Month: November 2015

eye contact

In a culture that practices regular segregation of the sexes, general advice is for women to avoid eye contact with men when walking on the street. A bit difficult for this Californian who comes from a culture where a smile and a “Hi!” are an automatic greeting for everyone, but I’ve adapted. The reasoning for the instruction is because a smile could be construed as an invitation and generate unwanted sexual advances. I’ve never experienced any harassment personally, but it does happen on occasion.

What I’ve noticed about myself is that not making eye contact with people allows me to not treat them like people. I start forgetting that individuals are human, and start viewing them as obstacles. I realized this yesterday while I was driving. When I drive, my personal rule is eyes straight forward, no hesitation, no eye contact, no merging. It’s easy to wall out a vehicle when it’s an inanimate object. It’s not so easy when you see the human behind the wheel, make eye contact with them and connect with them on a personal level. Being impersonal is easy. Letting other people interrupt your life is inconvenient and takes more mental and physical energy. 
I don’t have a ton of extra mental energy these days, but I’m going to try and be a more conscious/compassionate driver. Wish me luck! 
What is it that takes up all my mental energy? These little people.  

Carter and Caleb both had volleyball tournaments this week to end their season. That means a few extra hours on the road and even more hours in the gym.

In-between sets, listening to the call to prayer. I never get tired of hearing it, especially when the singing comes from multiple mosques and the voices all layer together into one haunting piece of music. 
This week was also the end of the school’s first quarter. Normally that shouldn’t have anything to do with me, but these days when all the boys’ grades are online and there’s even an app to track their progress, it turns into me looking at their progress out of curiosity and then getting sucked into “conversations” like this: Why do you have 3 missing assignments in English??!!? You’re getting a D in Arabic??! Do you even want to go to college someday? And then threatening to abolish all electronics and sports from our household if they can’t get their academic lives straightened out. 
I’m sure it’s a great thing that all that information is accessible online, but it feels like one more responsibility that I don’t want to take on. I’m so far from being a helicopter parent that I’d more accurately be called a “dock parent.” I stay in one place and the kids come in and out as needed for supplies and repairs. But this dumb online grade thing spins me up and makes me shriek things like “you will never play sports again if you can’t be bothered to turn in your homework!” 

That’s how I felt at the end of this week. Tomorrow is day 1 of the new term and I feel like I’ve gotten a reprieve. As of this moment, everyone has a clean slate and no missing assignments. Let’s see how long that lasts . . .
Our other big event this week was our Very Last First Lost Tooth. 

Most kids are excited about losing teeth, right? Leave it to my girl to find something else to be nervous about. She was excited for the first half a second and then she asked, “Is it bleeding?” and a very helpful brother mistook her pink gum for blood and told her it was and then the tears started. Meanwhile, I’m driving and she’s crying in the back seat of the car and I’m trying to reassure her without taking my eyes off the road by telling her, “No, it’s not bleeding. There is no blood,” hoping that I’m not lying through my teeth and ruining any chance of her ever trusting me again.

We got home and I finally coaxed a smile out of her. (But only after I took care of the cat on lizard violence that was taking place in the living room when we walked in the front door. Zeki was batting the lifeless corpse all over my Persian carpet which caused another flood of tears. Yuck.) She finally believed me that she wasn’t hemorrhaging to death after I took these photos and showed her that indeed, there was no blood. 
All ready for the tooth fairy! (The Tooth Fairy brings 1BD, or $2.65 in case you were wondering.)

Halloween Horrors

If you remember my Halloween post from last year, you’ll understand the smile that spread across my face when I asked Camille what she wanted to be for Halloween this year and she replied, “Um . . . I think I want to be Anna.”

Ah, the bliss of my girlie wanting to dress up as the funny sister rather than the princess. 

So on the night of the base festivities, she got all dressed up, hair braided and we headed to base, full of excitement.

And then she fell apart as soon as we arrived. I know a panic attack when I see one and she was feeling the fear. Mama Nutter has produced a baby nutter — poor girl. 

I would blame the scary costumes that other people were wearing, but truthfully it started before she saw any of that. As we began the walk from the parking lot, her mind remembered it as a scary event from last year and she started to freak out. 
I had one sobbing child clinging to my leg while trying to locate other kids to hand off their costumes and then I found out that Josh had to work late. Yay! I don’t enjoy Halloween much as it is, but doing it with a panicky child who is wailing, “I wanna go home!” was really not how I wanted to spend my evening. 

At least my Survivor was having a good time. 

I set Caleb free to run and collect candy and sat at the picnic tables on the fringe of the action, talking my scaredy-cat down off the ledge. Calvin was volunteering with the Marines at their booth, Carter was in Germany, and Josh was working so 50% of the family was having a good night. 

After about 45 minutes of skeptically eyeballing the action and realizing that nothing bad was happening, she accepted some candy that Caleb brought back for her. The magic of sweets. 

Best friends from school, unplanned matching costumes. Anna and Elsa together!

Josh finally got done with work so he and Camille ran the gauntlet. The only way she’d leave the safety of the table was to burry her face in Josh’s back so she didn’t have to see anything.  The worst part was if she did see a scary costume she’d start screaming, be unable to look away, and start clawing Josh’s neck like a feral cat. Josh laughed and said, “She’s so much like you” about 10 different times. Thanks babe. Love you too. 

Caleb in the costume contest. This survivor didn’t win. When I asked Caleb who the winners were he said, “Oh, one of them was the kid in the Army costume (you can see it in the photo above).” Um, baby? That’s a Marine. Don’t let your dad know that you can’t identify the uniform! (Though it has been about 8 years since we’ve been stationed at a Marine base.)

Calvin at work — the Marines put on a small haunted house that was so scary Caleb ran out in tears and was speechless and shaking for about 10 minutes. 
The night ended up being a good time — just more work than I had hoped. 

A few days later Camille had a special Halloween morning with her kindergarten class. Since the Anna costume was too hot, she opted for a cooler, breezier Elsa dress for trick or treating around the school. 

A sweet tradition. The kindergartners have a “parade” where they walk around the school to various classrooms and trick or treat. My favorite part was that they go to some of the Middle School and High School classes and as they walk through, the big kids ooh and ah over the costumes and drop candy into their bags. Camille stopped and gave Cater a hug as they walked through his science class, but was moving too fast for me to get a photo of them together.  

All done with big bags of candy to show for the effort! If you zoom in you can see that Camille’s teacher was dressed as the Boom Chicka Boom Boom tree from the famous children’s book. Her costume was perfect. Camille’s costume choice was very wise — it was so hot, we were all dripping and fanning ourselves. It’s always hot on Halloween here. 

Next up was a morning of Halloween games, crafts, snacks and other fun. 

Working on her bat. Yay for a tear-free Halloween celebration. 
Our third and final Halloween was the big party that takes place at school every year: Spooktacular. After her experience on Spine Street (the base party) Camille was dreading this one days in advance. The afternoon of, she was begging me to stay home, pleading, “My heart is beating!!” Sorry girlie, I know how uncomfortable a pounding heart feels. 
I was more than happy to stay home, but I also didn’t want her fears to keep her from having fun. I told her that she didn’t have to wear a costume and we didn’t have to stay long, but we were going to go in and see all the work the volunteers had done and to visit her brother, who was working in the Not So Haunted House with some other High School students. 

Calvin is behind the big ID, holding it in place. They work on this project to get credit for their required volunteer hours. They had set up 4 different stations with games where the kids could win tickets to get prizes at the end. They did a really good job making a fun, non-scary place for the littles (and Caleb) to enjoy. 

All smiles!

Once she’d seen the “man behind the curtain” and knew that Calvin was part of the event, none of the rest of it bothered her. She pronounced, “I’m not scared anymore!” which was exactly what I was hoping for. Baby steps. 
One last thing. On Halloween, Caleb talked me into going out to the base Zombie run. It’s a 3K race where the participants wear flag football type flags and then have to dodge the zombies (volunteers in makeup) who try to steal the flags. 

It takes place at night in the dark so there was lots of screaming as the zombies jumped out from behind light posts or behind buildings as we ran through base. I didn’t escape the zombies, but it was fun running from them!