The last 24-36 hours have been difficult. It started after we left the pyramids and I hauled a sleeping, dead weight Camille from Tahrir Square all the way back to the hotel by myself while Josh took the boys to buy a few souvenirs (about a 7 minute walk, but it involves dodging cars on several freeway type roads) only to have her start screaming the moment I put her down in the bed in the hotel.
Then the train — it would have been fine except she wasn’t happy and was flopping around on the totally grimy floor of the train and then spilling her snacks all over and then eating them off the disgusting carpet. And I let her because it was better than hearing her scream.
After a long day yesterday we decided to take the day off from any sightseeing and just relax. There’s a beautiful park and beach across the street so we took the kids over there and they ran and played and mostly didn’t get on our nerves.
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| A place for them to burn off all their extra energy |
Josh and I were talking today about our friend who has a blog and how every now and then he will post the most beautiful things about his three girls. How he is in awe of the amazing humans they are growing up to be and how they have wisdom and depth of insight beyond their years. And he’s right. They are fun, funny, incredible people. And as we’re sitting on the steps watching our boys play soccer on the grass and push each other to the ground and argue over whether they deserve a penalty kick or not, I say to Josh, “Every time I read about how awesome Eric’s girls I are think, ‘What am I doing wrong because my kids all act like they have bricks in their heads.'” And Josh, because he lives with our 3 brick-headed boys totally started laughing and agreed that sometimes we wonder what good we’re doing as parents because we can tell our son 30 times that tossing his water bottle in the air here in Egypt is a bad idea because he’s going to drop it on the ground and it’s going to land in some Hepatitis or TB or urine and he’s going to end up putting that stuff in his mouth, but 3 minutes later he’s back to tossing and dropping it all over again. Or the son who argues over every little thing that I ask him to do, or the daughter who screams “Mine!” and hits people when she’s mad, or the child/children who still picks his nose and eats it. Seriously?! It feels like I’m living in Groundhog Day where I say the same things over and over again and nothing ever changes.
Add in plenty of travel fatigue and I felt pretty useless today. And also like a sideshow freak since everywhere we went people stared at us. Like really stared. They must not get a lot of white tourists up here in Alexandria because we all felt like we were on display as we walked around. After dinner we found ourselves in the middle of a street market where tuk-tuks were zipping in between cars and busses and people and I was sure someone was going to get run over. Add in some homemade fireworks, pieces of meat hanging on hooks from a metal awning, and live chickens and rabbits ready to be slaughtered and it’s the closest I’ve come to feeling like I was in the 3rd world since arriving in the middle east. It was fine, and on a different day I probably would have felt more in the spirit of adventure and found it interesting or charming in some way, but today the noise and the people reaching out to touch my kids’ hair just made me tired.
So I’m back at the hotel hoping for a good night’s sleep and a fresh outlook tomorrow morning. We think Camille must be getting sick because she’s been even more difficult than usual so we bought some ($18) children’s Motrin, dosed her up and Josh took her on a 2 mile walk to get her to fall asleep. At this point I’d pay a lot more than $18 for some piece and quiet, so if it works it will have been worth every penny.
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In front of our hotel — sunset on the Mediterranean
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Hopefully the sun will come out tomorrow. . .
