robinchartier

We have noticed that we are dragging ourselves into the new decade. The last straw was going to the boys’ cross country race 3 weeks ago where they both ran slower than normal and were beaten by boys who they used to outrun. And it’s not just the boys, but the old people who live in this house are walking around with tense jaws, distracted brains, and sore bodies, so the new plan applies to all of us.

The plan: electronics off at 8:30, including mom and dad. Kids up to bed and lights out by 9. Meanwhile, mom and dad up to bed by 9 with no computers or phones for the next hour and lights out by 10. TV watching is done downstairs on the couch, none in the room. I know all of you with great sleep habits probably already do this, but Josh and I are marathon a TV show until we fall asleep kind of people, so this is a big shift for us.

A week in and I’m miraculously waking up before my alarm goes off at 6:30 and I don’t feel like I want to crawl back under a rock. I’m no chirpy early bird, but at least I don’t feel like giving everyone a death stare if they need something from me before school.

Since I’m a night owl I’ve been taking Good Day Chocolates and falling asleep in 30 minutes, not an hour or longer. Josh falls asleep in 90 seconds, same as always. I wonder where Camille gets her sleep struggles from? :whistles innocently:  

The biggest grain of sand in this finely tuned machine is (of course) Camille. The boys are going to bed easily without complaining and asleep in minutes, but our Princess always has a complaint about some sort of Pea: she has a bug bite that itches, her leg bones hurt, her iPad is dead and she can not go to sleep without music, her tooth is loose and it’s bothering her, she’s hot, she’s cold, the dog won’t stay in her bed . . . bless. Her feelings are hurt, her brothers were harsh with her 3 hours ago . . . she has a never ending litany of distractions that pop up just as she gets in bed to go to sleep each night.

Josh is usually pretty good at soothing her complaints but he’s been in America for work this past week and I’m out of patience. Since I have been feeling better after getting more sleep at night, when she’s the one standing in between me and sleep this past week it’s not been pretty. Imagine girlie weeping at 10:45 at night (2 hours after sending her to bed) because her mom said she didn’t care if she went to sleep, she just had to stay in bed. In my mind, I’m offering freedom — you don’t have to sleep, you just have to be in bed with the lights out. In her mind, I’m a calloused and uncaring mother who doesn’t care about her feelings at all and nobody loves her. A blowup over 3 little words: I don’t care.

Thankfully Josh is home now and he gets to handle all of those feelings. I can’t even remember what last night’s tears were about, but they were flowing — oh yes. Math homework and estimating. Estimating is wrong on purpose and she does not like that. And it’s too hard.

On the flip side, or maybe it’s the same side as all these feelings are just a precursor to the many, many feelings we will enjoy over the next few years, she is riding her bike to school by herself, going to swim team without tears (after the first day, of course), and taking care of so much of her life by herself. She’s growing up fast, even if it doesn’t feel like it at bedtime.

• 

• 

• 

aka more administrative headaches

At the same time as our visa renewals were underway, we also had to renew parking permits for our cars to be able to park on the street in front of our house. A few years back the government, in an effort to increase revenue and to cut down on the number of cars parking in certain areas, created a permit process that requires . . . dang it, as I’m explaining it I’m realizing how convoluted the whole process is and you’re not going to understand it.

Basically in order to cut down on illegal housing/subletting/crowding of too many people in one apartment, all leases had to be registered with the government. Then, to get a parking permit, your lease had to be registered with the government and pay a fee of approximately $300/year per car. But just for expats. If you’re local, you can have 6 permits and they are all free. That sort of tiered privilege and pricing is incorporated into every aspect of life here.

Anyway, we had a parking permit that expired in September. We couldn’t renew it before it expired because Josh didn’t have his new Emirates ID yet. These IDs have chips in them and carry all of your personal information — fingerprints, medical, etc. You can’t do much without them. When I go to the psychiatrist to get my Zoloft prescription, he has to insert my card into a chip reader that pulls up my information on the computer and then he can enter the prescription. Hello Big Brother!

So once Josh had his new Emirates ID, (about 6 weeks ago) he went to the Traffic Directorate to get another parking pass. Long story short, our current lease is managed by a 3rd party company so the computer couldn’t recognize Josh as a valid resident because the name on the lease wasn’t his name or his employer’s name. You would think there would be a way to get around that, but things here aren’t set up for the exception to the rule.

Since she didn’t know how to issue one, instead of finding a solution, the woman assisting him asked, “do you really need a parking permit?” Um, yes we do. Your Ministry started requiring one or we risk getting $100 ticket every day. Then she went on to suggest, “Well, how about you just park on the sidewalk behind your other car?” (the way the locals do). Her third helpful solution was, “You live in a villa. I don’t think they ever go down that street to issue tickets. You’ll be fine.”

Josh insisted they route his application up the chain to a supervisor who could hopefully figure out a way to issue a parking permit and a month later, still nothing. But we hadn’t gotten a ticket so . . .

Then one morning last week, sure enough, a ticket was on our car. So he went back to the Traffic department, showed the lady his ticket, she was sheepish and giggled, but still had no solution and no one else knew what to do to get a permit issued. I left the car in the school parking lot for a few days (so we didn’t keep racking up fines), and one of the drivers/all purpose people at Josh’s office made it his personal mission to visit the office 3 times a day until finally, Josh got a text saying his application for a permit had been approved. Bless him. I have no idea what he did, but sometimes it just takes persistence to make someone want to make an effort to find a way around the system.

And yes, we paid the ticket. No, we didn’t get a refund. That’s just how things go here. Am I annoyed by that? Nope. Just happy it’s done.

This fall has been a season of visa acquisition — yes, the same as last year, but even more complicated. It’s December and we are still waiting on one last piece to fall into place, Carter’s Emirates ID. Then we will finally all be legal residents once again.

Why did it take so long this time? Well, it’s a series of unfortunate inconveniences that snowballed into a frantic race to the finish last week. First, when Josh changed jobs, all of our old visas were cancelled instead of transferred because his new company/local office is solely American owned so there’s a special visa process to go through. Next, when Josh went to get his residence visa installed in his passport, the page that he had left wasn’t valid to put a visa in (who even knows why), so he had to file to get another passport, get it back, and then get his visa before they could even start the process for us.

In the meantime, our residence visas had a 30 day grace period, but instead of being able to file an extension, we had to physically leave the country to get a renewal which meant we had to do a last minute border run to Oman. Also, Josh couldn’t go across the border with us because his visa was in process so he couldn’t legally leave the country.

So we pulled the kids out of school at noon, headed to Al Ain (border town with Oman), dropped Josh off at a coffee shop, and the kids and I headed to the border to get legal again. Since my Arabic speaker husband usually handles all interaction with border people, I was NOT looking forward to trying to communicate and understand the process. It’s like trying to navigate with DMV customer service people who all speak really quietly and with a thick accent. It felt like I needed one of those old fashioned ear trumpets as I kept saying, “I’m sorry, what did you say?” as Carter laughed at my deafness and interpreted for me.

It also didn’t help that they kept asking “visa?” and I’d say, “yes, our visas are expired, we need to get new ones” when what they really wanted was my VISA CARD for payment. If they had just said, “50 aed please,” then I would have known to hand over my visa card, but when you are purchasing a visa it is not helpful to ask a person “visa?” and expect them to know what you’re talking about. This happened on both sides of the border and it felt like a conversation of “Who’s on First” as we went in circles until I figured out what they wanted.

I finally made it through the border gauntlet, out of UAE, into Oman, and then back into UAE with all the proper stamps and new tourist visas, and then thankfully Josh drove the 2 hours back home. That gave us 30 more days on the clock.

Then we had to redo medical checkups/blood tests/chest X-rays (me and Carter) so we could get approved for health insurance (all before even applying for visas). But wait, Carter is over 18 and a boy so we had to submit a letter proving he is still in school and had to apply for a humanitarian waiver to be able to sponsor him here. Once those were approved and he passed medical, Josh had to go pay a deposit that we’ll get back when he leaves the country (to insure he doesn’t overstay). Then Caleb had to go for fingerprinting, because he’s over 15. Josh has been running between work and government offices for the past few weeks, trying to get it all in in time for the kids to be able to travel with school in mid-november.

The last straw was was when I went to apply for Caleb’s visa to go to India with the school volleyball team. He still didn’t have his residence visa, “any day now, inshallah,” but we thought he should be able to travel as a tourist on a US passport. I submit for the evisa and get an error message: there is less than 6 months remaining on the issued passport. Visa can not be issued. ACKKKKKKKKK!

Somewhere in the mess of administrative tasks, I had overlooked that the kids’ passports would be crossing into no-mans land of 6 months left of validity. Calling them 5 year passports is a joke when you can only use them for 4.5 years, but whatever. #soapbox I knew they were coming up soon, but thought they expired in May, not April, and suddenly we had 3 kids with useless passports. ARGGGGH.

I already had scheduled an appointment to renew them so our party of 5 tromped in to get our passports, raised our hands and swore that all the information was true on the 5,345 forms and photocopies that we turned in and crossed our fingers that they’d come back in time for the boys to go on another school trip at the end of November.

In the meantime, the pieces of our puzzle began to fit into place. I wasn’t sure if the government would issue a residence visa in a passport that had less than 6 months validity on it. It turns out the 2 younger kids passed, but Carter’s application, since he’s over 18, got special attention and it got kicked back. Tick-tock, tick tock . . . the passports came back right at the last minute (while Josh was in Dubai all week, of course) so I took off work to pick them up at the embassy, Carter arranged to meet the guy from Josh’s company to pass it off to him, and he got the visa installed the very next day, just in time. The kids leave for Oman in 2 days for a school enrichment trip — to get their advanced PADI dive certification.

We are still waiting for Carter’s Emirates ID to be completed. He can travel without it, but he needs that to make a medical appointment to take care of his knee/military waiver. That all feels minor in the grand scheme of hoop jumping that we’ve just accomplished. I’m sure we’ve done more than this in the past few months, but it feels like this is the only thing that has been accomplished. #finallylegal

I was talking to Calvin the other day (well, texting — cause that’s the easiest thing when you live 8,000 miles away from your child and your time zones are flipped) and he was looking at old posts on my blog and saying how he missed hearing about our daily lives here.

I agree, 100%. The time I spend working eats up all of my creative mental space that I used to use to compose blog posts, framing life here in contrast to what would be normal in the US. And after living somewhere for a few years, oddities don’t stand out like they used to.

He sent me a few screenshots from my blog back in the Bahrain days — when we had a mama cat living in our yard with all of her kittens, driving Zeki and Micah crazy. Our life was absolutely nutters back then. And then we had that cat die in our wheel well and couldn’t get the body out. I’m so happy that I blogged about all that back then because I wouldn’t believe it today if I didn’t have the posts to prove it. I love looking back and laughing at what we’ve experienced as a family.

Flashback to the past — little miss was mad at me so she hacked off the front of her hair.

Flash forward to just last week and little miss was at it again. She came in to my bedroom, looking sheepish, holding up a clump of hair, and said, “Mom I was mad that you said I couldn’t [something so insignificant that I can’t even remember] so I cut my hair.” 6 years later and I still have haircutting stories to tell.

The other reason that I am blogging less is because my little people are much more savvy about avoiding photo taking — usually when I try to snap a shot they’re all, “this isn’t going to end up on your blog, is it?!” I thought for sure I had a photo of Camille’s snipped bangs in my camera roll, but I think we were too busy laughing about it and I was carefully balancing her brothers’ teasing and making sure it didn’t push her into tears. But I’m determined to get one today.

• 

• 

I’m at a milestone. My job is 50% complete. 1/2 of my kids have made it to adulthood. Anyone with older kids knows that 18 is not the magic number where all the work is finished, but it’s a transfer of legal responsibility from me to them and it’s another (giant) step in the letting go process that began the first time they tried to roll over by themselves.

I look at this kid and think what a cutie he was, but have no desire to go back in time.

Instead I look at this kid and think, “He is going to do great things and I can’t wait to see what they are.”

I love you Carter. I hope you enjoy your late night Raider games and still manage to be a functioning adult in the morning. Pretty soon it will be late night Raider games with Navy work in the morning. You’ll figure it out.

Of course, you’re not a reader so you won’t see this, but maybe your brother will tell you all about it. XOXO