While shopping for school supplies. The perfect notebook . . . if your name is Jean.
I don’t know who or what “6 ILSI” is, but the designer of this little girl’s shirt isn’t very happy with them. But at least they’re saying it with style!
Omani traditional dress for men is the dishdasha (the white robe) and the kuma (the hat). If you’re an Omani man, that’s what you wear. Everywhere. To dress it up (suit and tie equivalent) there is a scarf that is wrapped around the head and worn over the kuma. To dress it up even further (tuxedo equivalent) there is an overcoat type layer that is worn over the robe. They are sharp looking and perfect for the climate here.
Well, my little dudes wanted dishdashas of their own, so we had them measured for them on our most recent trip to the sook. They put them on right away and had people smiling at them right and left on our way out.
We even had someone stop us and ask to take a picture of the blonde boys in dishdashas.
They find them so comfortable that they even wore them to play handball outside and then didn’t want to take them off before going to bed. Now they want to know when I’m going to get an abaya . . .
Another old post that I “found” today. This is from summer when we went to the sook and bought our chess table from the Syrian wood guy. You can see Carter was eyeing the knives months ago in anticipation of his birthday . . . the kids that don’t belong to us are our next door neighbors.
Recently we went to the sook because we wanted to get something interesting for our house. We keep going to this shop that carries items imported from Syria because it’s fun to browse and look at all the beautiful boxes, trays, and chess sets while Josh speaks Arabic to the shop owner.
This most recent time the boys had friends come along to keep them occupied while mom and dad shopped. These two were fascinated by these curved knives.
The boys have been wanting a chess board and I thought that instead of buying a chess board that I would have to find a place to store, that we should get a small chess table that would be useful/decorative when not being used to play chess. This is the one we decided on.
backgammon, chess, checkers, and cards — both beautiful and functional
A few seconds of Josh chatting in Arabic
A friend posted this much better video of the sandstorm we had the other day. I don’t know who filmed it, but he (based on the voices in the background) did a great job capturing it as it rolled into town. It also shows how it was a normal day and then at the end when the storm reaches the location where they are filming, everything goes dark, just like it did at our house.
We’re back from camping. It was fun, but cold. Yes, actually cold. We went up, up, up the mountain and while it was 90 at home, it was 60 up there — in the daytime. At night it got down into the 40s (possibly lower, I wasn’t going to go outside of the tent to check) so we were huddled in our sleeping bags trying to stay warm. I was happy I brought my Uggs.
Camping photos and video coming soon!
The last few days the sky has gotten really dark, thunder has been rolling, and the humidity has been so thick that we’re positive it’s going to rain. It doesn’t. But this afternoon the boys were out playing handball in the front yard after school and suddenly Carter busts in the front door yelling, “Mom! You gotta see this!”
I go out front to see the sky has turned completely dark — the sky is so black that our security lights have been tricked into thinking it’s nighttime, but the darkness is from the dirt falling from the sky. The kids are running around screaming, “It’s snowing! It’s snowing!”
I grabbed my camera and shot this really quickly. The camera lens lightened up the sky quite a bit, but you can still see how much dirt is in the air when I focus on the security light. It really was raining dirt. It was crazy and gritty.
About 10 minutes later the sky started lightening up again because it started raining and the water washed all the dirt out of the air. It didn’t rain much and it didn’t last long, but to feel actual water fall from the sky was a novelty. We went back outside and stood under the sparse drops like we do every time it rains in the desert.
We’re planning to go camping tomorrow unless it’s raining up on the mountain. Normally that wouldn’t be likely, but while we’ve been teased with rain here, it’s been pouring up there so we’ll have to see what the weather is like in the morning.
