Walking the Wall

The past few months have been leading up and building up to the excitement of having my brother come home after living in Mongolia for 4.5 years. He married there and had his first child and we were all anxious to meet our sister-in-law and our nephew who we only knew over the phone, email, and pictures. Last Monday my family showed up in force (which is pretty forceful considering there are 7 siblings) at the airport to pick them up and it has been a crazy, wonderful week since that evening. Some impressions I have over the last week:

It is amazing to me the amount of food my brother has eaten in one week. He has eaten huge amounts of pizza, Burger King, Taco Bell, food from the grill (3 hamburgers and 5 hotdogs, he insists my sister-in-law helped him eat but she can’t weight 100lbs soaking wet so…), more pizza, malts, root beer floats, nachos–I think he is trying to cram 4 years of American eating into one week and his stomach certainly is not appreciating the effort. It’s like watching a mini version of "Super Size Me"! I don’t think my sister-in-law is all that impressed with American food and is dismayed at the amount of sugar in everything, she didn’t even like the sweetness of Honey Nut Cheerios–what would she think of Fruit Loops? Of course she did send us sweetened curdled milk pellets once as a "treat" so…that has to be taken into account.

The language barrier is going better than I expected, I think we are finally starting to understand in action as well as head knowledge that people who don’t speak English are NOT deaf, and increasing the volume when she doesn’t understand is not going to do any good at all. The funny thing is that we joked about people who do that before hand, but I find that I instinctively talk louder to her the more she doesn’t understand. The first night she got to my home and made a call to her family in Mongolia I could hear her chattering up a storm and I would have loved to have heard what she had to say about these crazy hugging, laughing, and very loud Americans! She says we are funny, friendly, and make a lot of face expressions–but she is a sweetheart and I know she is leaving out the loud, strange, obnoxious adjectives out of pure kindness.

Yahzee is universal. My sister-in-law not only loves Yahtzee, she really kicks butt at it and adds up my points for me half the time because I’m too slow at it. This was a great ice breaker for us, we could focus on the dice, laugh, groan, and forget about Mongolian, forget about American, and just yell Yahtzee! Ping Pong is also universal. Remember how I wrote that laughter came in the shape of a ping pong ball? I believe that even more firmly. Despite the fact that she beat me at least twice, there is no language problem with laughter and balls shooting all over the place and great serving and…did I say laughter?

There is so much more to say, but I’ll have to leave it for another time, let me just say one more thing: My nephew seriously has the softest, creamiest skin I have ever had the honor of mushing on, he is adorable and smart and we are having the time of our lives getting to know him and his mother.