Alive and Well: A Banner Day in the Heiss Household

When our house went under contract, the closing date was set to September 26 (the day before we're set to get the keys to our new apartment), but then the buyers asked if they could move that up to September 15, so we very quickly made arrangements for that. 

This was mostly fine because selling our house was rather passive for us. We had given our neighbours power of attorney, so they went to sign the documents in our place. We just had to help arrange things and be present for an "alive and well" call with the lawyer (who we'd met previously). 

Because of the time difference, this happened right during the dinner rush before mutual. Andrew was just getting out of class, I was in the middle of making dinner, and we were trying to figure out how everyone was going to get to mutual (Andrew was recently called as a teacher's quorum leader so now he goes to mutual as well). Still, we found a few minutes to sit down and hop on a call with the lawyer, verify all our information as correct (for money transfers and taxes and so forth), and then we went on our merry way. 

Alive and well, having made it through most of September 15. 

Rachel, meanwhile, had been having a rough morning and still had much of September 15 ahead of her.

She had gone to get a few vaccines the day before and woke up feeling very sore and rather overwhelmed. 

Andrew and the kids came home from mutual, we put the little kids to bed, and then Benjamin and Miriam settled in to watch Inception (for Miriam's propaganda class) while Andrew and I sat down to hype up Rachel. We talked with her for a while, did our best to make her laugh, and motivated her to do a few of the "adulting" things she still needed to do before her mission started. 

And then we had to get ready for bed because her 7-hour countdown to being set apart for a missionary was also our 7-hour countdown of how long we could possibly sleep before getting up to be present for her setting part (9 PM for her, 6 AM for us). 

We did not get 7 hours of sleep...but we did eventually go to bed.

And we mostly got up to watch Rachel be set apart. 

We decided to not wake Phoebe up, in part because...she's just a force to be reckoned with and once she's up, she's up. It seemed silly to wake her up for this when we could just...leave her sleeping. So we...didn't wake her up. 

Clever signs

A lot of the walking around we end up doing happens to be indoors (so much so that one day Benjamin looked up symptoms of vitamin D deficiency and whether or not you can get vitamin D through a window when he realized he hadn't been outside the entire day...not that a single day without the sun will give you a vitamin D deficiency...but many days without it might). A lot of this indoor walking happens in malls. 

Mall life is alive and well here.

We like to be on the lookout for clever typography and/or names of things when we're out and about...and here are two we've spotted recently. 

First up, "eyewa" or "أيوا":

It's always a good day to accidentally teach your children the word "only" in Arabic

The day after we visited the falcon exhibition, the kids and I went through the worksheet we got on how to help preserve national heritage sites. I didn't pre-read the worksheet so the word "only" came as a bit of a surprise to me, although it makes sense...we say the something similar in English: "Take only pictures." 

And it isn't as "only" is a very difficult word. In fact, it's a pretty basic vocabulary word, so it isn't as if we're gatekeeping "only." It's just that...I dunno...I imagined this maybe said something a little bit different like, "I take photos," or something.

Again, given the fact that we say "Take only pictures" in English, it's perfectly fair that it would say this in Arabic as well. I was simply unprepared to have the discussion that we had to have when sounded out this sentence around our table... 

The root of "only" is F-Q-T, which you can see above: فَقَطْ. 

You pronounce it as, uh, faqat. 

It was actually (gratefully?) my turn to sound things out when we came to this sentence and I started out very slowly, as one does, stumbling over every word: "'Al...ta... Alta...Altaqit suuuu...waaaaaa...ran... fa...fa... " 

But then I recognized the last word, so I said, "Oh—faqat!"

"MOM!" Zoë shrieked, her mouth falling open.

My bad! I didn't even think before I said it because...it just means "only." But it did inspire a lovely conversation with my children regarding language use. 

(And that's not even the only word that sounds like a curse word in English... Oh, and...for the record, in our household we typically eschew the use of "Christmas words" like stupid so for the kids to hear their mother drop an "only" (in Arabic) was quite...shocking...for the children).

*****

We met up with some friends at the library yesterday and T mentioned that Zoë had said something in the car the other day that he wanted to tell me about, but we ran out of time before we all had to leave, so he said he'd tell me later. 

And I was biting my nails that she'd shared her newly acquired "spicy" Arabic knowledge with her friends. 

But that isn't what it was at all! It was completely (more or less) innocuous (though we did have to have a conversation with her about how far she takes her teasing because it went a little far in the car). 

*****

In other news, I read the book Karma's Rabbit from cover to cover. It was a painstaking process, but I made it through, and Phoebe made it through beside me, and we learned a few new words and happily recognized others. 

On the very first page, Phoebe stopped the story to ask whether it took place in Qatar. I asked her why she thought it might take place in Qatar and she pointed to...

...the electrical socket!

I thought that was pretty clever for her to notice. 

I don't know whether the story really takes place in Qatar. The author, Taghreed Najjar, is Palestinian-Jordanian. The illustrator, Hassan Manasrah, is Jordanian, so if I'd wager that neither Najjar or Manasrah were imagining Qatar when they worked on this book, but it's still cute that Phoebe noticed the different electricity. Most of our plugs do have those little switches by them! 

Falconry and things

I am typically a one-outing a day kind of a person, but today we had three outings that had us out and about the whole entire day. 

We spent the morning chatting with Rachel while getting ready to head out. She was up late, having been out late with friends. She remarked that since she's been living with my parents over the summer she hasn't had many late nights (which kind of made her miss her roommates and all the fun they'd have together), instead going to bed by 10 PM most nights and then getting up and going to work...and, honestly, while I'm glad she had a fun time out with her friends, she's going to be adhering to a missionary schedule pretty soon so it's not terrible that she's already in the habit of going to bed by 10 PM and getting up early to get the day started. 

It was wonderful to get to speak with Rachel for a bit, even if it was during our own morning rush. I can't believe she'll be starting her mission so soon (just a couple of days now)! But I'm definitely looking forward to only being 4 hours different from her instead of 9. Surely that will make arranging phone calls a little easier. 

Anyway, our first outing this morning was to brunch at the apartment of some people in our ward. They live in the same area that we'll be moving to and they have three little girls all right around Phoebe's age (3, 4, 6). It was fun to get to know them, even if the kids got a little rambunctious—many little bodies running around squealing and laughing in a small apartment with marble floors can be a bit of a recipe for disaster. I was glad when our hosts asked if they should pull out some LEGO (that seemed to calm the kids down significantly).

From brunch, we made our way to Katara for another visit to the S'hail Falcon Exhibition, this time with some friends. Here are Andrew, Phoebe, and Zoë walking towards an art installation by Lorenzo Quinn called "Building Bridges":

Falling down and standing up

Last weekend when the other kids were all off at various activities, Andrew, Phoebe and I went to the mall to look for a few specific things...but we also stopped by Max and Phoebe and I saw some cute dresses on the sales rack that we liked, so we got them—my dress was only 40 QAR and Phoebe's was 20 QAR. We were the fanciest gals on the block!

Late this night when we should have been getting to bed...

So, uh, the building across the street from us is on fire...which is (one of) my (many) worst nightmare(s). 

I think about it every time I get in the elevator and see the sign that says, "In case of fire use stairs. Do not use elevator" because we...live on the 40th floor. 

And I just can't help but think of what a nightmare it would be to navigating all those stairs in order to evacuate. I mean, we'd do it...but it would be with screaming, howling children...so not very fun.

I assume the screaming and howling because, well, today when we arrived at the metro station a train was already at our stop and getting ready to head off. We kind of hesitated about whether or not we could make it on, but ultimately decided we couldn't—not with our party of seven!—so we collectively decided to wait for the next trains (they literally come every six minutes so it's typically not a big deal to wait).

Oh, except that Benjamin missed the memo about waiting for the next train and hopped on board! 

The doors closed, and off he went.

Phoebe immediately started wailing. 

"We will never see Benny again!" she cried. "He's gone forever!"

Katara International Hunting & Falcons Exhibition

It was Alexander who saw the advertisement for the Katara Falcon Exhibition on the metro. He tried to tell me about it on the train but sometimes the train is just too loud to hear him speak (not because others are talking but simply because the metro is moving fast and that creates a lot of noise). So when we got out of the metro he gushed out all the information with syncopated, breathless excitement: "Falcon festival! September 8 through 12! At Katara! Free admission! Can we go?"

A better day (in which no one gets impaled)

This morning was much smoother (thanks in no small part to the slight temper tantrum I had at dinner after Andrew came home, in which I ranted about everything that had happened during the day). 

The little kids got up and worked together to put away the clean dishes, practiced the piano, played a dominoes counting/adding game with Phoebe that I made yesterday but she refused to play, and started on their math work. Phoebe played nicely while I got a good bit of writing (for my coursework) accomplished with minimal interruption. 

It was (compared to yesterday) so marvelous. 

Here's a list that Phoebe made for a hypothetical sleepover that she'd like to go to some day:

The parable of dumping all the silverware into the bottom drawer

This morning was rough. 

It didn't really stop at the morning because the whole day was a little bit rough, if we're being honest. 

But the morning? It was rough.

I won't tell on everybody, but I will tell on the four year old. 

I interrupted Phoebe's play to ask her to help me unload the dishwasher, which—granted—was rude of me. Like, why should she have to do chores? Pretty rude. 

But she eventually decided that the dishwasher could be on the plane, so unloading it could be part of her game. But, like, if any turbulence happened she'd have to go back to her seat...which sounded fair enough.

Though...also...things did get turbulent.

First, though, here's a picture of her earlier in the morning setting the stage for today's pretend play:

Tour de famille (and a stop in Banff and BC)

Rachel will be set apart as a missionary in about a week. She and Auntie Josie took a road trip up to Canada to see some family and some places before Rachel settles down to business. 

Here they are at Elizabeth's house on the first night of their journey. She lives in Rexburg, so they didn't get too far their first day, but there's just something about driving 10 hours versus driving 13 hours that feels so much more doable, so I'm glad they stopped. Plus they got to visit with Elizabeth and her family!