Author: Robin Chartier

This morning I’m sitting on the couch with my netbook, following the news of Osama’s death. I started to write ‘Obama,’ accidentally, and then thought, “how many people are making that unfortunate typo this morning?” Just then, the guy on Al Jazerra English said, “he was a symbolic leader, but Obama’s death, I mean Osama’s death will be felt . . .” Hilarious. Poor Obama, on his day of glory, people are accidentally reporting his death.

Anyway, my original point was that I’m here with my computer and my knitting while the baby is being fawned over by two women, one who is mopping my floors and doing our laundry. The maid from next door came over and brought the 3 year old daughter to play with Carter and Caleb. So she’s holding and playing with the baby while Lucy is folding clothes. Win.Win.Win.

In case you’re following our “Where’s Robin?” adventure, I did make it to the embassy yesterday (no good mail though) and I made it to and from rugby practice without incident. I may try to do some more driving later, but that almost seems like pressing my luck.

Even though we still have all our administrative “issues” and now they are talking about our shipment from Egypt being over the weight limit — don’t get me started on that. I hardly had anything there to begin with, and it was a forced evacuation, it’s not like I chose to have the items shipped . . . oops, getting sidetracked. In short, life is good and I’m glad I’m not Obama. Or Osama.

Carter was so great with Camille on the way home from the desert. Everything she did, he would copy. She’d put her finger in her mouth, he’d put his finger in his mouth. She’d play with her bottom lip, he’d play with his bottom lip. 

In a few short hours, Josh heads to Bahrain for 5 days — leaving me in charge of 4 children in a foreign country where I don’t have the slightest clue how to get anywhere except the grocery store (and that’s because I can walk there).

So we’ve been having conversations like this:
Directionally Challenged Me: If I needed to go to the hospital, would I take the entrance to the first freeway or the second one?
GPS Josh: The second one.
DCM: So is that the one that we took to go to church the time that we went the right way or is that the one where we went the wrong way?
GBSJ: The right way. You just get off at (insert foreign-sounding name here that I’ll never remember) and head toward the mountains. It won’t take long to get there — maybe 10 minutes.
DCM: You know I’m not actually planning on going to the hospital, right?
Plan B: get a phone number for a taxi in case of emergency

On the way to the embassy:
GPSJ: That’s the way you’re going to go to take the boys to rugby.
DCM: That’s where we are?! I thought Rugby was over by the freeway.
GPSJ: It is. The freeway is right over there.
DCM: But I’m talking about the freeway that’s by our house.
GPSJ: That is the freeway by our house.
Expanded plan B: Take a taxi to rugby or skip rugby

So it’s going to be an adventure filled several days. And by adventure, I mean normal and mundane tasks like picking up the mail from the embassy will be nail-biting, hair-raising adventures as I have to change lanes and stay to the right to go straight, keep to the inside lane on the roundabouts (since the inside lane has the right of way — figure that one out), and try to follow the breadcrumbs I’ll be dropping to find my way back home . . .

Sometimes having your family employed by the government feels a lot like trying to get something done at the DMV. Add in an 8-11 hour time change and only 3 overlapping work days and that just sweetens the deal.

Right now we have 4 outstanding administrative issues waiting to be resolved. 2 of them are months old and have required countless emails back and forth, extra paperwork (which is awesome when you don’t have a printer or a scanner, but things need to be printed, signed, and scanned), lots of emotional energy, and just general irritation.

The two more recent ones are similar in nature, and will probably follow the same pattern: need more info, need more paperwork, need more *something* that they really don’t need, but whatever.

Add to that the extra administrative hoops involved with our move, the shipment of our Egypt stuff, and the shipment of our car and it’s a little much. BTW, our car did get on a ship, but what we thought would take a week or two is actually going to take a month because it is being transported on 3 different ships, which means our kids will continue to fight every time we get in the car. I can’t really blame them though. Look at this pitiful picture of them on the way home from buying a drying rack for our clothes. (yes, that is the rack that they are holding up.)

We could rent a bigger car, but it would cost about $100/day instead of $400 for the month. For that kind of price difference we can put up with a little pushing and shoving in the back seat. Besides, the bigger car only had seatbelts for 5, so we wouldn’t be much better off anyway.

And then today I realized that we’ve been here for a month already — 1/2 of the time that we were in Egypt, but I don’t feel comfortable and settled here like we did there. I’m sure it’s because we were in a hotel for over two weeks in a different area of town, so I shouldn’t even start to compare until we’ve been in our house for a month, but still . . .

The best part is that baby isn’t sleeping because of her teeth and I’m not sleeping because of the baby and Josh isn’t sleeping because of both of us and because of the mattress so I’m just having a big unreasonable cranky pity party today. So I thought I’d share.

***blah, blah, blah, I’m fine and I’m thankful that we’re all healthy, well fed, have a beautiful place to live, insert any number of things I could write in a gratitude journal here ________. I’m just irritated with a lot of little things today, including the fact that my daughter is happy with everyone else, but starts crying every time she sees me because she wants to nurse, probably cause her mouth hurts, but it still drives me crazy.

or in this country, a Sultan. One of the not-so-nice things about our house here in Oman is our mattress. Because we were a last minute addition to the embassy here, the office Josh is associated with had to beg and borrow the furniture for our house from different departments to supplement the few pieces that they had available. And the furniture in our house is perfect – except for our mattress. It is b-a-d. Like, time to be put out on the curb bad. I’m not terribly picky, but when I pulled off the sheets and saw how skeevy it was I insisted that we had to go buy a new one. That day. On the bright side, we finally decided to upgrade to a king size bed. All these years we have stuck with a queen mattress because we have lived in so many different houses and many of our bedrooms wouldn’t fit a king size mattress. But hopefully Josh has been promoted enough times to rate a house with a big enough bedroom for a king bed. Cause after all these years of 3 and even 4 bodies squished together, I am done sharing such a small space.Perfect right? Not so fast. Unfortunately it takes 2 weeks to get the mattress, so in the meantime I’m sleeping on the scary, gross one and trying not to think about what made it scary and gross. :happy thoughts, happy thoughts: