Happy Monday Everyone! If we were getting together for happy hour this week, here’s what we’d have to share:

•  Exactly 1 month from today, we leave Kuwait!  We’re headed back to America where we will spend the summer months.  It is so crazy how fast the time has gone here.  It still seems like just yesterday we left our lives in Minnesota and moved to the Middle East.  With a month to go, we’ve decided that we can officially start our countdown until we can see our family and friends from back home.  We leave in a month, but the kids only have 19 more days of school, so they are getting excited for summer vacation too.

• Last weekend we were scheduled to have another routine doctors appointment just to check up on Rachel and Baby J.  The doctor thought that there was a pretty good chance that we would find out the sex of the baby at this appointment, but . . . . . . . our appointment got canceled because the doctor was sick!  We were a bit disappointed, but we knew that it was best for her to stay home if she was ill.  Hopefully we will be able to reschedule the appointment soon, so we can find out if we are having a little baby boy or girl!

• One of the major oil companies here in Kuwait is called Chevron.  All of the employees and their families live on a compound, south of Kuwait City, and a majority of their children attend our school.  To show their appreciation to the staff, last weekend they invited all of us to their compound for a beach party!  We went with a bunch of friends and enjoyed the afternoon swimming, tanning, and just hanging out.  Chevron provided a complimentary BBQ lunch for everyone, and we had an absolute blast!  It was so kind of them to host us for an awesome day at the beach.

• Kuwait has a majority of the stores that we miss back in America, (except Target of course!)  However we were delighted last week when we found out that Kuwait’s first Old Navy was having their Grand Opening!  We checked it out over the weekend and were pleasantly surprised how nice it was.  It was exactly like a store you find back home, and it even had the old blue truck in it!  It was a pretty big store, spread out over two levels.  Rachel was pretty excited because they had a decent maternity section, which has been pretty tricky to come by here.  We browsed for a bit and found a couple of treasures.  I picked up a couple short sleeve shirts for work and we bought a couple of baby outfits for our friends who just had a little baby boy.  Clothes everything in Kuwait is pretty expensive, just because they have to ship everything from so far away.  We were pretty pumped though, because the prices were pretty decent, plus everything was 20% off for their grand opening sale!

• One of the jokes here in Kuwait, is that the official bird is a plastic bag!  Unfortunately, it is pretty common to see them blowing around.  The other day, we were driving home from school when suddenly, BAM!!  A plastic bag got caught on the antenna of our car.  I couldn’t help but chuckle, and just thought to to myself, “only in Kuwait.”  That wasn’t the only thing going through my mind though, of course I was yelling, “quick, take a picture of it for the blog!”

• Yes, that is a picture of a monkey. Why you ask? . . . . . . It was on the loose at our school last week!!!  It wasn’t a “wild” monkey, but someone’s pet!!  It’s a long story, but first, a little background of exotic animals in Kuwait.

You can find/buy just about any kind of animal in Kuwait.  I have heard stories from colleagues of the crazy pets that there students have at home.  Even the kids aren’t shy about telling you that they have pets like monkeys, deer, penguins, lemurs, or even lions! Last December, there was a big news story here in Kuwait City about a family’s pet lion killing their maid.  Apparently it got out of it’s cage and attacked her . . . . . . . SAY WHAT! Fast forward to last week at school . . . . . . I was waiting in the classroom for another teacher to drop off her kids.  They are always on time, but that day, they were about 5-10 minutes late. When they finally showed up, the teacher said they were late because they were looking at the monkey.  I had no idea what she was talking about, so I just thought to myself, “ok, no problem.” Well later that day I found out that indeed, there was a monkey on the loose, running around our campus!  Apparently it escaped from a nearby house, and the family was out chasing it, trying to capture it.  Luckily, the monkey clung on to a fence for awhile near our soccer field, until the owner was able to catch up to it and offer it some food, so that it would come home.  The kids at school got a kick out of it, but all I could think of was, “only in Kuwait!” That’s what we are up to this week, see you next Monday for Happy Hour!