Typical Tuesday

This morning Benjamin and I hit the bay early for a swim...and found this cute little hermit crab wielding an auger for a sword:

Bratislava (October 10)

Uncle Patrick wanted to make sure we had an Out-of-Austria adventure while we were visiting. We tossed around the idea of going to Budapest or Znojmo but ultimately landed in Bratislava—it's close, it's inexpensive, and it's quiet (and we were all in need of a quiet day after being out late celebrating Uncle Patrick's graduation). So Bratislava it was!

Stuff, stuff, and STUFF: We have it

After we finished with our schoolwork on Sunday, we headed out to the beach to enjoy the last of the afternoon sunshine:

Rudderly without an utter

The shower in the girls' bathroom stopped draining. I fully suspect hair in the drain, but the drain is weird so we just put in a request to the plumber, who came and fixed things up for us. After he left I thought I would just test the shower really quick to see if the drain really was draining, so I stepped inside the shower to turn it on. 

You should know that each of our showers is equipped with an overhead shower and a handheld sprayer. In our bathroom the control panel looks like this:

The button on the left is for the overhead shower and the button on the right is for the handheld sprayer.

Where's it at? The beach! The beach!

There were a lot of things we wanted to do this summer that we never got around to doing because we were...otherwise engaged. That is, we were organizing all the moving parts for a seven-person international move, while also trying to get Rachel ready for a mission. It was a lot of packing, it was a lot of document-gathering, it was a lot of...stress. 

We dreamed of taking off and doing something like revisiting the Outer Banks or North Topsail or driving out to a new beach for "Beach Week" somewhere...or even making a trek out to Utah or California or Canada. But, it soon became clear that wasn't going to happen. Our van had issues we didn't want to fix (since we knew we'd be leaving it behind) and we simply didn't have the time (Andrew was still teaching over the summer). 

So we didn't have "Beach Week" this year (as has been our tradition), but we told the kids that it would be fine. We were moving to a peninsula in the Arabian Gulf (and/or Persian Gulf—it's as you like). There would be plenty of beach time, we reasoned.

And here we are...70 days after touching ground in Doha...living on an island...and we have finally, finally taken our kids to the beach. Or at least some of our kids—Benjamin and Miriam were at the beach in Abu Dhabi instead (and, in all fairness, the boys got to visit Azerbaijan Beach with our friends while Zoë and I were in Vienna). But anyways we made it to the beach!

UN in Vienna! (a guest post by Zoë | October 8)

After leaving Schönnbrunn, we headed to the UN headquarters to find the anti-corruption hand sculpture that is also in Doha–the thing is, when we got there, a security guard told us that we could not go in without a guided tour, and apparently we needed government issued IDs to go on a tour. Mom had her driver’s license, but she didn’t have my passport.* 

Things weren't looking great

Mega Hymn Book (and talking in church)

Don't mind my children sprawling out all over the floor of the chapel.

Not today, Stan! (typo humor)

Perhaps it's just late...but I'm finishing up a draft of a talk I'm going to give in church tomorrow and I made the following typos, which I corrected, but which I also laughed about while I was fixing...

1. "We grope for the wall like the blond..." instead of "We grope for the wall like the blind..." (see Isaiah 59)
2. "Or we can listen to Stan..." instead of "Or we can listen to Satan..." (see Divine Discontent)

That Stan! Always messing things up! 

Vienna, Day 2: Mega Museum Day (October 7)

This was my third time in Vienna, so you might think I would be getting familiar with the city and feeling pretty comfortable. But you would think wrong. In truth my base-level anxiety is pretty high so I actually approached the whole situation with quite a bit of trepidation and really had to convince myself that I could, in fact, leave the house, navigate the city, and have a good time all on my own...with Zoë in tow, of course. It was fine once we got going!

Patrick and Hadis both had to work on Wednesday and Thursday so we were on our own, which is fine—we fared well! I didn't ever lose Zoë, who in fact was quite handy at figuring out the metro, didn't ever complain about being tired or hungry, and was—in essence—a delight. 

I can brag about not losing Zoë in Vienna because, as Patrick pointed out, we have set a rather low bar for ourselves, seeing how Zoë was once (lightly) kidnapped, and Rachel was nearly abducted by Italians when Patrick took her to Salzburg (I don't think I wrote about that on the blog but they were going through Mozart's birth house and Rachel got sucked into a field trip of Italian high school students and when she tried to get away from them—and not on their tour bus—she was chastised by a chaperone and had to work a little to convince them that she really wasn't with them). Anyway, we have a history so Patrick was proud of us for not losing Zoë and I was proud of us for not losing Zoë. 

We were doing pretty great in the not-losing-kids department.

Yes, but...

There's a "Yes, But" comic about the "two sides of every coin" and I couldn't help thinking about it when we rejoiced over finally locating our beach access. We did not do a beach trip with the kids this summer because we were moving to Doha—which is surrounded by beaches! But we haven't made it to the beach yet even though we live on an island!

So, yes! We finally found our beach access point!

...but then Phoebe took her socks off on the couch and got sand everywhere.

But having to clean up sand doesn't bother me too much (yet), so that's okay. We're still excited about the beach—I just thought it was funny!