When Camille was a baby and wouldn’t sleep I used to tell people that she would go from 100 miles per hour to zero in a single second. She never drifted off — she’d go from screaming to out cold.
I guess she hasn’t changed too much. I went to check on her last night and found her snoring under a book.
And two nights earlier she was yelling for me to help her put on her pajamas, but when I came upstairs, I couldn’t find her. I looked all over and under the beds (because we’ve found her sleeping there before too) and right before I woke up the boys to help look for her I discovered her passed out by my closet.
It’s exhausting going to a full week of school after the EID holiday. Good thing the next 2 weeks also have holidays in them. Yay for Optional School October. That’s not a real thing, it’s my joke because of where the Islamic calendar holidays fall this year — last year was No School November. I was trying to think of one for next year to go with September, but I just realized we may not be here then and my reflex emotion was sadness. We are almost at our 5 year anniversary of life in the Middle East. Completely not what we expected, but better than we could have planned for ourselves.
I don’t know if I’ve said this here, but it looks like we have 3 likely options for next year (Josh’s last year before he is eligible to retire): move to Abu Dhabi for 2 years and retire at 21 years of service, extend here for one more year, Calvin would graduate from High School and Josh would retire, or be sent back to the US somewhere and Josh would retire at the end of the year (summer/Sept 2017).
That’s the “plan,” but we also only “planned” to be in Egypt for one year. Josh’s goal in retirement is to be hired by a company in this region that will utilize his Arabic language and experience, so he would like to retire from here or UAE to make the job search easier. We shall see what the next few years bring …