Author: Robin Chartier

Baby has been sick since the day of the fish feet, so unless you want to hear about puking and sleepless nights and extra laundry, I don’t have any interesting stories to tell from the past few days.

We all had to go pick up our rental car yesterday so we wrapped her in one of the hotel towels as a preemptive measure. Yes, it has been that bad. Don’t let the smile on either of them fool you.

Today Josh took the boys to church while I stayed home to get thrown up on. At least by staying home I “got” to take a nap, which I needed, but ugh, naps suck the life out of me. There is only one Protestant church in Oman, called The Protestant Church of Oman (PCO). Clever, huh? It’s in a complex with a Catholic church that meets at the same time. In case you get lost, there’s a handy sign:

Josh said traffic was crazy getting in on the single road that services both congregations. According to him there were about 300-400 people at the 9 am service they attended and he estimated the Catholic service had twice as many people.

I understand they recently started an AWANA program too. With no other options, it makes church hunting very easy. We just have to choose between the 9 am or the 11 am service. (We’ll go at 9 because it’s the family service.)

But there are 50 bazillion mosques around town and they are all beautiful and ornate. This is the Grand Mosque named after Sultan Qaboos.

The boys have spent a lot of time with our soon-to-be neighbors. They’ve gone over to their house to play two different times and they met up with them at the pool after church this afternoon. They have two boys Carter and Caleb’s age and a three year old girl. Everyone gets along great and is sad when we break up the party to return to our hotel. The boys are already counting the days until we are right next door and they can come and go without parental interference. Supposedly there’s even a secret door in the attic that acts as a pass-through between the two houses.

This is not our house. Isn’t it beautiful though?

This isn’t our house either. Ours is much smaller and on a busy street. I’ll get pictures of it as soon as I can. But these gorgeous estates are all over Muscat, and more are being built all the time.

Our family has a new hobby: KittenWatch 2011. This mama cat hangs out at the back door of our  hotel and Caleb is infatuated with her. I have many pictures of her on my camera. Well, the other day her kitten appeared and it is the cutest, tiniest thing ever. Every time we leave or come home the kids all do a kitten check.

And this door at the mall? Does not lead to the women’s restroom. There was almost an embarrassing story involving me entering the prayer room thinking it was a bathroom, but thankfully Calvin said, “Mom, I almost walked into the prayer room because I thought it was a bathroom” and then the picture of the mosque on the door made sense. I thought it was just decorative signage — you know, a Middle Eastern theme. I was wrong.

Hopefully baby will be better soon and we’ll be able to leave the hotel towel-free . . .

So I know a lot of people homeschool to keep their kids away from “bad influences,” but that has never described our reasons for homeschooling. In fact, sometimes I wonder if my kids are the ones spreading the “negative element” around the neighborhood.

I have to consider where we are going to fall out on the parenting bell curve every time we move to a new neighborhood. Our kids play with toy guns and they pretend to shoot each other (when they aren’t beating each other with sticks, nun-chucks or other weapons), but is new neighbor family anti-violence?  That totally makes it sound like I’m “pro-violence,” but I like to think of it as “pro-freedom in playing.”

Is mom X going to think I am raising a troop of future Columbine shooters because I haven’t outlawed guns or put perameters on play like “never point your play gun at people or animals”? Or because I say things like, “please don’t hit anyone who isn’t related to you!” Or will her kids be picking up swords and hacking away at each other like the rest of my crew?

Does family Y say “crap” or “fart” and do they talk about wieners? (And not the hot dog variety.) Those things all happen regularly at my house. Yesterday Josh had to tell one of the boys that he couldn’t sing a song about his privates until he had written it down on paper first. And knowing this child, that won’t ever happen. Win. win.

I actually don’t care what others think about how we do things, but I want to be sensitive to other people’s rules for their families. We’ve always told the kids, “In our family we do/don’t do _____”, but sometimes we forget that our rules aren’t like everybody else’s.

For example, we were having lunch with my sweet nephews and niece one day and one of my boys called his brother a “butt-head.”
shocked cousin and aunt: “we don’t call people names like that.”
sheepish me: “um, they say that because I call them butt-heads all the time. Sorry. Boys, don’t call anyone else a butt-head. Only I get to call you that.”
skeptical and surprised aunt: “Um, OK.” But she was probably thinking, “I can’t believe she lets them talk like that . . .”
Me thinking: “Wow, am I really that far out of the normal parenting parameters? I might need to do some research on this . . .”

At our house, butt-head is a benign term of endearment — one that I am ok with. I can understand how that would be shocking to someone else, but in a world where we watch Project Runway or Top Chef, they’ve heard lots worse than that. And we talk about those words and what they mean and why we shouldn’t say them in anger. But are they curious about them? Sure. Do I care? Nope.

And that is how I end up with a situation like this:

This morning Carter was playing with a phonics toy we have for the baby. Somehow he figured out that if he pushed the letter buttons fast enough it would say the sounds close together and sound like it was saying the words “cat,” “mat” and “ram.”

Then he moved on to “dam.” Yep, he had that little word worm saying, “dam, dam, dam” and he thought it was totally hilarious. Finally, he moved on to his ultimate: “a**.” Except those fine folks at LeapFrog were one step ahead of him — it would say “aah” and then when he pushed the ‘s’ it would insert a giggle sound instead.

:sigh: Look out MQ (the neighborhood we move to next week) . . . here we come . . .

At the mall yesterday we got up close with some fish.

No, it wasn’t at an aquarium . . . would you believe we were at a spa? The place is called Dr. Fish and they offer a treatment where you stick your feet into a tank of these special fish and the fish eat all the dead skin off your feet. Seriously. Since that is awesomely gross, I decided we had to to it.

Here are some of the hungry fishies. They have 3 sizes of fish — the larger the fish, the more aggressive the nibbles.

The boys were all excited to try it, but they were a little nervous about it being too ticklish. First you wash your feet and dry them, then you sit on a cushion in front of your assigned tank. Then put your feet in and let the fish go to work.

 

Hoards of the “big” fish, gnawing away . . . it was crazy ticklish for the first few minutes, then it felt kind of like someone was rubbing your feet with a bristle brush. It was relaxing after you got past the gross factor.

Caleb was the most hesitant at first (he was afraid the biting would hurt), but Josh got out his stopwatch and had him do it for 10 seconds at at time until he was comfortable.

The smaller fish nibbling felt more like little air bubbles massaging your feet.

Thirty minutes later, we had clean and smooth feet. Ironically, 2 doors down is a sushi place, but I figured I’d let the fish eat our flesh today and we’d eat theirs another time.

The water here is WARM!

After two years in Monterey where touching the water with your toes meant instant frostbite — to be able to run straight in without flinching, cringing, or risking bodily harm is heavenly. I’m totally wearing my swimsuit next time.

But today baby and I stayed close to shore and watched the boys play. Besides, I think I want to find some swim trunks first so I can be more covered up when I swim. (I already have a rashguard to keep from getting sunburned). I would feel strange swimming in a swimsuit when the women 10 feet down the beach are wading in the water with their abayas (the black overdress that many Muslim women wear) hiked up only revealing their shins.

There are no real waves — just little rolling ones like you’d get at the edge of a lake after a speed boat cruises by . . .

but they had fun jumping over them and pretending to body surf anyway. 

Our resident stray animal whisperer found another friend. A cute dog who wanted to jump and splash in the waves with the boys. I  know Caleb is going to start asking for a dog or a cat as soon as we get settled in our house. Especially since the friend he made yesterday adopted two stray dogs this past week. Wearenotgettingapetwearenotgettingapet . . .

Camille loved watching her brothers jump in the waves. The noise of the waves makes it hard to hear, but she was laughing and giggling at Caleb as he splashed around. 

I thought it was sweet that baby was being so snugly, and we headed home because she was falling asleep on my shoulder, but it turned out that she was coming down with a fever. Poor girl. Hoping tomorrow is a better day for her!

For these first two weeks we are staying in a hotel while we wait for our house to become available. Instead of a regular hotel room, we have a 2 bedroom suite with a living room/dining area and a separate kitchen with a washing machine. No dryer, but there is a huge drying rack and the clothes have been drying really quickly. It’s like we’re in an apartment instead of a hotel which is nice because the baby can nap, the kids can play and we can each have our own little space and not feel like we’re on top of each other all the time.

This is the view from one of our windows. There is a girl’s school right across the street. They start at 6:45am. Of course the only reason I know when they start is because I’ve been waking up at 4:30. Normally 6:45 and I are not close friends. The ocean is right behind the buildings in the background, but you can’t see it in this picture because it just blends into the sky.

 

We’ve been getting up early, going to breakfast around 7 and then spending the morning in the hotel while Josh does paperwork/check-in stuff at the embassy. The boys have been drawing, reading, listening to audiobooks, and doing some math while the baby naps. In the afternoons we’ve been exploring, and for dinner each night we’ve eaten with different embassy families and have made some new friends.

We’re having fun making ourselves at home in Oman, but we can’t wait until we can move into our house!