I need to read a book

I've been a little too inquisitive recently, wondering about things that I've never wondered about before. I haven't been into any books as of late because I'm working on a baby blanket, so that's what I've been doing when I have any downtime. Apparently, though, I need something to think about, otherwise my mind starts getting off track.

Somehow, one night Andrew and I got on the topic of female genital mutilation (FGM), a rather archaic, tribal ritual done in parts of Africa, most popularly Sudan and Egypt. There are varying degrees of FGM, some less severe, others quite life-altering. Oddly enough, studies have shown that if women view the experience as positive then it doesn't negatively impact their life, whereas if women view the experience as negative it does negatively impact their life. With a full infibulation women have to be operated on to be able to birth a baby because there is, in essence, no birth canal. And then, after having the baby, some women want to be closed up again.

Anyway, although FGM is present in approximately 95% women in both Egypt and Sudan, full infibulation is more common in Sudan. (FGM is not condoned by Islam--it is considered a "tribal" ritual--and is illegal in Egypt, but only since the mid-1990s so many women still have/had it done).

That's one of my pregnancy nightmares, actually--coming home from the hospital after delivering the baby to find that instead of just having my perineal tearing stitched up, I've been fully circumcised.

It's kind of an illogical dream to be having since I trust my doctor (he studied in America thus probably doesn't support FGM), and besides, it's completely illegal for a medical doctor to perform such a surgery, anyway. I'd for sure rat my doctor out to the government if he did. And he probably knows that because Westerners typically aren't pro-FGM.

Still, it's a horrible dream when I have it.

Anyway, after reading about all these statistics, we were out walking last night and a group of Sudanese children walked by. I couldn't help but wonder what percentage of those girls were circumcised. I asked Andrew about it after we had passed them and he admitted to wondering the same thing, or at least he was able to guess what I was wondering about on the first guess...so chances are he was already thinking it.

We continued our walk and our talk smoothly transitioned to chickens...somehow.

I've always thought it would be nice to be a bird and have my offspring gestate outside my body. But then I started wondering a whole lot of things about chickens. I've never been very interested in chickens before, so I don't know very much about them. I had a lot to wonder about.

The egg is hard when it comes out...how does that work? How does the hard part form on the outside? How long does it take the egg to form? What exactly is the yolk? How many eggs does a chicken lay at one time? What happens if the egg gets stuck? Could an egg break inside a chicken? Would that kill the chicken?

Wow. There are so many questions about chickens and eggs. Who cares which came first? Let's just deal with how we get the egg out of the chicken in the first place!

I spent quite a bit of time learning about chickens and eggs today. I never knew there were so many chicken farmer forums out there on the world wide web! I shared some of what I learned with Rachel and we drew pictures of chickens...and octopuses (octopi/octopodes/whatever you prefer) because, did you know, female octopuses are called hens. Also, female lobsters.

A chicken egg takes one day to form. One day! Certain species of chickens may lay up to 300 eggs in one year when they're in their prime, although they'll only ever lay one per day. Her goal is to get a "clutch" of eggs (approximately 1 dozen) so that she can "brood" them (aggressively and tenderly protect them).

No wonder we get so many negative words like "hen-pecking" and "brooding" from hens. Can you imagine if teenage girls ovulated every day and not just once a month? Yikes! So that's reason #1 I'm glad I'm a human and not a chicken.

Another reason is because humans only have one baby at a time...or two...or six. My point is that our body eventually tells us to stop reproducing and start incubating. Even if we continue to release eggs, the chances of them becoming fertilized and/or implanting after the first few weeks of being pregnant already are slim. And the eggs are so small that it really doesn't crowd out the uterus if we release one or several.

Not so with a chicken. If delivery is tricky and an egg gets stuck inside a chicken, she'll keep producing eggs, and then she'll get "eggbound." It is not pretty. If you haven't noticed, chicken eggs are kind of huge. Can you imagine having 12 whole eggs stuck in your stomach going nowhere? Neither can I. And I don't want to.

I'm still not sure exactly how the eggshell forms around the yolk and white, but over dinner we were talking about how that must be for the hen to push out something as hard as an eggshell (we did not have eggs or chicken for dinner, in case you were wondering). And then I realised that I shouldn't pity the hen any more than should I pity myself.

"After all, I pushed out bone," I pointed out to Andrew.

He dropped his fork in surprise. "You did?!"

"Yes," I said, knocking gently on Rachel's head.

"Oh, yeah..." Andrew said.

"Mama--knock my head!" Rachel accused, rather offended.

"Sorry for knocking your head, Rachel."

I also wondered how it must feel to have a hard thing growing inside you, but then I realised that I do and for the most part it's okay...except for when she kicks too much...and eventually when she'll get lodged in my ribcage. Those are the times when it would be nice to be a chicken. Chickens don't get kicked by their eggs, nor do their eggs encroach upon their ribcage. Unless, of course, they are eggbound.

I learned that eggs can break inside a chicken, and the pieces of eggshell can cause internal damage. I suppose that's kind of like a chicken miscarriage, though there are many ways for a chicken to miscarry...they can lay rubber eggs, too, for instance, when the shell doesn't calcify correctly. It's much better for a rubber egg to break inside a chicken than for a well-formed egg to break inside a chicken, for obvious reasons.

The eggs on our dinner plate are typically not fertilized, just in case you were wondering. This was something I already knew. I quite enjoy the fact that the eggs we buy in stores aren't fertilized because there is no guarantee with farm eggs. And, oh, do I ever have a story about farm eggs! *gag*

At the end of the day, I'm pretty glad I'm not a chicken...I was thinking I could almost go for being a penguin, though. One egg per year, and the daddy penguin incubates. Sign me up!

I'd miss my babies, though. I kind of like it when they move around, I like feeling them grow, and getting to hear their heartbeat. I kind of missed being pregnant after I had Rachel in my arms. I had to hold her all the time, otherwise I felt empty. I missed her squirmies and hiccups.

Not that I wasn't glad to be finished being pregnant, just that I missed it a little (like when she was screaming and wouldn't stop--sheesh, I never had to deal with that when she was in-utero). I did eventually get used to having her on the outside instead of on the inside, though. Motherhood is great, but we do put up with quite a bit of mistreatment from our babies, don't we?

Maybe I'll tell you tomorrow what Andrew's been wondering about...he has some pretty bizarre questions, too, regarding gestation (mainly of the human variety, though, not chickens). He just finished The Hunt for Red October...he can read during his commute time, lucky guy...maybe I'll pick that up since he seemed to enjoy it so much...and then I can think about the Cold War instead of FGM and chicken reproduction. That sounds like a much safer dinner table topic to me.

What are you doing?

Our upstairs neighbours killed our internet connection yesterday. While they were hanging up their laundry over the balcony they dropped a pair of red shorts, which landed on our phone line, pulling it apart at the various places it's been broken apart and twisted back together. Heaven forbid they solder anything together here when twisting it back together works just fine...until your upstairs neighbour drops a pair of red shorts from their balcony.

So I didn't have internet at home all day.

When Andrew got home he asked me what I did all day without internet.

"The same thing I do everyday with the internet," I told him.

He volunteered to fix the phone line again, by twisting the wires back together again. Who needs to solder? The chances our neighbour is going to drop another article of clothing that will land on our phone line is slim, right?

While Andrew did this, he got a dose of what I do all day long, with or without the internet. Rachel followed him around everywhere.

He went onto the scary balcony to find the problem. Rachel didn't want to go out there; she's no dummy--she knows scary when she sees it.

"What are you doing?" she asked him.

"I'm fixing the phone," he said.

"Oh." she said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm fixing the phone," he said, while thinking, Didn't I just say that?

"Oh." she said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm fixing the phone," he said, "What are you doing?"

"I"m standing up," she said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm fixing the phone," he said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm standing up in the kitchen," she said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm fixing the phone," he said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm standing up in the kitchen watching Daddy," she said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm fixing the phone," he said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm standing up in the kitchen watching Daddy fix phone," she said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm coming back inside," he said, "Because I'm finished out here."

"Oh," she said and followed him from the kitchen to the toy room where he moved my desk out of the way so that he could access the hole in our wall where the phone line comes through (yup, it's a hole, and a great entrance for mosquitoes and ants and things), "What are you doing?"

I think you get the picture. The only thing different about my day with the internet, as opposed to a day without the internet, is that I can chat to Andrew when Rachel does little cute things, like using the broom as a "tripod" for her "camera," or when she does little annoying things, like throwing fits because I sang Pease Porridge when she only wanted porridge and not peas. And I can post what I write to the blog instead of saving it to my computer. It really doesn't change my day at all. My day is as repetitive as Rachel, herself, usually.

"Elephant, elephant, elephant, elephant, elephant, elephant!" she's saying right now.

"Yes, that's an elephant."

"Yup!"

And she's gone, only to come back a few minutes later.

"Help me up, help me up, help me up, help me up, help me up!"

"How do you ask nicely?"

"Please may I more holding you?"

Now she's up on my lap, holding me and the elephant she earned for staying dry x-amount of nights in a row, asking if we can all watch Winnie the Pooh together...again...that poor DVD has been watched so many times it's not even funny.

But at least I can chat to Andrew that his daughter put her blanket over her head to "hide" and then walked around. And then started clapping her hands, too, and said,

"Wear blanket-hat...and clap hands!"

She was so excited to be multitasking. Must be her father's daughter. They both love to multitask...anything...just to say they can multitask.

Maybe that will be my new answer for Rachel's never-ending interrogation about what I'm doing at any given moment in the day.

"What are you doing, mama? What are you doing?"

"I'm multitasking."

"Oh."

(For the record she just asked me what I was doing and I told her I was typing...

"No," she said, "You're using mouse!"

Oh, yup, I hadn't even noticed I'd switched).

Playing in the churchyard

The church villa has an awesome backyard and we try to make it out there to play together every so often. Sometimes it’s awkward because we can see people watching us from their windows, whispering to each other.

Playing in backyards isn’t exactly normal here since there aren’t many backyards around. I always wonder what they’re whispering…

Today Andrew and I played some volleyball together while Rachel ran around screaming that the ball was hers (and it is, but it was our turn). We also kicked it back and forth between all three of us. We blew bubbles, we spun around, we turned somersaults, Rachel did a whole lot of jumping, we found a snail, and we took a whole bunch of pictures.

   

We also learned that when we hit the ball into the plumeria tree it gets stuck rather tightly. The leaves are so big and thick that they just sucked the ball right in and held on for dear life. We had to use a broom to hit it out of the tree.

This was our first time bringing a big ball to play with and it was a lot of fun. If only we could find a volleyball net to rig up somehow…then the neighbours would really have something to watch!

Not that either of us are actually any good at volleyball…

Starts with ‘b’ and ends in -reeze

Rachel was gifted some well-loved books from Sam when he moved. I’ve been fixing them up a bit because I’m a bit of a librarian and it breaks my heart to see books, even well-loved books, looking dog-eared. And since I was the head of the conservation diagnostics committee when I worked as a librarian, I decided that I could keep that title in our household.

I spent a few evenings fixing the books up—my waterproofing was done with packing tape, which I realise is against everything that book conservation stands for, but I have limited supplies here!

Oh, and they’re baby books. I fully expect them to wear out by the time we’re finished having children; my goal was simply to make them a little more fun for Rachel now, and for Miriam in the future.

A few weeks ago I drew and attached a new cover for the Curious George book. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s pretty good since I don’t really consider myself and artist, per se, and all I had as a reference was a picture off Amazon.com.

I put off doing Toes, Ears, and Nose for quite a while; I actually hid it on my desk for a few weeks, but Rachel found it and we’ve been reading it a lot lately. I haven’t wanted to fix it yet because it’s a lift-the-flap book and some of the flaps were missing and it just seemed like more work than I wanted to put into it.

Furthermore, we weren’t even sure of what the words were. We thought it was supposed to be a poem, but we couldn’t figure out a rhyming pattern or if there was any sort of canter to the words.

It didn’t help some of the words were printed on flaps that were missing (or partially missing) so we were making things up as we went along.

We agreed on mostly everything that was missing, for example, it was obviously that under the hat were two ears since there were two flaps missing directly above the ears.

There was one part of the book that Andrew and I always read differently, however.

My blue jeans protect my knees.
My coat protects my back.
And keeps my…

“…belly button out of the way,” is how I would read it. But Andrew read it as “…belly button out of the cold.”

When it came time to fix this flap we had a bit of a debate. I thought we should do what Rachel was used to hearing, so I read it to her and let her fill in the blank. She filled it in with “way,” which proves that I read this particular story to her more often than Andrew.

Clearly, I won (of course I do have the advantage of being home with her all day long, so you shouldn’t feel too bad, Andrew (but you still lose)). But he said that my answer didn’t make sense since the book deals with scarves and mittens and things. His answer was by far the more logical choice. Obviously it was a cold-weather book.

I let him convince me and wrote “cold” down on the flap, but that didn’t seem long enough of a word because the text was supposed to be centered and with plain, old “cold,” it wasn’t.

Air, I wrote down next to cold.

And keeps my belly button out of the cold air. That kind of makes sense. But then I read over the text again.

Fingers…toes…ears…nose.
Elbows…knees…back…cold air?!

That just wasn’t working for me, but neither one of us had any idea of what to put in its place.

After putting Rachel to bed I read the book through to myself for the first time, ever. No stopping to lift up flaps, or to count fingers, or to discuss whether the author should have used the word shirt instead of coat (it really bugs Rachel that the word in the story is coat; she thinks it should be shirt; I kind of agree). I just read it through quickly and said the first word that came to my mind.

My blue jeans protect my knees.
My coat protects my back.
And keeps my belly button out of the…

Quick! What rhymes with “knees?” Breeze!

It’s a little embarrassing that it took us so long to find the right word for the story, truthfully. I mean, Andrew is halfway through his master’s degree and I have a bachelor’s degree. You’d think we would be able to think up a word the rhymes with knees. But, no. It took us weeks and weeks to figure this out.

I was actually rather elated when I had my “breeze” epiphany. Looking back, I’m not sure it was completely sane to be that excited over it. The things motherhood does to your brain…

A place for everything…and everything in its place

Sometimes when I’m finished making dinner my kitchen floor looks like this:

My washing machine looks like this:

 

And our “pantry” looks like this:

 

When I opened the door of the cabinet to get out a container for leftovers after dinner, I learned that our Tupperware breeds little plastic animals. Unfortunately those disappeared before I could obtain photographic evidence. I wonder where they’re hiding now.

I assure you this isn’t the way I originally intended my kitchen to be organized, but at least it keeps Rachel occupied while she’s underfoot.

Who's evolved?

It's barely been an hour since I finished writing that last post about going crazy and things are already looking up. We finished lunch (which was porridge, of course) washed the dishes, got ready for a nap, and only 4 temper tantrums were thrown. That means her temper tantrums were 15 minutes apart (instead of 5) for a whole hour! What rapture!

Sometimes when I feel like I'm going to snap at Rachel my conscience takes the form of Robin Williams playing the role of Teddy Roosevelt in Night at the Museum. He just pops right into my head and coaches,

"Who's evolved?"

"I am."

"Who's evolved?"

"I am."

When that happens I can usually push the unevolved, primitive-minded monkey inside of me back and let the evolved, more kind-hearted mommy do the talking, instead. Each time I am able to do that I pat myself on the back a little bit. Like today. I think I did a pretty good job today. I didn't yell even though I was just on the verge of snapping...

I'm telling you, having temper tantrums come right on top of each other is almost as bad as having contractions come right on top of each other. I'm not my most patient self when I'm in active labor. And I'm not my most patient self when I'm dealing with active temper tantrums all day long.

Sometimes I do yell.

The other day Rachel was following me around and wouldn't leave me alone. And while she followed she whined and whined and whined. I was trying to do laundry and get the house clean and it wasn't as if I hadn't played with her at all...because I had. Usually she likes to help with the laundry and cleaning the house...but this day she didn't and refused to do every little job I asked her to do.

I told Rachel that she had to go spend some quiet time in her room so that I could get some things done. She went berserk. And refused to stay in her room. So followed me around whining and screaming and crying and pulling...

"I can't deal with you right now, Rachel, I can't! So if you can't leave me alone, I'm going to have to leave you alone!" I yelled.

And then I went into my bedroom and closed the door. I didn't feel bad about leaving her "alone" because Andrew was in the kitchen doing the dishes. Apparently she felt bad about it because she didn't even try opening the door. Instead she wandered into the kitchen and cried to Daddy,

"My mommy so mad! My mommy close door! Has time out!"

He explained to her the purpose of "alone time" and that we all need it, even mommies, and that I would come out when I was feeling happy again, just how she can come out of her time outs when she's a happy girl.*

When I came out, she asked me,

"Your own time done?"

"Yes, it's done."

"Happy girl now?"

"Yes, I'm a happy girl."

"Sorry I'm screaming?"

"Yes, I'm sorry I screamed."

And then she gave me a hug. It's funny how much like me she sounded when she grilled me with those questions--almost word for word what I ask her before she's allowed to leave timeout.

Sometimes I wonder who's the monkey and who's the mommy? Who's evolved?

*We don't enforce a time limit for our time outs when Rachel's just throwing fits; we just send her to her room, kicking and screaming, and tell her she can come out when she's ready to be a happy girl again because we don't like listening to her scream and don't have to. Sometimes she comes out 2 seconds later, sometimes she doesn't come out for a half hour or so. But when she comes out, she's usually willing to cooperate or at least communicate about what's bothering her, without any screaming. If we send her to timeout for breaking a rule or hurting someone, we stick her in for 2 minutes, 1 minute for each year. Sometimes when she feels she needs a break, she'll stick herself in timeout.

Porridge and Patience

Andrew's not online, so I can't chat to him...but I can complain here...and I will...because, YIKES, Rachel is driving me nuts. Even though she "doesn't nap time," I think she will have to today.

We just finished reading The Magic Porridge Pot. As soon as I closed the book Rachel crumpled onto the floor and started wailing, "I eat porridge...so bad! I eat porridge...so bad!"

Have I mentioned she leaves out verbs a lot. Either the main verb or the auxiliary verb--apparently it doesn't matter which, she just leaves out verbs.

"You want to eat porridge, so bad?" I asked.

She climbed back onto my lap to snuggle. "Yeah...I eat porridge, so bad!" she wailed.

I told her about how oatmeal is porridge and so that's what I would be making if I were to make porridge.

"No not oatmeal! Porridge!"

I told her she could call it porridge, but it would still just end up being what she formerly knew as oatmeal. She was okay with that answer.

We went into the kitchen and I put some water in the water-boiler. While I did that I sang Pease Porridge Hot. That was a mistake because it sent Rachel into a tizzy again. She threw herself on the floor screaming,

"No not make peas! I don't peas! I eat porridge...so bad!"

By now the water has had more than ample time to boil and I'm sitting here typing about how frustrating being Rachel's mother has been for me the past few days while "taking deep, cleansing breaths" and trying to ignore her.

She's playing nicely (finally) and insisting that she's "Soooo happy!" every few seconds, even though she is still on the verge of crying.

She always insists she's happy when she's threatened with nap time. I think she'll probably end up having a nap after we eat our non-pease porridge, anyway, because I don't think I can handle one more fit today. I just can't. I have been dealing with fits every 5 minutes for the past several days and I'm going crazy. I need some more patience.

What's that saying? Grant me patience, but make it snappy!

What it is?

"What it is?" Rachel asked me the other day.

It looked like she was poking her eye, but she was stopping just short of that and rubbing her finger along her eyelashes.

"What it is?" She asked again and again and again. "What it is?"

"Those," I told her, "Are called eyelashes."

"Oh," she sighed, still rubbing her finger gently across them, "I like those!"

She still gets eyebrow and eyelash confused, but she's slowly working through the finer details of anatomy.

The other day, while I was still in bed and Andrew and Rachel were breakfasting together, Rachel informed Andrew that Baby Miriam was inside her tummy. They woke me up by "putting" Miriam back in Mommy's tummy. This may or may not have involved some tickling.

Later that same day, I told Rachel that I could feel the baby kicking and that she could come and feel her if she wanted to. Instead of coming over to me, Rachel put her hands on her own stomach.

"Yeah, baby's kicking," she said, "Right there."

My question is that if Rachel has taken over carrying the baby...why am I still tired?

Another thing Rachel has been saying lately is "I don't," as in, "I don't nap time" or "I don't bed time." She says it as matter-of-factly as if she's informing me she's just given up a nasty habit.

Oh, you don't nap time? Well, I'm trying to give it up, myself.

As far as I can figure she's using "nap time" and "bed time" as verbs...or she's leaving off the verb altogether and is sticking with the dummy "do" verb to express all her actions. With all the extra verbs we use in our sentences to help the main verbs make sense, I can't blame her for being a little bit confused. She's rather serious about don't-ing nap time, though. She tells it to me when she wakes up in the morning, every time I yawn, during lunch, while playing blocks...you know, just in case I forget that she doesn't nap time.

Last night she told Andrew, right before family prayer (and therefore, right before bedtime), "I don't bed time."

He looked at her and said, "Well, you don't verbs, either, but you still have to bed."

And then we laughed as only language nerds can.

We've been playing a lot of games recently. Rachel likes to play games. Playing games with her is interesting, but she usually does an okay job if the game she wants to play is a real game that we know about--like UNO or Princess Go Fish or something like that. Occasionally she'll ask to play "big, red game" and I have no idea what that is or means or how to play and any game I've tried to invent with the given criteria has been an absolute flop, involving tears and tantrums and everything.

While we're playing real games, however, she's a hoot. Every time she gets to play a card she says triumphantly,

"PLAY GAME!"

Every. Single. Time. It's hilarious.

Question: What do you get when you cross a baby doll and a t-rex?

Fact: A giraffe.

It's interesting to me to watch Rachel play. She's definitely a girl. Not that we didn't know that...

All of her little games involve families. Today she was playing with a little giraffe (that Aunt Nicky gave to her when she was born) and a tyrannosaurus-rex. The dinosaur was holding the giraffe and the giraffe was giving it kisses and saying, "I want Daddy!"

Then she threw both toys down and running out of the room (and away from me) saying, "I need Mommy!"

She came back with her baby doll, who acted as the giraffe's Mommy.

Watching her play teaches me so much about how she perceives life. For example, the mothers in all her scenarios sleep a whole lot, which bothers the baby toy to no end. It seems as soon as the Daddy enters the scene the Mommy finds an excuse to go to sleep and then the baby starts crying, "No sleeping, Mommy!"

Hmmmm...could that possibly be representative of our current situation?

As soon as Andrew comes home I usually do say something like, "I'm going to lie down for a few minutes."

I'm tired. What can I say?

The other night I went to bed at 7:00. Actually, Andrew sent me to bed after I sat down on the couch and promptly fell asleep. I think that's the first time I've ever gone to bed before Rachel her whole life long (excluding when she didn't have a sleep schedule at all, but she doesn't remember that) and she acted like her world was falling apart. Anyway...

It's fun to see her acting out families all the time. It seems to me that families are naturally important to girls. I know Bridget's daughter, Miriam, likes to act out families. When I was younger I always annoyed David when we played together because my cars could talk to each other and lived in families. His? Didn't. Neither did his dinosaurs. Weird, I know. I'm just glad he was patient enough to deal with family dynamics in play as well as in real life. Otherwise, who would I have played with?

I asked Andrew about this and he said that he didn't remember making his toys play in families.

I guess it doesn't matter what kind of toys you give to your children--dolls, dinosaurs, or cars--girls are going to play the role of nurturer and boys are going to play the role of hunter/gatherer.

This isn't to say that Rachel's dinosaurs don't suddenly turn predator and destroy everything in their path, because they do...it's just that most often they are peaceful father figures.

Independence Day 2009

We had hoped in vain to be able to go to the 4th of July party hosted by the American/Canadian embassies—apparently it’s this huge carnival-like thing. Unfortunately, you had to get tickets beforehand and in order to get tickets you had to present a passport (American or Canadian) and ours were still being held hostage at the Mugama.

Andrew begged to splurge on some corn on the cob, though, so we got some this week, along with a few handfuls of cherries (which are about as expensive as buying gold), and I even made some Jell-O.

We went out to dinner with my “cousin” JC, who flew out from France to visit his friend Maïte, who is here from Germany doing an internship.

While we were waiting for them in front of the Mugama, a couple came and sat on the bench next to ours. They had a very curious-looking container filled with a few centimeters of water and two little green blobs. Rachel had to investigate.

She quickly made friends enough with the man holding the container and ended up getting to watch his turtles the whole time we were waiting for JC and Maïte. She loved them.

He asked her if she knew which one was a boy and which was a girl.

“Yes!” she said.

“Okay, which one?” he asked (he spoke English very well).

“That one,” she said, pointing to the bigger one.

“Is that the boy or the girl?” he asked.

“Boy turtle!” she declared.

“That’s right! She’s a turtle-expert already!” he said.

Either that or it was a lucky guess. It was nice to have such great entertainment for Rachel while we were waiting. Her favorite was when the little one (the girl) would climb onto the back of the big one (the boy) and he’d walk around the tank, taking her for a ride. Rachel thought that was hilarious.

Her least favorite part was when they’d climb up the side of the container. She was afraid they were going to get her, even though they were each no bigger than a silver dollar and weren’t even close to being able to climb out of their habitat.

She found a little stuffed turtle in her toy box and she’s been playing with it all day today. It’s funny how she remembers about toys that have lain so long forgotten at the bottom of the toy box one day and they suddenly become her favorite and most entertaining toy.

We were a little worried about meeting JC because this was really our first time meeting. We weren’t sure if he would recognize us. But then I remembered that we’re pretty obviously American and all three of us are considered “blond” here. We’d be pretty easy to spot. And we were.

JC found us right away and came up to introduce himself and Maïte. Then we all walked to Tabouleh together.

Tabouleh is a fabulous restaurant that serves the most delicious Levantine food. We love it. The food is good and the atmosphere is a perfect mix of old Bedouin and more modern Arab art; more likely than not Um Kolthum or Fayrouz will be singing a song in the background. It’s frequented by foreigners and locals alike. It’s just a great place.

I think the only Egyptian food it serves is foul. Unfortunately, Egyptian food isn’t that great. Levantine cuisine, on the other hand, is fabulous (as long as you stay away from brain sandwiches and things like that).

We ordered a bunch of appetizers to share: hummus, falafel and tahina, fatoush, baba ganoush, and some grilled cheese. Their hummus is the absolute best. Our baba ganoush never came…instead we got some mystery dish, which was also good.

Andrew and I shared a shish tawook and JC and Maïte shared some shwerma. So good!

It was fun to get to know JC a little bit, and to visit with Maïte, too. She has a friend who is doing an internship with the head of antiquities, Zahi Hawas, and she got permission to take both JC and Maïte on a VIP tour of the pyramids. It sounded amazing! They got to go inside and see chambers that are usually closed to the public; they even got to go right into the sphinx compound.

I’m a little jealous, but I’ll survive.

We only took a few pictures of the evening. The flash on our camera was a little hyper-active for some reason and every picture we took was at the risk of going permanently blind. Therefore every picture is also a little bit unflattering, but here’s an okay one of me, Rachel, and JC.

Maïte invited us to join them on a felucca ride after dinner, but it was already 9:00 PM! We would have loved to go, but Rachel didn’t get to bed until after 10:30 as it was. Had we gone on the felucca ride it would have been midnight, if not later!

Instead we said our goodbyes and took the metro home.

We had to do sparklers when we got home, because Rachel knew we had them and wouldn’t let us forget that we promised we could play with them. She’s so good at remembering things like that—too good, really. So we bid the 4th of July farewell by using up a package of sparklers.

Rachel was really excited about it until she learned what they did.

Once she saw that these were no ordinary candles, she screamed and hightailed it out of there as fast as she could so that she could watch from a safer (father) distance.

After a few singles, we decided that bedtime would come faster if we used the package of sparklers up faster. That way we wouldn’t have to lie when we said they were all gone to get Rachel to go back inside. Andrew started lighting three and four at a time.

Rachel did eventually get brave enough to try to light her sparkler—she had been holding one the whole time, but wouldn’t ever let us light it. She never actually got close enough to light it herself, but at least she was brave enough to try.

In the end holding a sparkler was still much too scary and so I had to hold it for her.

It was fun to get to see a few “fireworks” this July—we’ll be seeing a lot more during Ramadan, I’m sure.

Happy Independence Day!