Month: June 2015

Today is the first day of summer/last day of school, depending on which kid you are at our house. The elementary school finished up yesterday and the Middle/High school had one last 1/2 day this morning. Last year I made my kids go on the last day, figuring if the teachers had to be there, they should be there too, but this year I figured I wouldn’t make them waste their time since they had finished all their finals already. Ironically the kid who would have begged to stay home every day of the year (Carter) wanted to go to school, mostly because he had grand plans to visit the teen center with his friends after school and play video games all afternoon. Live it up, my son. The video game ban starts at 5pm today.

Our kids are not great with test prep and my casual attitude towards grades with homeschooling has carried over to traditional school. BUT, I expect them to put forth a good effort. When they kept protesting that they had studied enough and didn’t need to spend any more time preparing, Josh warned them if they didn’t get a B or higher on all of their finals then they would be off electronics for the first month of vacation. Carter gambled and lost. Whoops. He called me this afternoon to tell me he was “mad” about his C+.

Meanwhile, Calvin is mad that I’m not mad at him about his mediocre grades (Bs and Cs), and wishes that I would be harder on him. I explained the beauty of self-discipline and self-motivation and how me hovering over him, demanding that he perform to a set standard, wasn’t going to create a successful adult. If a C isn’t good enough for him then he needs to figure out what he needs to do to change that. I don’t care if he’s an honor roll student, I care if he is a kind, hardworking, gentle, generous, considerate, patient, humble and genuine person. I see all those characteristics developing in him so I’m not worried about his C+ in Chemistry. When I see him leading worship for our family Bible study on Wednesday night, playing the drum box along with the church worship team on Friday morning, and interviewing and being hired for a summer job where he will earn money, that is how I measure success.

Meanwhile Bob is soaring with all As and basking in the glow of finally being a Middle Schooler. His proudest achievement though was being voted “Fastest Runner” and “Best Athlete” in his class. Our scholarship hopes are riding on him.

Seeing that it was the first day of summer for 1/2 of us, I thought it would be a quiet morning. Instead I was woken up by shrieking at 6am and I pulled my phone off of my nightstand to call Carter and ask him why he was waking me up and why Camille was awake so early. (Yep, I love my morning sleep. I didn’t want to wake up enough to walk into the other room and yell at him in person.) It turns out that they were watching the Warriors win the National Championship so I quickly forgave them and told them to keep their cheering down for the rest of the quarter. Then I fell back to sleep until 9.

Yes, I do have a 4 year old. How do I do that with Camille in the house? Dirty secret — usually she sleeps until 8:30 or so, but Josie arrives around 7 and starts cleaning downstairs so I know that if Camille is awake and I’m not, Josie will get her breakfast and watch her until I’m up and about. Besides, Camille may have given me hundreds of sleepless nights over the past 5 years, but she doesn’t get into the kind of trouble that the boys did at her age. When she’s unsupervised she might look at a few books, draw pictures on pieces of paper, or talk to her stuffed animals. My 4 year old boys were getting into everything, making messes and jumping off of furniture. I would have needed 3 Josies back then.

I’m finishing up packing for our trip to Poland/Germany tomorrow. I’m going to freeze my butt off. Last night Josh and I walked to get ice cream and I was wearing yoga pants and a wool sweater. It was 93. Currently it’s 63 in Krakow. I need to go back into my suitcase and switch out a few tank tops for long sleeves. Brrr!

A week from today we will be headed to Poland on our Chartier Summer Extravaganza, subtitled Desert Rats do Europe. I’m so excited for rain and green and not sweating. Poland was never on my list of must-do places, but I’ve learned that the world is full of hidden gems: Turkey, Oman, remote corners of Crete . . . I’m looking forward to adding another place to my favorites list.

With every new trip comes the pressure to finish up the previous one. I’ve been terrible about keeping up this spring. I haven’t even finished writing about our trip to Paris yet! But over the next few days I plan to finish up Atlantis because I have some great photos that I don’t want to miss.

I’ve been in a half-fog the past two weeks. There’s a nasty cold going around that brings with it the gifts of sinus headache, sore throat, and uncontrollable sneezing. You’d almost think it were allergies if it weren’t for the general feeling of unwellness that goes along with it. I’d recovered, was feeling perky and back to my old self and then the kids started complaining of stuffy noses and sore throats and mine crept back. I thought once I fought off a cold, it was banished for good, but this one is special. Josh had the same thing — maybe this virus takes a hiatus, fools you into thinking you’re on the mend and then, “Bam! See ya sucka! You’re going down! Again.”

Josh and I went and got massages yesterday to try and get rid of some of the achiness I’ve been feeling. It sounds exotic, but the massage atmosphere at most places is very basic/spartan unless you go to a hotel spa and pay big bucks (we do not). We’d been to this place a few weeks ago for the first time and the selling point for our return visit was that the tables were made of plywood with a cutout for your face, padded by a U-shaped travel pillow (with padding of some sort on top of the wood, of course). It was much better than the previous place we tried that had futon mattresses on the floor and regular pillows. The worst place that I tried used inflatable pillows. It’s impossible to get comfortable during a massage when your head is cricked up and to the left or right and every time you turn to the opposite side (to relax the strain in your neck) it sounds squeaky and sticky. No thanks.

Our previous visit was over Josh’s Memorial Day holiday. Base personnel had the day off, but for the rest of the city and the kids’ school, it was business as usual. We went to the “spa,” which was mostly empty, except for the line of Thai ladies in matching uniforms. When we went back yesterday though, on a Friday afternoon, it was Saudi central. We walked in and the place was overrun with men. I was the only woman in there aside from the many young Thai women running to and fro, ushering clients from room to room. For a moment I wondered if we had made a huge mistake and this was one of those “happy ending” salons on the weekends, but we had an appointment so I stood off to the side and tried to make myself invisible while we waited. It turned out that the room for the “couples massage” was still occupied for another twenty minutes (I silently wondered if there was another woman who had braved this sea of men or if it was 2 men who opted for the convenience of the shared room), but we could be seen immediately if we split up.

Since I didn’t want to wait any longer than I had to in the front of the salon, I opted for separate rooms and waved goodbye to Josh as we were led away in opposite directions, down a narrow hallway, past countless cubbyholes to my “room.” On the bright side, because I was solo, it meant that I didn’t have to listen to our massage therapists chat to each other throughout the entire massage. The previous time my lady was chatty and the Josh’s was a giggler. She would whisper, “gong he wa-wa ni lo ti la” and Josh’s lady would giggle back, “tee hee hee hee hee.” It was like the episode of Seinfeld when Elaine gets a manicure and is convinced the ladies were laughing at her. I started fake-translating their conversations in my head to entertain myself. I’m pretty sure that the one was telling the other about one of the other ladies at the salon and her illicit Bahraini boyfriend (based on what I can pick up at the nail salon, that’s a pretty common occurrence).

Anyway, it was a great massage and an hour of silence, other than the building construction that was happening on the other side of the wall and the construction worker that had a hell of a cough. His gasping barks made my masseuse giggle a few times, but I was mostly lost in relaxing almost-sleep. When I was finally reunited with Josh on the other side, he was sipping tea along with the other men in the lounge. One guy was hobbling around and Josh said that group of guys were all getting waxed. His legs were still hairy, so I’m guessing he was hobbling with discomfort from some other area that was denuded? Josh said during his massage the guy in the room next to him was getting the wax treatment and was whimpering and whining about the pain. The rooms all have 3/4 walls so any conversation or noise carries right over the top. They started around the same time and the guy was still under the wax, so I can only imagine how much hair was being removed. The funniest part was listening to Josh describe the broken English conversation: “The burning! It burns!”

Not the most relaxing massages, but certainly entertaining in their own way. We’ll go back again sometime, but I’ll pass on the Friday afternoon Saudi man-parties next time.