Transition

Well, we are finally all back together in our home. We left my parents' home on Friday and arrived at our home on Monday. It was roughly 72 hours of traveling. The three flights were not even up to 18 hours, but there was just a lot of wait time throughout the journey.

Transitioning back in always takes awhile. The kids slept in the car from Abuja to Jos, but once we arrived home, we didn't allow them to sleep because we wanted them to sleep well tonight. Well, it's now about 2 a.m. and we're all up. Bayo is trying to get the boys back to sleep. I think I even heard Lily's voice recently. I guess she's getting into this transition too. I decided that I'd rather work on my blog than try to get back to sleep.

Tobi finds transitions to be quite hard. It's interesting to me that he has been able to articulate why he's feeling sad. Today was a dark, cloudy day with a heavy rain in the morning and another one in the afternoon. Tobi said, "I wish we could come back to Nigeria when it's the dry season instead of the rainy season because I don't like this darkness." The sun often does come out in the rainy season, but today was just exceptionally rainy.

We did not have electricity when we arrived at our home. Welcome back to reality. I was ready to go and buy petrol so we could run our generator just to make the house seem warm and alive, but thankfully the electricity came on about 15 min after we got home. Over the past decade I have often brought lamps from the U.S. so our home can have a homey glow rather than just the stark light from the flourescent tubes. Here's a little-known secret: I can plug a 110 lamp directly into my 220 socket after putting a 220 light bulb in it. So I turned on lamps in all the rooms that we were using. That helped Tobi.

He also recognized his need for a friend. Right after we ate lunch, he went in search of a neighbor on our compound. They played Risk all afternoon. Later in the evening Tobi said, "When I started playing with my friend, I felt better." He continued: "I'm SO glad school is starting on Wednesday." Tobi is a decent student, but school for him is all about his friendships.

By the time we ate supper about 6 p.m., we did not have electricity so the home was dark. Right after we finished eating, I herded all of us outside to enjoy the last few moments of daylight.

I finished our unpacking today, but not the putting away, so I guess that really doesn't count. I still have a long way to go.

Hopefully within a week we'll feel like we've been here all along, and life will resume its normal rhythms.