PreEaster Festivities and Spring

At times, Turkey has been a lonely place for me.  But in this last year, God has blessed me with some really great friendships. I have three good American girlfriends that are all in the same season of life as me. Our husbands are all out doing great and important work and we are all at home doing the not-nearly-as-fun support work. Between the four of us we've got 12 kids ages 6 and under (so if you do the math, I'm the least "fruitful" of the bunch :). So when we get together it is a joyful, tearful, funny, messy, and loud sort of time. 

Last night, we piled into one friend's 12-seater clunker van (affectionately known as "Big Jim") and drove 40 minutes to another girlfriend's house for an Easter egg hunt.     

 

 It was, indeed, a joyful, tearful, funny, messy, and loud sort of time. By 7:30pm, after the kids had exceeded their sugar limit for the night, we packed 9 of them back in the car and headed for the crazy city center of Ankara because the driver's husband had locked his keys in his car. He went home and left the car in the parking garage, located under the largest mosque in Ankara, for us to pick up. 

So picture the three of us, with weak senses of direction, and 9 screaming kids driving through a city of 4.5 million people. How in the world could we not find the largest mosque in Ankara?! I mean, it looks like this for pete's sake:

We finally found it and all moms, cars, and children arrived home in good shape. 

Finally this week we put away the winter coats and turned off the heat. We could still probably use the heat at night, but it goes against every bone in my body to run the heat in April. 

We've been out at the parks and Noah and I have been walking Eli to school in the Radio Flyer wagon we brought from the states last winter.  Few people here have ever seen a wagon and we have had strangers offer to buy it from us on the spot.  This week a middle school aged boy came up and asked, "What is that thing?"  Zach and I have joked about starting a wagon business here. 

 

 The park caretaker begged me to take his picture.

 Here's Eli with some new friends from our neighborhood. The little boy just started attending Eli's school so he's no longer the only English speaker.