Uko Wapi?

Currently sitting in London Heathrow Airport.  

I found out two days ago that I would be accompanying Elizabeth back to the states.  It's about time I get to really help do something for her!  She's a nurse you know.  So she has a huge servants heart, can cook well, and nurses people back to health.  So it hasn't been often over the past six months that she has no choice but to let us take care of her.  It's been over six weeks now that she's been sick with malaria, infections and being given too much medication by doctors that didn't exactly know what they were doing.  Which put her system into overload of too much medication, making her very very weak.  We just spent the evening in a great hospital in Nairobi a few days ago not knowing if she could travel now but thankfully no sickness remains in her.  

But now I sit here traveling with her after quite a rough week for her and she's a rockstar at overcoming all she's been through.  She'll be going home to rest, recover and let her immune system get strong enough so she can come back to the place she now calls home.  

When you get the itch, the Africa itch.  You can't just shake it off.  It becomes home.  It's a love/hate relationship somedays.  But what a beautiful place it is.  This picture went around Facebook recently and so I thought I'd share here...  It puts things into words that are sometimes hard to find words for...  

So I'll spend 12 days away from my three most favorite people in the world (Elisha, Claire and Bud).  This is the longest and farthest I've been from them.  So rather than updating grandparents, I'll just sit in my puddles of tears and post pictures of them as I await my time to be back with them.  Ok, so in between those puddle moments, I will enjoy some family time and chick-fil-a :-).  It's an unexpected trip that I find reasons to be thankful for.  Elizabeth is a good travel buddy too!  

But I'll miss these funny girls....

 Especially this one....

And really miss seeing this one off to school...

 I know it's not the end of the world though and they won't (hopefully) hate me for leaving them this long.  After all, they do have a great dad and grandparents to take care of them.  For all I know, they'll probably be having so much fun it won't phase them a bit!  They'll just get an overload of time with me when I get back.  Elisha was totally ok with me leaving once I said I was going to see Grandma.  His immediate response was "you bring me present from Gamaw?!".  Maybe we should work a little more with him on the importance of people over presents.  :-/  12 days and counting.

(Like the pep talk I'm giving myself?!)

I'm a mom.  What can I say.

And then I still have thoughts of little ones like this....

Who are still in desperate need of a family.  His name is Babamama.  Because he can't speak but can only say "babamama", which means dad and mom in swahili.  No one knows where he came from or who abandoned him.  But we hope to give him a new "baba" and "mama" soon this year.  

So there's some random thoughts roaming in my head, laid out in a blog format.  

Time to go catch a flight to Texas.

Where am I again?