I've been ignoring this blog for a while. It has been sitting idle while your father and I are taking Arabic in preparation for our move to Oman. Five days a week, we leave at four thirty, five in the morning and head up to the Foreign Service Institute to take six hours of language instruction. Throw in some lab hours and lunch and we don't return until four in the afternoon.

Thank goodness for Sumeyye. Otherwise we'd be beside ourselves.

But this morning, I am alone. And it shocked me, how long is has been, since the last time I had the house to myself for a few hours. The quiet. No television, no chatter, no escalating, excited voices. And I realized how long it's been since we talked.

Eight months of language training and your dad and I still have to take a few more training classes here and there. You're going to love the ones of your mom with a Beretta 9mm and the lovely pics of me shooting a shotgun. And before you asked, yes I qualified on the M9, the M11 and the m4 before playing with the shotgun. And no, you can't have one.

I've missed the mornings with you. The snuggly, warm cuddling where you are in the process of waking up and we curl up in one of my quilts and watch the morning news. I have missed the slow, steady getting ready for school; breakfast, brush teeth, change clothes, shoes on, backpacks. The evenings with you have been fun, but we're all tired and hungry and your dad, Sumeyye and I take turns trying to get the other ones to cook. Getting you all into the bath and bed is a bit more of a challenge than getting you excited to go to school...

On the news front, our government announced that it had killed Osama Bin Laden. He was a man who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. For ten years, our government has been looking for this man and they finally found and assasinated him. I can understand their actions and the taking of intelligence materials from the compound where he was staying, but I am not understanding the huge arrogance that we, the American people, are showing by telling the world that we killed this man. My fears are of reprisals, especially with us heading overseas. Pictures of the body and burial have not been released, so the conspiracy theorists have said that he's not dead and the American government are hiding him. Some moron on the news actually said that they had "cut the head off the snake". I don't think so. I think we've taken out one of the eyes- and that snake had been functioning very well with that eye under cover for quite some time. So now we've gouged out it's eye, drawn its attention and pissed it off.

And what do we say about messing with our enemies? Either kill them or leave them alone. Messing with them just pisses them off. I just hope I'm wrong.