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!"

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:

Daily studies and other stories...

Alexander picked this position to do his writing work this morning:

Well, good

This morning I was doing Phoebe's hair while she was playing Minecraft and she was prattling on and on about everything:

"Mom! Do you want to look at my house? I decorated it so goodly! I mean well. I decorated it well. Did you know that well and good are the same word, but you can only use them sometimes. You can't say that you do anything goodly. You do things well. Not well-ly, either. Just well. Like, I decorated my house well, you do my hair well. But things can be good, I think. Like this is a good house or this is a good hairstyle. You can't say well hairstyle. It's always good."

*****

Miriam and I are watching The Other Bennet Sister, certainly a pleasant watch (which diverts from Austen quite markedly, is drowning in anachronisms, and seems to be at least a little cloying (according to the linked-to review)—not only because our television seems stuck on "soap opera effect"). I'm reading The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion and this series seems like a lovely companion to that. I'm pretty unconcerned with doing Jane Austen justice or perfectly replicating society as it was during the Regency or Victorian eras. I'm simply happy to enjoy a rather wholesome retreat from the world and both serve that purpose. 

Light, fluffy, uplifting, occasionally quite humorous. 

When Mary is talking with Mr. Sparrow at a ball, he mentions something about "less oysters" and Mary quickly says, "Fewer. It's fewer oysters; not less." Miriam and I just about died laughing. I don't know that this was a joke in the series, per se, but it certainly is an ongoing joke at our house.

Celestial Patterns and Perspectives and things

The children are taking an astronomy course at the moment and the first lesson focused on the difference between astronomy (a science) and astrology (a pseudoscience) and how the two terms are often confused. 

We also started reading a book called The Turtle of Oman by Naomi Shihab Nye. I read a poetry book of hers over the summer. She's Palestinian-American, but this particular book is about a boy from Oman who moves to the states for three years. So far the kids have noticed a lot of similarities in the preparation phase of the move (which we recently finished experiencing). 

Phoebe was surprised that Turkish Airlines was mentioned in the book because we just flew on Turkish Airlines! And then she wanted to know if Oman was close to Qatar because the book described it as being hot and close to the sea—and we are hot and close to the sea. So even though we looked at the map yesterday and pointed out where Oman was and where we were...we talked about it again. 

Considering she's still not 100% sure where her bedroom is in our apartment we probably can't expect her to remember where Oman is in relation to Qatar.

Anyway, we talked a bit about culture shock because Aref's mom said that the first day would be scary but then things would start to feel like home. The kids did agree that the first day was the scariest—both the leaving and the arriving—but they disagreed that things already feel like "home" because things still feel pretty new. 

So I mentioned how culture shock lasts from months to even years as you adjust to all the many things that need to be adjusted to. One thing that I like to do in a new place is to notice and recognize the signs of the seasons changing, like knowing that oak worms and Joro spiders start popping out in August in Atlanta. 

Here we keep hearing about the al-Nathra period, which we recently entered. This is typically the hottest period of the summer, when the al-Kulaibain star rises in the sky, but it also marks the end of the hot-hot season, because once the Suhail star rises...the hot weather typically begins (ever so slowly) to moderate (see here).

All that talk about different stars set off astrology bells in the children's minds. They said it sounded like superstition more than science.

A special treat

 I think this makes the third post in a row that includes ice cream.

Phoebe had ice cream on the plane. 

We had ice cream at IKEA yesterday (which Phoebe threw up).

And now I'm going to write about ice cream again. Moving is wonderful. But also stressful. And it turns out that a little bit of ice cream really can help soothe raw emotions (particularly with preschoolers involved, but I am pretty sure that drowning sorrows in ice cream is a rather common trope). 

*****

Today was our first somewhat official day of school.

True, we just got here and are still getting over jet lag.

True, we're in temporary housing so will have to move again in a couple of months. 

True, I feel like just being here is a pretty big learning experience. 

But it's been a long and rather hectic summer and we really needed to build some structure into our days. 

Lifelong teasing

Yesterday I was doing Phoebe's hair and asking her silly questions to help her keep still.

"Who is the cutest Phoebe in the world?" I asked. 

"Me!" she said proudly with a giggle.

"Who is the sweetest Phoebe in the world?"

"Me!"

"Who is the smartest Phoebe in the world?"

"Me!"

"Who is the goofiest Phoebe in the world?"

"You!"

"What—me?!" I objected. "But my name's not even Phoebe!"

"It is," Phoebe insisted.

"It is not!" I said. 

"It is," Phoebe explained, "It's just that no one has ever called you that because everyone has been teasing you for your whole entire life."

This is just the kind of joke she'd consider hilarious (she's been confusing Rachel and Miriam since she was about 6 months old...surely in part because she neglects to verify their identity entirely before saying their names, but also because she thinks it's funny—some days she'll switch them up entirely, other days she'll call them Rachel #1 and Rachel #2 or Miriam #1 and Miriam #6000). She's all about a good long-term prank.

A few good lasts: Church, swim friends, PTC bridge

Sunday was our last Sunday in our ward (and our last Sunday at church for a while since our ward in Doha will meet on Fridays). Nothing too far out of the normal happened, except our primary children were each gifted a rather large bag of leftover Easter candy (which they were thrilled about).

Xylophones and Pinckneyville: Crossing things off the bucket list

Downsizing is an incredible amount of work! 

I suppose one could simply rent a dumpster and empty the contents of their house into said dumpster and call it a day. But even that would take a bit of work (unless one also hired workers to carry the contents of the house to the dumpster for them). We don't have the luxury of a dumpster—and doing something like that would eat away at my conscience forever—so we've had to figure out what to do with everything. 

We took a load of old paint cans to be recycled here. We took old electronics to be recycled there. We took 20-year-old towels to the animal shelter. We took dozens of loads of stuff to goodwill. We've given away a billion items on the Buy Nothing Group. We left a bread machine in the kitchen for a friend who is in Mexico until after we leave. We meticulously disassembled our broken organ and snuck it piece by piece into the church dumpster over a number of weeks. We sold a few things. And yesterday we took all our glass to the park to recycle it.

*****

Years ago—in 2022—we got a case of ginger beer for Christmas. We kept the bottles so that Miriam could make a xylophone. By October 2023 she still had not done this, but she did manage to smash an entire box of said bottles on the cement floor of the basement while we were recovering from the Great Flood of 2023. That experience must have really taken the wind out of her sails because the rest of the jars sat for another nearly three years. 

I came very close to simply loading them up to take them out to recycle but then I thought to myself, "Come on! It will take all of two minutes to make a xylophone!"

So I grabbed the cracked funnel (that we haven't tossed yet but which we knew we weren't going to pack halfway around the world with us) and filled those bottles with varying levels of water. 

Boom—xylophone done! 

Extremely scientific. 

If I had wanted to take more time on this project we could have used a tuner to get actual notes. Or I could have used a larger variety bottles to make it trickier to know what order they would go in (though we did throw in an experimental bottle or two into this activity). Or, I suppose we could have done any number of things.

After holding onto these bottles for, oh, four years, however, I was simply proud of us for doing anything with them at all (aside from smash them on the floor). 

Alexander had the most fun playing with them, I think. 

WECOME, WELOME

This morning Zoë sat down to make a "welcome" sign for her friends (who are coming to sleep over tomorrow—because sleeping in an empty house sounds so exciting for any of the neighbourhood kids to pass up).

This morning Andrew also had the follow-up appointment for his toe and the doctor thinks it's coming along nicely. I think so, too. Andrew has other feelings about it, but also is noticeably in less pain so overall I think he's improving. He just doesn't like to look at it.

He picked up doughnuts on his way home and while we were enjoying them together we...fell into what we call "lecture mode."

Let's just say that Zoë and Benjamin are transitioning to being the oldest and most responsible young humans in the home and it's been a rough transition. They've been used to having four older humans waiting on them hand and foot so perhaps haven't realized that they've become capable older humans, themselves. That comes with great expectations. 

For example, Zoë was like, "I want half of that doughnut and have of that doughnut."

And Andrew was like, "Great, go for it."

And Zoë was like, "Like...what do you mean?"

And Andrew was like, "Cut the doughnuts you want in half and take them."

"By myself?"

"You're eleven!"

Yes, we cut a doughnut in half for Phoebe, who is four. But you're eleven. You can cut your own doughnut!

It's just been a bunch of things like that that they haven't ever considered doing because their bossy older sisters would step in to cut doughnuts (or whatever) if we as parents didn't do it, ya know? So we had to clue them in that they were getting older and wiser and needed to just step in and do...stuff.

In their defense, we took the chore chart down (and with it went any sense of responsibility, apparently).

"Like, if you see something that needs to be done, you can't just say, 'Someone else can do that!'" Phoebe added.

Exactly. 

At least she's been listening to our "please do stuff" lectures. 

Of course, the dishwasher is still full of clean dishes, so she's quite happy to ignore her own assigned chore...but...growing up is a process.

Anyway, we were deep in lecture mode and then—still in lecture voice—Andrew said, "And you're going to want to remake that sign, Zoë."

"What? Why?!" she asked.

"Go ahead and read your sign out loud."

"Welcome. Come and find me."

"Try again."

"Wel...oh."

Nature-y stuff

Going for "one last" walk on the trail at Pinckneyville was wonderful and heartbreaking because really, truly we won't have this in Doha. We will have many interesting things, I'm sure. But we won't have this and I have such a soft spot for moss and ferns and all things moist and verdant....

Killing time in an empty house: rain walks, nature wreaths, and craft dates

We have been blessed with a very wet summer, filled with plenty of thunderstorms. It's sometimes made our walks a little difficult to take, but it's been lovely to literally soak in all the rain while we can.

I took Alexander and Phoebe for a walk last week after a storm and they enjoyed exploring their wet world. Here's Alexander pointing to a little herd of deer wandering through our neighbourhood (they've eaten everything in my garden that we would have liked to eat—such a nuisance).

Miriam's last day (last week) and giving away the last of our food storage

Miriam had Andie and McKenna over on Thursday night (July 16) to play a few games and say goodbye. Tonight the kids are having a sleepover down there because that room is 100% empty (except for all the stuff the kids just dragged into it, I guess). After this picture was taken I made Andie and McKenna fill a box of food to take home to their families.

Thoughts two days out from swim team and two weeks out from moving

My brother recently sent a video of "bedtime" at his house, which was really of his 4-year-old and 2-year-old running in circles around him and jumping on the bed while declaring that they were not going to go to sleep. 

I don't know why he thought they'd go to bed.

It's late July in Southern Alberta. The sun even doesn't think about setting until around 9:45 PM so those children had no indication from the universe that it should be bedtime (and why should they trust their father about a thing like that?). Soon enough (like in December) the universe will be telling them it's bedtime by 4:00 in the afternoon...perhaps he'll have an easier time then. 

On the other hand, I'll bet he didn't take them to the pool for four hours in the middle of the day (like I did today). That somehow doesn't guarantee my kids will be worn out at the end of the day, but it sometimes works to shorten bedtime shenanigans. 

I didn't tell him anything, though. 

I just "laughed" at his video—the kids are cute even if they're driving him crazy. 

My mom, though, simply told him that parenting is...hard... 

And that is absolutely true. 

*****

We lasted two days without swim team to keep us busy before I threw in the towel and told the kids to get started on their math curriculum.

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's...an antelope!

Today was another day when we didn't have to set any alarms! There was no early morning swim practice because the oldest age group had their county competition today. Benjamin has his tomorrow afternoon. Zoë and Alex have theirs on Sunday. 

In addition to some small things like laundry and dishes and I meeting with my academic advisor and whatever else, I also finished cleaning out the chest freezer in the garage and listed it on the Buy Nothing Group. And I sent out the Hancock Hummer. And I finished writing (and submitted) my application essay for the Certificate in Interdisciplinary Qualitative Studies. And we went to the lawyer's office to sign a POA (power of attorney) for welling our house.

And I still have a million things on my list of things to do!

I also took a nap because we are trying to manage our stress levels. I'm doing okay so far. I can tell because I haven't even developed a twitch in my eye yet. Andrew, however, was silently thinking he was going blind for the past two weeks (but didn't want to talk about it because talking about it would make it real...so he went to the doctor while I had all the kids at the waterpark and the doctor suggested he go to the eye doctor...so he went to the eye doctor yesterday and they did all sorts of tests and determined that he has beautiful 20/20 vision, but might need reading glasses, and also that he's probably pretty stressed out so use eye drops and try to sleep more).

Here he is with his wacky eyes coming off of whatever dilation medication they used on him (apparently more solution went into one eye than the other so they de-dilated at different rates, which was pretty freaky looking):

Sparklers, take 2

When Phoebe saw the pictures of the kids playing with sparklers on the 4th, she was like, "Wait a minute—when did that happen?" 

So we had to tell her that it happened...after she had gone to bed. She immediately began to have some serious regrets about bedtime, so Andrew promised that we'd pick up some sparklers at the store on Monday and do them again for FHE. 

This sounded like a good plan to her.

Could she remember what they were called?

Absolutely not.

Sprinklers? Spracklers? Spritzes? Sprinkles?

Twinklers? Twizzlerss? Twirlies? Twinkles?

If she was talking about something yesterday, it was highly likely that she was talking about sparklers. 

Or trying to...

Unfortunately for her, there were no fireworks left in the grocery stores on Monday morning—zip, zero, zilch!

Every last firework display had been replaced with back-to-school displays. Yuck!

So I sent out a plea on the good ol' Buy Nothing Group to see if anyone had any sparklers left for my poor youngest child who had slept through the late-night fun the big kids had in the cul-de-sac. 

It took a couple of minutes but soon I had offers pouring in. 

"I have a few boxes!"

"I have so many left over! TAKE MINE!"

"You should have just asked me! The big kids didn't burn through my entire stash on the 4th!" (this last one was from our neighbour who had supplied the sparklers in the first place).

We ended up with plenty of sparklers—enough for Phoebe and all the cul-de-sac kids to enjoy another evening of pyromaniacal mayhem!

Here she is anxiously waiting for her first sparkler to...spark:

Funemployed...in Greenland [Qatar]

We had been operating under the assumption that I could continue working remotely from Qatar, but unfortunately we recently learned that that will not be a possibility. Since I am moving for personal and not professional reasons (unlike Andrew, who is moving for professional reasons), UGA can't allow me to continue to work, which means that I lose my stipend and scholarship. 

Which is all...fine. 

It simply...changes...my path toward graduation a little. I'll still continue my studies, just...differently...than before. 

We're still working out precisely what changes this will entail. But it'll be fine. 

It is a little sad for me because I've liked my job, but it will also be nice to slow down a bit and focus more on being a mom and (Andrew says this part is important) having fun. 

To get a scholarship/stipend at UGA you have to work part-time (13 to 20 hours a week, depending on the contract) and you also have to take 12 credit hours (that's four classes; three classes is considered full time). Last semester, in particular, felt a little rough for me, so I think it will be nice to let that go...and then I can be more present during our homeschooling. The past couple of years I've really had to assign the kids their tasks and work on my own tasks instead of joining in on tasks with them (and honestly the latter can be much more fun—and sometimes effective—for all of us). 

So that will be nice. 

But Andrew also insists that I become like the fancy housewives from, like, a Jane Austen novel and just...frolic about the town...and have mid-afternoon teas...and whatever. 

He insists that it's funemployment rather than unemployment. 

Oh, what do you do in the summertime?

It was hot today.

Our swimmers were hosed down with cold water while they swam because the pool was a little too warm to work out in. It was hot yesterday morning—hot enough that we got hot just playing around and had to go home to cool down. 

We didn't plan on extra pool time today because...it was just too hot.

But our little neighbour knocked on the door asking if they could have phase two of the water fight they started last night. 

"Only this time can we use your hose?" he requested. "Because my dad is working. I can bring all my water balloons! I just need a grown up to fill the tub with water!"

So that's just what we did because...it was hot!

We brought out one of our empty bins as well. I haven't decided on the fate of this bin yet (it doesn't have a lid) but it made an excellent little pool today. 

Here's Phoebe dancing around in the arc of water from the hose (I had to keep making water rainbows for the kids to run under while I filled the bins with water).