Month: May 2011

My reluctant, struggling reader is now . . . a reader! When we moved to Oman he was barely reading Frog and Toad books and other “I Can Read” books and even those were a fight. He kept saying that he hated reading and would flop and sulk when I required him to read to me. But the first week here we were browsing in Borders, looking for Oman travel books, and he came up to me with the first Harry Potter book in hand. I really (secretly) didn’t think he could read it, but he wanted it, so we bought it (and yes, it cost twice as much as it would have cost to order it from Amazon, but if this kid was interested in a book, I was buying it right then and there, no matter what the price!)

So the first few chapters were slow and painful as he would read aloud to me and I would help him pronounce the hard words (there were a lot of them), taught him to decipher Hagrid’s crazy dialect, and valiantly fought to stay awake. At first he was ready to quit as soon as I was each day, but after a while I noticed that he would continue to read to himself after I had to go take care of the baby.

Then two days ago he started complaining that his neck and back hurt and I realized it was from READING! He has spent so much time with his head buried in that book the past few days that he was getting a kink in his neck. He asked Calvin if his neck ever hurt from reading and Calvin said, “Oh yeah. That’s totally normal.” 

Today he was determined to finish — he was up reading until 1am last night so he slept until 10am and went right back to the book, even before eating breakfast (Thus the bedhead in the photos). After he finished all 300+ pages, he proudly handed me the book and then I did a happy dance around the living room. Then we hopped in the car and immediately went to the mall to buy Book 2 and stopped at ColdStone to celebrate.

The ColdStone employee must have transferred in from Benihana, because I’ve never seen ice cream tossed around like this: He threw the scoop up about 10 feet in the air and caught it in his paddles several times, then he mixed in all the cookies and chocolate sauce like he was holding Ginsu knives, reshaped it and flung it to the other employee who caught it in the cup, stuck a spoon in it and handed it over. They must have known it was a special day.

a sick baby. Only I didn’t know it until today. She’s been exhausted, but every time we lay her down she screams until someone pats her to sleep, but then she only sleeps for 20 minutes. Except for yesterday when I wanted to go shopping at the sook. That time she slept for 2 hours. I can’t decide if that would be an example of irony or poetic justice — either way, it was a pain in my behind. In between times she’s been mostly fine, but you can tell from her face rubbing and hair pulling that she really should be napping more than once a day.

Last night we were going to go out to dinner, but she fell asleep as I was nursing her so I put her to bed. Josh offered to stay home while I went out to eat with the boys, but I thought a quiet house was more of a gift than a dinner full of “Mom? Can I ask you a question?” or “Mom! He’s eating my french fries!” and “Stop chewing with your mouth open. That’s gross!”

Of course 5 minutes after they walked out the door I heard baby yelling coming from upstairs, and I still couldn’t figure out why she only slept for 15 minutes. But it all became clear in the middle of the night when a very hot baby joined me in bed and then nursed and fussed for the next many hours. Poor Camille.

On the bright side, this morning I came down to have breakfast and Lucy whisked her away and has been playing with her for the past hour while I’ve had a peaceful bowl of cereal and am contemplating taking a nap. I also woke up to a clean kitchen and shrimp marinating for dinner tonight. Sounds like a Mother’s Day to me!

ETA: Carter couldn’t wait until dinner to eat shrimp so Lucy made them for lunch. They were huge prawns that she marinated with garlic and then floured and magically cooked them so they were crunchy/crispy on the outside and perfectly shrimpy on the inside. (I hate the word “moist.” Also not a big fan of “tender.” Ew.)

Add in some sauteed eggplant and squash and we had quite the gourmet lunch! She already has plans to make the boys meatballs with mashed potatoes and gravy, chicken breasts cooked the same way she cooked the prawns, some of her favorite Indian dishes . . . they are going to be fat and happy.

This morning Josh went out with the other FAOs (foreign area officers) to do some sightseeing and shopping. Unfortunately Camille fell asleep 10 minutes before we were going to meet them at the sook, but after her nap we drove to old Muscat and joined them for lunch at the Oman Dive Center.

So we drive out of old Muscat and head through these rocky hills and it doesn’t look anything like where you’d expect to be driving to go to the beach. Especially since I picked Josh up at the harbor and then he headed inland. (I actually made it to Muttrah sook on my own with only one small wrong turn — but as soon as I ended up in a dirty alley I knew enough to turn around and head the right way. Baby steps.)

After a few ups and downs and arounds and “hey! Are we back in 29 Palms?” later, we came out at this beautiful private cove. I admit I haven’t traveled a whole lot, but it was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.

Clear blue waters, rocky cliffs, and a long stretch of pristine sand. We sat on a covered outdoor patio and had lunch — spicy pineapple salad with grilled fish for me, but all the food looked really great.

After lunch we went down to the water and it was WARM — bathtub warm. If Monterey had warm water, then it could compete in the “my favorite beach category,” but it gets disqualified for unhospitable water and air temperatures.

Wouldn’t you love to vacation in one of those huts on the beach?

The boys splashed around in the water and tried to catch fish with their bare hands, but none of us brought swimsuits and baby kept taking her hat off so we headed home promising the boys that we would come back SOON.

Especially once I found out that you can lie on lounge chairs under a tent canopy down on the sand and order food and drinks from your chair.

That’s news that makes everyone happy.

Happy Mother’s Day Mom! (Pam and Barbara) I wish you were both here and we could spend the day sipping lemon mint drinks on the beach together!
Cheers!

Bit by bit, it’s all coming together — yesterday we finally got reimbursed for part of our claim to cover evacuation expenses. Yeah, we’ve been waiting that long. We submitted the paperwork over two months ago and it kept getting kicked around from department to department until someone agreed to pay it. I was like, “Look. I wanted to stay in Egypt, but it was a mandatory evacuation. You have all our clothes, toiletries, toys, and other stuff and you have our money. Pay up!” Except I didn’t actually have anyone to say it to, so poor Josh had to listen to my frequent rantings.

And then, the headache with the packout of our apartment in Egypt. We went round and round with the shipping people there because they said we were 223 pounds over our allowed weight limit for an air shipment . . . with our size family we actually rate 1600 lbs, but something about the only available flights from Cairo were commercial, so there was a cap of 1000 lbs . . . blah, blah, blah. So they wanted to open our crate that contained the things we moved back in early November that has been sitting in customs for the past four months just to add the excess 223 lbs. But once you break the seal on a shipment, things have a way of “disappearing” so we didn’t think that was an acceptable solution. The other option they gave us was to have us pay the excess baggage fee, but that wasn’t an acceptable solution either.

In a phone call with Josh the other night I was ranting about how everyone was acting like it was a normal move. Like we chose to ship all those things and that’s why we were over the weight limit. I told him I didn’t care how it got to us, I just wanted to get it moving. I said, “Put it on a boat — heck, put it on a camel and walk it here! I don’t care how they want to ship it, I just want it moving in this direction!” He said, “I’m totally going to tell them that.”

I thought it was too rude, but he didn’t so he sent them an email saying exactly that and next thing you know he got a reply saying that the overage had been approved and to not worry about it any longer. We suspect that the people in the Egypt travel office didn’t inform the higher ups that this was a case with special circumstances and as soon as they heard that we had been evacuated and weren’t even able to be present for the pack-out, then they became much more accommodating.

The thing is, it’s all just stuff. Meaning we don’t need any of it in the grand scheme of life. So I’ve been trying to stay relaxed about all the delays both once we arrived in Egypt and now here in Oman. But it gets frustrating when we have to spend $50 for each pair of new cleats for Calvin and Carter so they can play soccer/rugby when I know we already have perfectly fitting, expensive cleats sitting in a box in a warehouse. Or buying a new mattress when we already own one, but we have to wait for someone to approve the funding to have it delivered here. (I’m not complaining about the mattress though — I came out the winner in that deal. And when it arrives it will become our guest bed. Win.Win.Win.)

In one of my favorite books, Same Kind of Different As Me, there’s a quote that reminds me to be careful of how I think about our stuff. The book is about a friendship between a homeless man and a wealthy art dealer and their faith (If you haven’t read it, I *highly* recommend it. I can’t give a short description that does it justice).

One of the things that becomes clear is that the homeless man, Denver, is content with his life and has no desire to trade places with his rich friend. From page 112-113 Denver asks:

“I know it ain’t none of my business, but does you own somethin that each of of them keys fits?”

 I glanced at the keys; there were about ten of them. “I suppose,” I replied, not really ever having thought about it.

“Are you sure you own them, or does they own you?”

So I’m trying to remember that life is simpler with less stuff. Less to organize, less to clean, less to worry about. Of course if you asked the people at Amazon, they’d tell you that I’ve already got plenty of stuff, with more on the way. Who needs a shipment when you have the internet?

Actually that title is a little misleading, because I haven’t figured out how to wear one without looking like I’m welcoming people onto a ride at Disneyland. If you know the trick, let me in on it cause I don’t want to walk around looking like I’m going to break into a version of “Yo ho! Yo ho! A pirate’s life for me!” at any second.

So why the headscarf? Well, it’s hot here and my hair is annoying me. It’s too short for a ponytail but I don’t like hair in my face so I keep looking for ways to keep it out of my eyes and off my neck. A normal person would talk about how it cuts down the amount of time they spend on their hair each morning, but since running my fingers through wet hair takes exactly 13 seconds, I’m not exactly looking for a time saving solution.

See, pirate scullery maid. All I need is a mop, a bucket, and some doubloons in my pocket. Unless you’re Josh and think I look like white Aunt Jemimah. :sigh: Either way, it’s a loser look for me.

But since I have always been a comfort before style kind of person, I may just have to keep this “Ahoy matey!” look while I continue to search YouTube for for “white girls with headscarves” videos. (yes, I did.)