Our UAB arrived! I have no idea what that acronym means, but it's a smaller portion of our personal items that were shipped via air freight. The rest of our things (HHE) are coming on a very slow boat, to arrive in a few months. It's only supposed to take two weeks for the UAB to arrive, but we were warned that it could take a couple months for it to get to us as there are limited working hours during Ramadan and Eid. I like to think it's a Ramadan miracle that we have it already!
When packing the UAB we had to make some tough choices, if I remember correctly we're only allowed 650 lbs. We intentionally packed a decent amount of clothes and ALL of the Gents' day-to-day items in suitcases to get us by until the HHE arrives so to not waste space in the UAB. What couldn't we live without for a few months time? Barware (not kidding), most of our kitchen, stereo and vinyl (of course), the gents Bumbo seats and most of their toys.
Our villa was supplied with a "welcome kit", the home basics needed to get by until we went shopping or waited for things to arrive. I appreciate having the welcome kit, but it's so nice having our things to make it feel more like OUR home. I had been told that we would want bring a good amount of home effects. At first I was like, "It's all going into storage". I did't want to worry about things getting damaged in the shipments. Good thing J talked me out of that. Having familiar things in a foreign country makes a huge difference.
I know these things are just possessions, and if we lost them our lives would most certainly go on. As I arranged our kitchen, J fine tuned the stereo and played one of my favorite Phoenix albums on the turntable, the gents lilting laughs and twin speak filled in the rest of space as they played with their toys they hadn't seen in a month, and my heart felt so full that it brought tears to my eyes. Now this felt like home.
It's been an eventful month and a rollercoaster of emotions, which probably got the best of me in that moment. It's a moment like this in life when I'm thankful to have some awareness and realize it doesn't matter where we're living. Our home is what we make it. And in I'm super grateful for the technology available to us that makes the distance from family and friends (about 7,000 miles) seem much less than it really is!