Fresh

Ah, to start anew!  When I sat down with my laptop on my lap, I sat here muddling through different titles to name this post I typed and retyped in the title box of what I thought I should name it and came up with the title, FRESH.  So, I went with it!

There's nothing like the newness of  something! Whether our something new is a car, a pair of shoes to go with that perfect outfit, a relationship, a baby, a career (okay, you get the point...something that we didn't have before) it is such an exciting feeling!  Sometimes our "new stuff" is so great we tend to get overwhelmed with it.

Well, my move to Saudi Arabia was that new overwhelming thing to me.  I must say, moving there was probably the most scary yet most rewarding part of my life.  The night before, strike that...the day before flying to Saudi, I spent ALL DAY packing my new life into suitcases & other bags.  I packed those bags until the next morning, the morning we were flying, until 3:00 AM.  My oldest niece came in from Miami just in time to see us off.  She was supposed to arrive a week earlier but due to the Hurricane Joaquin hitting South Carolina so hard, all trains that needs to go through South Carolina were cancelled.  Anyhow, I finally  got into bed around 3:30 AM and set my alarm for 6:45 AM.

Ok, fast forward, my family and I (even the two dogs) had been in this new country for nearly 5 months and as I was still trying to adjust to the laws of the land.  I had many days that I missed my family & friends immensely, I missed driving my car, I missed our little apartment, I missed my little job, I missed my daughter's school...I missed everything about my life back here in the United States!  On other days, I was fine with the things that I had going in Saudi.  I had my husband, our daughter & our dogs there so that life a bit easier for me.  Not to mention, I had Facebook Messenger so I could talk to my sisters and my mom everyday if I needed to. We visited Dubai & Abu Dhabi for Thanksgiving and Bahrain for Christmas and we spent the New Year (2016) in Saudi Arabia lazing around on the couches together. On top of it all, I got pregnant with my now 17 month (almost 18 month) old little boy.

Here I was 40 years old and pregnant with my my second baby in a foreign country! My oldest baby was 9 and I was often thinking what in the world am I doing starting over again?! My daughter had prayed and asked for many years for a baby brother and here is God answering her prayers. I was super excited about my new baby to be but also very nervous.  But look at everything that transpired! In my living in a new country, miles away from my family, miles away from everything I knew and I was okay with my new, "fresh" life! I wouldn't trade my experiences for anything! I was able to see first hand different cultures, meet people from different parts of the world, learn the truth about a Muslim country that I had heard so many negative things about and to ice the cake, I was able to travel to places that I would never be able to think about visiting.

So you see, experiencing the freshness of life will always have an affect on all of us, be it good or bad. It really depends on how we approach that in which we're faced with.