Finally adding something to my blog...

Well, it has now been a week since we have been gone but feels much longer. Which is good because most vacations fly by too fast. Our couple of days in London were good but we really weren't there long enough. This was the kids first time to London and there was so much more we wanted them to see. I guess we will just have to go back!

From London we flew to Bahrain and it was mostly uneventful except for the bathroom incident. We booked our seats so we can have two windows and two middles so each kid could look out. Well, Jake and I had a larger man sitting on the aisle, and he was spilling over into my seat, so Jake and I switched - Jake was good about switching with me. Well, after the food was served and we ate, Jake decided he had to go the bathroom. Bailey had to go to so I tossed Jake over the seat back to Peter and he took the kids back to the bathroom. All, was well. Not 10 minutes after back in their seats. Jake whispers to me that he has to go poop - great! I glance back at Peter who is sound asleep or at least pretending to be, because I tried to get his attention. The man on the aisle was asleep too, so I had to wake him up... We go in the bathroom and Jake really did have to go! At least three days worth - the mushy kind!!! The problem was it all landed closer to the front of the inside of the toilet bowl, so we I tried to flush it down - it would not go!!! I tried flushing it several times and there it sat! So then I wadded up toilet paper around my hand and attempted to push it closer to the hole! The entire time I am gagging and Jake's butt is covered in mushy poop! Finally it went down but leaving a trail, oh well! Next I had to deal with scraping this stuff off of Jake's butt. The bathroom had clorex wipes for wiping down surfaces and yes, that is what I used on Jake. 15 flushes later I had the situation under control. The bathroom reeked, however, I didn't throw up and Jake was as clean as he was going to get and most of the poop went down the toilet. Okay, out the door we go only to be greeted by a line of people waiting to get in. The first person in the line was the man sitting next to us! We hurried back to our seats and we pretended to be asleep by the time the man came back to our row!

Later when Peter "woke" up I shared the lovely story with him and I told him he was lucky it wasn't him back there with Jake. His response to me was that he would have just come and gotten me to handle it....

Mom and Dad, if you are reading this you may want to stop here and read the rest once I am safely home....

Our seats each had the televisions so we were able to watch movies, track the flight etc. After my movie, I decided to watch the map as we flew over all the countries you hear about in the news, the ones my Dad warned me about as far as staying out of their air space. We even flew right over Baghdad, the entire time my Dad's voice echoed his warnings in my ear. Well, we landed safely in Bahrain, got thru customs without problems. Once we had left the baggage claim area there were throngs of men just standing there by the doors staring at us. Peter said it was because of my hair - nice! The hotel sent a driver to meet us at the airport, a very nice Mercedes with bottles of cold water ready for us. When we got to the hotel, the front desk agent walked us to our room and checked us in up in the room. A huge platter of fruit was there. It was probably the nicest Ritz Carlton we have ever stayed at! Thanks to Peter's job at the corporate headquarters for the Ritz Carlton Club we get to stay at these nice hotels for less then the price of a Best Western! Peter also has some sort of VIP status listed on his portfolio with them since he works at corporate so we get the little added perks.

Okay, the next day we had a driver take us on a tour of Bahrain and then drive us over the causeway into Saudi Arabia. The causeway is 18 miles long and customs is in the middle of the causeway. We had to go thru 4 customs check points. One for leaving Bahrain, another for looking at our passports, then next one we had to get out of the car and walk over to a building and get fingerprinted and have our picture taken (only the foreigners had to do this), the next one the car was searched. There were several lanes of traffic and the whole time people were honking their horns. The building we went into looked very run down. I felt like I was in a movie.

Okay have to finish later!