know anyone. It has been just wonderful to immediately have dinner plans and parties to attend.

*We went out to breakfast on our first full morning here (The Flying Biscuit). Kyle summed it up perfectly when he said, "I finally feel like I fit in. I am not the oddity and it feels great." We had really adjusted to living in Brussels, but we could never shake the feeling of walking into a place and knowing that we stood out like a sore thumb. In being back, it felt great to just blend in and know that all those unspoken norms were second nature to us and we weren't going to screw up. The chit chat seemed effortless, we didn't try to avoid a conversation with people fearing that we wouldn't know how to communicate, and we just got it. I feel like a conformist saying that I am so happy to know how to behave, but I had never before realized just how many unspoken interactions make a place either feel comfortable or uncomfortable to you.

*You can get a lot of food for not a lot of money. At that same first breakfast we kept saying, "Look at all this food! And it is only $8 per person! I can't believe it!" Although in one way we loved seeing so much food, we were also disgusted by it. I have been saddened by how much obesity there is around here. In the food court we saw two men each drinking a 32 oz drink. I kept thinking of my mom's good point when I was in college -- why do people balk at the idea of drinking that much water but we will happily consume that much Coke or beer in a sitting? On that note, click here for a really good article about how portion sizes have changed over the years. And then take the Portion Distortion quiz. It is really a goal of mine to keep my eating in check upon our return, but the portions are so darn big that even when I think I am doing well to only eat half my meal, in reality I have probably already consumed much more than I needed to.

*Charlie did really well on the plane ride. Having the bassinet and a seat in between us really helped.

When the plane landed Charlie was asleep in my arms. The second I crossed the threshold from the air-conditioned plane to the gangway that was the outside temperature, Charlie's eyes popped open and looked at me like "What is going on? Why is it so hot?" Little does he know, this is just the beginning.

Charlie has slowly but surely gotten over his jet lag. Our first night here his "morning" began at 11pm (because that would have been 5am Brussels time).

I'll leave you with some photos of Charlie on the plane ride over here...