Ryan's 3rd Birthday

SO FUN that Ryan is turning three! He is such a happy boy and we are so blessed to have such an easy going kid.

These are the big sisters (= Layla's best friend is in the middle. She is from South Africa. The other gal is from Costa Rica. Layla thinks she can speak all the languages around her because she knows a few words in each of them (=

We asked for no gifts from friends so we got an array of very elaborate and funny cards instead (=

 

Here are a couple of his main playmates (= Collectively the thing they enjoy most is leaping off our couches on to cushions on the floor. It is the most played game every day (=

       

Yummy Food!   

Here we are! The cake is a fire engine if you can't quite tell. My favorite parts about birthdays are the  cake and decorating the house a few days before the big day!

The comments are screwed up again, but hopefully you can see that this is his birthday cake....a fire engine!

Here is the train set from Mom and Dad and Sue and Jen? maybe? Not sure. We probably need to buy another set of tracks the next time we go to IKEA. Thank you!!

This is the goofy smile we get these days.....but you can see he is happy!

Layla was SO HELPFUL to blow out the candles. She can't help herself!

       

My own mother's day

It is so fun now that Layla is old enough to anticipate holidays coming and to want to shop for a gift! She and Tom got me these LOVELY gaudy flowers - bright blue roses and sprayed on glitter and fake water droplets. Ahhh, the way Arabs love their flower is so unique.

Anyway, she wrote a wonderful card and hid it while she asked me to make her a "business sized" envelope. Where she got that from I don't know as we NEVER mail letters from here!

Anyway....here is a poor photo of both of us taken in between dodging the AC repair man who was fixing two of our broken ACs. Yippee we are extra cool today!! 

Mother's Day

My friend Rachel has a great story about mother's day in Djibouti. It really illustrates how differently folks in this part of the world view family from most people in the West.

http://www.djiboutijones.com/2013/05/honoring-mothers-djibouti-style/

On my end of things, I have a great deal to thank my mother for and this is just a tiny taste:

-she managed to help me instill confidence in myself
-she figured out how to raise two kids in a huge international city though she was raised on a small, midwest farm
-she taught us how to be comfortable in the kitchen and to cook and experiment with food
-she is Uber-Practical meaning she helped us to see beyond convention and what everyone might think is the right way to do things. Sometimes you just have to take the shortest route even if it against convention.
-she learned TWO incredibly difficult languages and can still speak them! This is amazing to me.
-she very selflessly takes care of our family and extended family

Wish I had more time, but I stuck the kids in front of the TV so I would have time to write this morning. They just LOVE to stand next to me while I work on the computer. sigh. They are watching Mary Poppins for the first time (= so fun.

Thanks mom!
love you!
WHEN ARE YOU COMING OUT TO VISIT?!?!?

Crazy weather and a new weekend

We love living in the Middle East. Life is just unpredictable and though that does get tiresome at times, it certainly keeps things interesting.

Lately the weather has been the crazy thing. We live in a desert which means that weather is pretty extreme and consequently it really really affects things when it changes or whatnot.  Lately, we've had rain almost every day for the last TWO WEEKS. It is affecting everything and has caused all sorts of flooding because there are no building codes (really, at all I don't think!) to address flooding. So all sorts of crazy pictures are getting sent from phone to phone of wild things all over the country as a result of the water.

The weather has been in the 80s instead of around 110 so we are LOVING IT. However, we have our own share of flooding, two burst pipes and really really dirty cars. It has taken Tom so much time to try and fix stuff himself, then find a guy to fix it the, get him to come back to finish the job etc etc etc. Any other house projects just get put on hold!

The other newsworthy item is that the government is changing the weekend! I think this is the craziest thing in the world. Living in Hong Kong and the US before, I never realized the Arab world has a different weekend. You should google all the various weekends around here. Anyway, our country has been talking about it for a very long time, but in typical fashion, they did nothing for years and now it is happening in three weeks (=

So we are having a three-day weekend! Normally our week is Saturday through Wednesday and now it will be Sunday through Thursday. As a person who sort of likes symmetry and order, it DRIVES ME CRAZY to never have a calendar that shows a full week. (yes I still use a paper calender!) Now at least, I can breathe a big sigh of satisfaction and see one week all on one page, finally.

Here are some random photos, by the way (=

The kids room now - the two pictures on the left are from Tom's grandma on his dad's side. Thanks Cary!  Sorry I didn't make the beds (=

This is a page from a book that she had and Cary has given a page to each great grandchild.

This one is for layla. I found a man who frames photos here in town and have had SO MANY things framed. This cost $15 for double matting and non-reflective glass (= 

Here is Ryan's "Jesus picture" from Frances Hook. My sister and I both had one growing up and mom got this for Ryan as a gift. Living in the middle east I am completely irritated by how Jesus does NOT LOOK ARAB, but sentimentality wins out on this one (=

Layla's Jesus Picture is the big one and is actually the one I had as a child.

This is a tea towel from Tom's mom.....I love the colors and the theme; Noah's Ark. Ryan just sits and looks at it sometimes (=  This is also in their bedroom and is where they sit to read. The bookselves are on the right and the bed is on the left.

I have thought about having it framed but didn't know if I was going overboard with framing everything (= I'm finally getting a wall of family pictures up in the next few months!

The After School Club

Our first meeting was this week. We started with the third though fifth graders which is a much easier group than first and second graders (= I am teaching music to the older group and I haven't taught elementary kids here yet so I was quite curious about how it would all go down.

Layla's school is a British Curriculum International school with about 90% local kids and 10% from elsewhere in the middle east and the rest of the world. I remember meeting one family straight from Iran and no one in the family spoke Arabic. Can you imagine? Thankfully there was some staff member around to translate for them.

The school has been open for three years and is adding a grade every year. The principal and core of the staff are all from South Africa and they are top-notch. The prinicpal says he prefers not to hire american or european teachers because their expectations are too high. They are not prepared to teach with limited materials, or to teach children with families with very very low education levels. Most of the 40 year olds in this country did not group with electricity, paved roads, hospitals or elementary education. Those of you who have been in developing countries know that a country without a long history of education has a whole host of issues that will be worked through as it creates its own educational foundation amongst its people. The principal believes that most South African teachers are more familiar with this dynamic than their American or European counterparts. I think it is a very valid observation.

So anyway - a friend and I decided to start the after school program because we were both hankering to do a little something more in the community and we both had kids at the school. The leadership is very grateful and supportive of us running their after school club because it means that they do not have to do it themselves (= So it is a win-win. We do charge for it for many reasons but MOSTLY to make sure kids actually attend regularly! We have about 7 "classes" offered at any one time and from 50-75 students involved depending on the semester. We are in our third cycle of doing this.

The music class that I taught was pretty basic. We are just doing some rhythm things and will do some basic theory along with having some guest performers. The strangest moment was when I asked a girl her last name and she didn't know what to say. It is similar here to what you read in the bible: layla, the daughter of so and so the daughter of so and so the daughter of so and so etc etc. So she wasn't sure how far to go back and then her friends told her to give her tribe's name but she didn't seem to clear on that (= So we just settled for her first name and then a few more back from that (= So interesting.

I'll post more as we have more going on....the biggest news this week, actually, is that it has been raining off and on for DAYS! this is so amazing. It also means our roof is leaking water. But hey, we love rain out here!

Road Trip!

My Neice

Baby Lillianna is about three months old now! I can't remember exactly when she was born at the moment, but it was two weeks early! Mike and Jen had the baby in Colorado so we could all be together which was a big gift to us on their part. THANK YOU!!

I was able to be a birthing coach of sorts to my sister which was cool and exhausting at the same time. I give huge respect to Doulas and midwives...I could never have such an intense job that requires so much emotional and physical output while losing sleep at the same time. I'd do it for my sister and a few close friends, but that is it!! Regardless, Jen was a rockstar mom in the delivery room.

After about two months they packed things up and headed back to Florida to be a family of three down there where they have been living the past three years. We are excited for their family to grow and develop over the next few years (= 

New Friends!

We've had new friends move to town! They were seven years in another Middle Eastern country so they are hitting the ground running so to speak. The kids are still getting to know each other and developing their playing styles but it has been lots of fun for them.

   

Let's just say these two little girls are ADORABLE!!!! They are in the same class at school as well (=

   

We went camping one of our first weekends back home because the good weather only lasts so long! They were real troupers to go camping for the first time with their four kids (= We joined Jon and Vic who are our usual camping partners so thre three families had a great time!

Their littlest one is almost a year and just learned to walk!

 

Joey is on the right and he belongs with Jon and Vic's family (= The four of them had a great time playing on the beach when we were camping.

Catching from Easter, to Sue's visit to our road trip

Our wonderful Azeb baking Ethiopian bread at 4am!

 

Sue making Monkey bread 

It took Ryan awhile to get the hang of his first Easter Egg hunt (=

    

Examing in the loot!

Family photo Easter morning 2013

Add caption

Will this work? Captions are not working. I am irritated.

Don't know where this will show up, but after the Easter sunrise service we did an egg hunt then we all took a big nap. Except mama of course.
Then we went to a nice, Western hotel and swam in their lovely pool. It was a fun day and the weather was PERFECT. The camels were randomly walking down the hill behind the hotel. So crazy.

Have i said yet how irritated I am at this crazy caption thing? What is the point?? I love the sunglassse on the kids (=

Our Easter photo - keep in mind we had just come back from a sunrise service in the desert (=