I know you have all been wondering...

How are trip back to the US has been. I'm sorry I wasn't able to post until now. It took the internet company 2 weeks to get to our house to install the cable and internet...not to far from what you could expect with "island time."

So I'll start a few days before we left the island (which already feels like a life time ago...and not in a good way!). Reece's class threw a big surprise going away party for Reece. He had no idea but the teacher let us in on the surprise so we could come and take pictures! They were all so sad to see him go and his best friend Max was almost in tears by the end of the day. It was very touching to see that Reece had such a great group of friends while we were in St. Maarten.

We got all of our cleaning done on schedule! Shocker I know! We got busy that Wednesday before we left, and although it took all day we were able to check into the hotel that night with the load off our shoulders that all the work was done! Dave took his last test that Thursday and then we came back to the hotel for some relaxing and we had a nice dinner out for our last night out on the island.
Friday my friends Jill, Hanna, Carlyn and Meagan all showed up to help us get our suitcases to the airport and then we all shared one last lunch (for a while, but not forever) together.

This picture is the only one I got of all our luggage. It is lined all the way down as far as you can see.

So the plane ride went pretty well. We got a lot of dirty looks all day for having so much luggage and so many carry ons plus the cats! But we got through the day ok and the kids were great on the plane...even the cats did a good job and were barely noticed the whole day of travel. So we got back on Friday very late and were hit immediately by the COLD! It was horrible outside, I believe that night was below zero. The kids were frozen because we didn't have very good winter coats for them, Dave and I were already questioning why we left the beautiful weather of the Caribbean to return to fridge conditions! Saturday we went out right away and bought my dream car. I had been doing research for months and many of my island friends already knew that an orange mini van was in my future because I never stopped talking about it. So Tange became the newest member of the Reimer family. A 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan..now the kids don't have to touch each other, oh how nice to have a car we can fit in, and one I'm not afraid is going to break down any minute.

Reece's birthday was the 17th. We took him to Chuck E Cheese as promised. And the boys all had a great time playing all the games.

For dinner we met up with Dave's parents and had a yummy dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings and shared Reece's birthday cake. I can't believe he's 9! Holy crap do I feel old now!

I'll have to get to Christmas in another post...it has just been a whirlwind with Reece's birthday, Christmas, and moving back into our house. Dave leaves Sunday for Dallas until February 20th so we've been trying to spend a lot of time getting things together around here before he leaves. The house right now is just a disaster with stuff everywhere. We've also had to go shopping a lot for Christmas presents and clothes. Carter and Gavin had a ton of stuff that I had saved, but Reece had nothing in his size at all. We've also of course, hit most of our favorite restaurants that we had been missing for so long. So we've been really busy around here! We hope everyone had a good holiday and I promise to update very soon with photos of Christmas!