I need to be more specific

I was clearing off the table in preparation for dinner this evening and Rachel was following me around, just begging to be put to work. I could tell. Mothers can always tell.

So I handed her an empty water bottle. We store tap water in our empty water bottles, just in case the water gets shut off. We've had several bad water experiences and we're a little paranoid, so thanks to the ingenious nature of my mother-in-law, we now have boxes and boxes of water in our spare bathroom. I'm not sure I would ever cook with it or drink it (we have boxes of potable water in our kitchen for such purposes) but it's great for flushing the toilet when you run out of water. I think that's all it will ever be used for...I'm not sure I'd even shower with it...not after it's been sitting unpreserved for months in our spare bathroom.

When David was here visiting, he grabbed a water bottle from the bathroom instead of from the kitchen when we left to go to Luxor. We got to Luxor and he's like, "Wow. Do all these bottles get filled from the same spring?"

"Yes..." I answered, "Why?"

"Because this bottle of water tastes like dirt. So weird because the other bottle that we drank at your house tasted fine."

"Did you get that bottle from the bathroom or the kitchen?" I asked.

"The bathroom, why?"

"That's tap water."

Luckily he had only drunk a little bit of it (because it tasted bad); apparently he had jet-lagged his way through our "drinkable water is in the kitchen; tap water is in the bathroom" lecture that all of our house guests go through.

Anyway...I handed Rachel an empty water bottle, which she knows goes in the spare bathroom, and I said, "Here, Rachel, will you do something with this for me?"

"Yeah!" she agreed pleasantly. Then she hit herself on the head, twice, with the bottle and threw it across the room.

I definitely need to be more specific.

Our day

Buttoning up the snaps on Rachel's onesie this morning was more difficult than usual. Not only because she was walking around--that's normal--but because when I was halfway finished snapping the final snap she threw a fit. Not just any fit, either. A royal fit. The kind that involves kicking and screaming and thrashing about on the floor. It lasted for about 10 minutes.

"Why don't you just tell me what's wrong?" I finally suggested.

I should have suggested that 10 minutes ago because Rachel thought it was a great suggestion and took it for all it was worth. She jumped off the floor and ran to her armoire.

"Dress!" she shouted, pointing emphatically and unambiguously to the part of her closet that houses her dresses.

"You want to wear a dress?" I asked just in case, because sometimes what I think is the obvious answer is the wrong answer.

"Uh...yessss!" she shouted, again. We're still working on inside voices.

I opened the door and asked, "Which dress would you like to wear today?"

Rachel pointed to the flounciest, frilliest, fanciest dress in her whole closet.

"That," I said, "Is definitely not a play dress."

Technically Rachel only has one play dress. She's worn it for the past 3 days and I finally put it in the laundry basket because you can only rewear things so many times before they must be washed. So apparently we need more play dresses.

I contemplated long and hard before deciding which dress could be converted from a Sunday/Friday dress to an everyday dress. I love her dresses and didn't really want any of them to end up in the sandbox (which is where we were headed for the day). And then I spotted it. Her 12 month purple dress from Costco. It's covered in butterflies and is cuter than cute, but has always been way too wide for her. Even now that she's 20 months old and the dress barely covers her bottom, it is always slipping off her shoulders.

"How about this one?" I asked.

Rachel thought that was a good choice and we finished getting ready to go without any further delays. We were 10 minutes late for playgroup--I need to remember to schedule time for wild temper tantrums--but it was a lot of fun today. Usually Maadi House is empty on Wednesdays but since tomorrow is a holiday and today was, apparently, an early-out day at CAC, the place was completely overrun with children.

We first met up with Fredricka, one of Melissa's friends from Germany, and her baby, Yosef. We sat at a table with a woman we didn't know because every other table was full. Her name is Mona, she's from Sudan, and she has a cute baby Yosef's age, named Victor. And that's one of the things I like about living here. There are always interesting people to meet. How do you run out of questions when you're talking to someone from Sudan and Germany? You just can't.

Then Melissa showed up, and Rachel and Finn took off to play at the playground together. Rachel got mud all over the front of her dress, so I was very happy we didn't choose the frilly, fancy one.

While we were all talking we were joined by Melissa's friend Jenny, who recently had a baby and who was then joined by her friend who also recently had a baby. There were babies everywhere. The place was crawling with kids.

It was very exciting for Rachel. Usually there's just Finn to play with. Finn's great, and all, but having this many children around was absolutely fascinating for her.

We had a quick lunch and Rachel squirted tomato down the front of her dress, making me doubly glad that we'd picked a well-worn and misshapen dress. It will probably be a full-time play dress now. After that, we headed to the pool.

Rachel's always so excited to go to the pool and always makes a run for it the minute she's inside the gate. It makes the lifeguards rather nervous. I'd prefer her not to jump in the pool with her clothes on, but I know that she will be fine floundering around until she reaches the side of the pool or the stairs. She's an absolute water baby.

I just wish she wasn't so independent all the time. She wants to be at the wall the whole time now so that she can be in charge of where she goes. I kept trying to get her away from the wall so we could play some games but she kept screaming at me, so eventually I put her back at the wall and let her do her thing. She was twisting around, blowing bubbles, kicking her legs, and having a great time. I was talking with Melissa and Fredricka, and while I was still watching Rachel I wasn't paying great attention to her. She was between me and Melissa and I had her completely in my line of sight. And then she disappeared and I kind of freaked out and spun around, searching wildly under the water for her.

"Eh...tuh...tee! Bemps!" was the only warning I got before she dropped into my arms from the sky.

Apparently she's can get out of the pool in under 2 seconds, by herself. Apparenlty she can say, "One, two, three...Bounce!" (Or she could have said jump...it's kind of a mix of both). Apparently she was ready to play.

We had a great time once she had warmed up to the water. And, on a not-completely-unrelated note, Andrew came home from school while we were out and cleaned the entire house. He's probably the best husband, ever. Sorry ladies, he's mine.

Rachel’s Sky

Yesterday Rachel and I were playing some games online. First we played Pooh’s Playful Kite Flight on Disney Playhouse. Then we played Tigger’s Shadow Shapes. Rachel liked both those games but for some reason the games take a whole lot longer to load at Disney Playhouse than they do on Sesame Street so we headed back over to Sesame Street to play with Elmo.

I kind of like the Sesame Street website because they have a little box called “Parent Tips” in which they put tips for parents, go figure. They change every few minutes while you’re playing juvenile games with a squirmy toddler on your lap, trying to fill the last half hour before Daddy comes home. Sometimes the tips are really lame like, “Elmo’s birthday is February 3rd. He’s an Aquarius.”

Question: How is that a tip?

Fact: That’s not a tip. It’s just lame.

Some of the tips are actually useful—like how to take the game you’re playing and create other non-computer activities out of it, or how to interact better with your child while you’re playing the game.

“When you’re finished playing this game do __________ with your child,” or “Talk about ________ while you’re playing this game.”

Those are the tips that I like because usually when we play the computer together it’s because I’m at my wit’s end and completely out of ideas.

So, we were playing Elmo’s Cloud Game yesterday and a tip popped up that suggested making clouds on paper with cotton balls and I was like, “Brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that?” I should have thought about that because I think every child does that at some point in their life. I know I have. But, as I said, I was at my wit’s end and was simply trying to “make it” until Andrew got home, not be a fun, creative mother.

When we finished playing the game I told Rachel that we were going to make a “real” sky picture, as opposed to one on the computer screen, so that we could show it to Daddy when he got home.

We hunted around the house until I found our bag of cotton, left over from the time Andrew fell off the horse and scraped up his knuckles and arms, some glue, a piece of paper, crayons, and a yellow muffin cup (which is actually the cup between the cups of the foil muffin cups—does anyone know if you can actually use those as liners?). Then we got to work coloring our sky blue.

“We have to color the whole page blue!” I told Rachel, who had the crayon.

“Yeah!” she agreed, very excited, and made a few strokes on the page. Then she shoved the crayon in my hand, “Mama col-col!”

Apparently coloring an entire page blue was an overwhelming task for Rachel, so I took over. It’s times like this when I wish we had construction paper. Then we could just get a blue piece of paper out instead of wasting our time (and crayons) coloring an entire sheet of paper blue. Oh, well. It didn’t take too long.

Rachel added some lovely sunset tones and stuck her sun very low in the sky. I thought that was very fitting. Personally, I usually put my suns in the top right hand corner but she chose to put her sun near her red scribbles. Very creative.

I made the mistake of having her put the glue on the muffin cup and placing that first. I should have had her put the glue right on the paper because once I gave her a bit of cotton, she immediately tried to put glue on the cotton ball, and since we were using a glue pen, that wasn’t going to work. So I had to re-teach her how to use glue so she could stick the cotton onto the paper instead of sticking the cotton balls to the glue stick.

She figured it out eventually and managed to get glue all over her hands, of course. She had a great time.

Me help me!

Independence always has its costs. Sometimes Rachel's independence seems to cost more on my end than it does on hers. She just loves to think she can do everything by herself.

The other day she went potty on her little potty...and emptied it into the big potty before I could make it in there to stop her. Luckily she didn't spill a drop. It isn't that I don't appreciate her helpful attitude. I merely happen to think that she isn't big enough to do some of the things she thinks she's big enough to do.

This morning she got a box of cereal from the table. I didn't even notice what she was doing until I heard the unambiguous sound of small, crunchy somethings spilling all over the floor.

I found her, box in hand, standing over a big mess. She wasn't intending on making a mess and had brought a bowl to catch the cereal. It, however, was completely buried under an anthill of cereal. We literally had to dig it out.

"Oh, Rachel..." I sighed.

"Yay!" she squealed, "Me hep me!"

"You did, didn't you? Now can you help you pick up all the cereal you spilled?"

"Yay!" she squealed again, "Me hep me!"

She was such a good helper to herself and picked up every last piece of cereal, all by herself. She was eating floor-cereal for snacks all day, too. Is it bad that I'm tired just thinking about tomorrow?

Ball down

Somehow between today and the last time we tried to play Ring Around the Rosie for Family Home Evening a few months ago Rachel caught on to how the game works. After we tried playing it with her a few weeks in a row, we simply gave up. She would hold onto our hands, lift up her feet, and let us spin her around, which is far less fun than playing the game for real.

Tonight, however, we were at the Lewis's and Rachel entered the room spinning in circles and singing "Asha, asha, asha, asha!" Then she tripped and on her way to the ground exclaimed, "Ball! Down!"

Then she got back up and did it over again. While she was spinning this next time, Megan walked into the room and announced, "Just so you know, Rachel is playing Ring Around the Rosie."

My personal theory is that Megan taught Rachel how to play (with the help of Sam) because the next thing I knew, Rachel was holding my hands, spinning me around in circles and singing, "Asha, asha, asha, asha, asha, asha, asha! Ball! Down!" and she's never done that before. Plus, Megan, Sam, and Rachel were in Sam's room for quite a long time and every once in a while someone would come out crying, get comforted, and go back in for more.

That behavior is easily explained by the "we all fall down" part of the rhyme. Some of these nursery rhyme games end up being played a little more violently than originally intended, if I remember correctly from my childhood.

So, either Megan taught her or she learned it in nursery, because I had given up teaching her that game and wasn't planning on trying again for a while still. How nice that someone else taught her for me! And it's super useful, too, because she has no qualms playing it by herself. She prefers, of course, to have someone spinning with her--falling down into a big heap of children is much more fun than bonking your head on the floor by yourself--but she has no problem spinning around in circles singing "Asha!" until she loses her balance and crashes all by herself, at which point she yells, "Ball! Down!" Pooh is also an optimal companion (for pretty much anything).

We spent several minutes playing Ring Around the Rosie before family prayer this evening. It was fun...now that Rachel knows how to play.

Flashback Friday: Earthquake, part II

My mind is on the fritz today and I can't think of anything to write at all. So I will follow up with my cousin's side of the earthquake story, told from my point of view of how I remember her telling it to me.

As I mentioned in the previous earthquake post, Mindy had just had her baby and we (my sister, my mom, and my friend Annik) were down in California visiting. We only stayed with Mindy for 1 night because her house is small for that much company. Instead we stayed with my aunt who lives about an hour south of my cousin (they aren't mother-daughter, by the way).

The morning the earthquake hit, everyone in my cousin's house was sound asleep. Finally.

They had had a rough night. Jim ended up sleeping in the living room on the La-Z Boy with Kali on his chest. Mindy ended up sleeping on two inches of king-size-bed space that Jacob, their then two-year-old, had grudgingly allowed her. No one in their house slept very well and they were all looking forward to sleeping in a great deal that Sunday morning.

But then the earthquake started, and being an hour north of where we were put them closer to the epicenter, so their shaking wasn't quite as mild as ours was. Instead of gently waking them, as it did me, it jolted Mindy and Jim awake.

Jim sprang up from the chair in the living room and ran down the hall to the bedroom where Mindy was wildly bouncing across the bed in pursuit of Jacob.

"Get in the doorway now!" Jim ordered his little family and Jacob and Mindy scrambled over to join Jim in the doorway.

That's when she realized their family was not entirely accounted for. She glowered at Jim.

"What did you do with my baby?!" she growled, as only a new mother can, while boring into him with his eyes.

All Jim could do in response was stammer. Up until that minute he had completely forgotten that he had been asleep with newborn Kali on his chest. Mindy remembered, however, and it was, from what I hear, a pretty tense wait until the earthquake was over.

When the shaking had stopped and they were able to move without being thrown around, Mindy and Jim rushed into the living room to search for Kali, who was no where to be seen. They found her, at last, sweetly sleeping on a pillow wedged between the chair, the couch, and the wall. She had flown off Jim's chest when he jumped up and landed there; she didn't have a scratch on her.

Considering they were in the middle of an earthquake and were hit fairly hard (Mindy showed us the crack that appeared in their ceiling due to the quaking) it was a good thing Kali landed where she did. Had anything fallen in her direction she would have been very well protected.

Still, I can't imagine the panic Mindy went through when she noticed Jim didn't have Kali...or the panic Jim felt when Mindy pointed it out to him. This story still makes me giggle.

Ish, ish, ish!

We were over at the Masons tonight and Rachel started going through my purse. She wanted a snack and I didn't have one. I told her that, but I guess she had to look for herself.

"Ish? Ish? Ish?" she asked.

I didn't know what she meant. So I told her, "I don't know what you mean..."

"Ish?!" she repeated, slightly exasperated.

"I still don't know what you mean." I said.

She took the biggest breath she could and then heaved a huge sigh. Rolling her eyes slightly she flicked her tongue in and out of her mouth.

"Blu-du-blu-du-blu-du?" she clarified.

That is what a fish says. At least, it's what Rachel thinks a fish says. How sad that she's started to say "ish" instead of "blu-du-blu-du-blu-du" because "blu-du-blu-du-blu-du" is so much cooler. I was hoping she'd hold onto that until kindergarten, at least. That would really have given her something to talk to her therapist about!

PAA

We’ve been in a bit of a rut recently, Rachel and I. Somehow the girl got hooked on Winnie the Pooh and I couldn’t think of any activities exciting enough to draw her away from the television. Suggestions of alternative activities were consistently met with a temper tantrum on Rachel’s part, so Pooh would go back on and peace would be restored.

In essence, I became her enabler. I didn’t notice we had a problem until I realized we were watching Winnie the Pooh at least 5 times a day and had begun communicating solely by quoting Winnie the Pooh.

Something had to change. To Rachel, Pooh was everything. I would mention it was time for lunch and Rachel would respond, “Honey?” She now thinks, thank you Milne and Disney, that tigers bounce and can do Tigger’s “Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo!” She can also do Pooh’s “In the mood for food” dance.

Our DVD has a little scratch on it and Pooh always gets stuck at his thinking spot, which is an okay place to get stuck since it makes him seem much more thoughtful than he probably is. Whenever we get to this part Rachel almost starts crying and says, “Pooh. ‘Tuck!” She also almost cries during several “scary” parts in the movie. And whenever the ending song comes on.

She’s addicted. Something had to be done.

So we quickly enrolled her in our homegrown Pooh Addicts Anonymous program. (PAA for short.) She’s the sole member.

This morning marked our first successful intervention. As per the usual, Rachel woke up and came out of her bedroom toting her Pooh Bear. (Oh, yes, she has her own Pooh Bear. She saw him at the store and instantly fell in love. We had to buy him, if you know what I mean.) She parked herself in front of the television, pointed at it, and demanded, “Pooh!”

I tried to convince her to eat breakfast at the table first. She threw a fit. I turned Pooh on.

I told you. I’m her enabler. I’m almost as bad as she is.

Half-way through the first short, I decided that she would probably like to play with play dough, so I looked up a recipe and halved it (I remembered how much extra dough we had when we made salt dough ornaments at Christmas time).

While I was in the kitchen, Rachel wandered in. She loves to “hep” me bake and wanted a turn stirring. After I warned her that what we were making was not for eating I let her have a turn. We mixed up some beautiful dough and then went to the table to play with it.

I took off her clothes because I was going to let her mix food coloring into the dough and I prefer to keep food coloring off her clothes.

She had a great time. We played with the dough for at least two hours straight, which is an amazing amount of time for a 19 month old to do anything. She thought mixing the colors was fun, but was much better at ripping the dough apart than anything else. She couldn’t figure out how to get it to go back together again, so I spent most of my time building things for her to destroy.

We made shapes and animals, which she thought was pretty neat. Her favorite, however, was the fake fruit that I made. She recognized it right away.

“Nana!” she squealed and then, completely disregarding our previous conversation about how the dough was not edible, shoved it in her mouth.

She spat the banana out and started stroking her tongue with her hands to get the awful taste off…unfortunately, her hands were also covered in salt residue and it didn’t help at all. That was the only real bite she took; she got rather good at “fake” biting after that. We should have had her experiment fake biting with play dough before we had her fake bite her fingers. She’s so good at fake biting now—she makes a chomping noise. It’s awesome.

Rachel also liked when I showed her how to poke holes in balls of dough. She thought this was hilarious. We started out making eyes on a head, but then it turned into a big ball of dough covered in holes. “EYE!” she’d yell while gouging at the dough. One day I hope she’ll get over her eye-gouging fascination. She’s been at it since she could move…

We also played a game where we flattened out balls of dough and then used them as drum pads. She had a blast with that!

That game morphed into a color-matching game. I kept a little ball of each color and gave Rachel all four “drums,” then I’d hold up a ball of dough, call out the color, and she’d try to hit the right drum. It was like “Rockband,” baby-style.*

After we were finished with that, we began mashing the play dough with different body parts: elbows, wrists, thumbs, chins, noses, etc. Rachel is the one who thought of that game.

She spent so much time facedown in the dough while she was pushing it with her nose. I would have worried she had drowned on her play dough had she not been giggling the whole time.

Then Rachel came up with a bit of dough that she insisted was a potty. She then requested that I make a baby for her. She has this odd fascination of toilet training her dolls and toys. She loves to take things “pah-pah.” I deny that it has anything to do with the fact that I ask her 2000+ times a day if she needs to go potty. It’s probably just a normal thing kids her age go through, right? (Or it might stem from the fact that I ask her 2000+ times a day if she needs to go potty.)

So I made a baby for her to play with. I thought for sure the first thing she would do would be to pretend to make it go potty. I was wrong. The first thing she did was take a pretend bite out of it.

Maybe the baby looked a little too much like a banana. I told her that we don’t bite people, even if they look like bananas. She kissed the baby better…and then made it use the potty. And then she entered into her own world of mother-of-yellow-blue-and-green-triplets. It was quite entertaining to watch.

The pink blob was the bed, she informed me when I asked her if she wanted me to make a pink baby for her as well. She put each baby to bed by squishing the baby between her head and her hand, signing “sleep,” before putting it on the pink blob. I’m not sure what all happened after that because she was, as I mentioned, completely in her own world. I left her unattended.

There was a lot of waa-ing and shushing going on and I let her play until she started crying for real. She had managed to rip off the heads of all three babies. I’m not sure how, but she must have done it one by one. It was really upsetting her, so I told her that it was time to clean up for lunch, anyway.

She cried the whole time we were cleaning up…and only asked to watch Pooh one more time today…and when we were making dinner she made a mad dash for the refrigerator when it was open and grabbed the dough.

We may have cured the Pooh addiction, but Rachel is still a member of the PAA. The full title has been changed to Play (dough) Addicts Anonymous. A much healthier addiction, in my opinion—it helps exercise her imagination.

*I’ve actually never played Rockband, so maybe it’s not like it at all. It was kind of like Guitar Hero, though, which I assume is kind of like Rockband.

Bloody fingers

Disclaimer: No blood was shed for the purposes of this blog post.

After dinner, Andrew showed a "magic trick" to Rachel where he "bit" off his fingers one by one until they were all gone. Then he coughed them "back" up again, making his hand whole. Rachel thought it was hilarious and was laughing up a storm...

...Until she attempted the trick herself by opening wide her little mouth, sticking her index finger inside, and clamping down as hard as she could.

We thought that after the initial impact she'd stop trying to bite her finger off. But she didn't. Instead she started grinding her teeth back and forth, with her finger still wedged between them. She was grunting with effort when we decided we should intervene.

"Rachel, no, stop! Daddy was only pretending!"

She looked at me, took her finger out of her mouth, and started howling. Blubbering about her vexation she pantomimed that all she wanted to do was bite her finger off. I told her again that Daddy had only pretended to bite his finger off, but she wasn't so sure so Andrew showed her the magic behind the magic.

"Look, Rachel, when it looks to you like Daddy is biting his finger off, he's really just folding it down so you can't see it."

Andrew has amazingly double-jointed hands and can do virtually anything with them. I can't do the magic trick because my fingers aren't that flexible. Andrew showed her the magic trick again, only this time made sure that she knew where the fingers were the whole time.

"And that's how Daddy does it," he said, "Can you do that?"

Again Rachel opened her mouth as wide as it would go and stuck her finger inside. This time we managed to shock her into stopping before she'd even bit down.

"No! Rachel, no!"

Tears started welling up in her eyes and her bottom lip started quivering. She said a few nonsensical things and then burst into tears once more.

"You break it, you fix it," I declared, and left Andrew to tend to our screaming child who was, fittingly, covered in tomato sauce.

I wonder if Andrew's finger-biting-off trick would have been more realistic if he also had tomato sauce covering his hands. We'll have to try that next time.

We now have television

Our only connection to the outside world for the past six months has been the internet, and that has been shoddy, at best, although it’s been a little better lately. We had television for the first month, or so, until it died one day. That wasn’t really a problem for us since we don’t watch television. The only show we regularly watch is The Office and we do that through iTunes because The Office doesn’t show in Egypt.

The first time we wished we had television was for the elections in November. And then the inauguration. And several other important national and world events that we didn’t watch.

Our landlord tried to fix our television so that we could watch the election. He thought it would be important to us to see who won. So he showed up to our apartment at around 10 PM on November 4th, took our television up to the roof, and had us feed some random wires through our open window.

He was up there for hours while we stood guard by our open window, watching out for Templeton (our rat, who has since disappeared) to make sure he didn’t come inside.

We didn’t get to watch the elections; and our landlord didn’t bother trying to fix our television ever again. Although Egyptians live and die by their television screens—and even cardboard houses and squatters in the City of the Dead have satellite dishes—we had to pay our full rent and not have a working television.

Again, it’s basically a non-issue since we don’t really watch television (obviously, since we haven’t had it since we moved to Egypt, basically), but it’s supposed to be included in our rent and sometimes—like when there is a bombing in Cairo—we want to be able to turn on the news so that we know what is going on.

Hatim, our landlord, eventually gave us the number for the satellite guy and left the key to the roof so that we could let the guy up there to fix it. Andrew called him a couple of times, but he never called back. Finally, last Sunday, we got a call from the satellite guy saying that he was on his way. Good thing he made an appointment.

Rachel and I were both napping when the satellite guy arrived and Andrew took him up on the roof. When I woke up, Andrew was still on the roof so I had no idea where he was. The television had been moved, though, so I figured out where he was and decided to make dinner instead of bothering them. I had just put a pot of water on the stove to boil when Andrew came back inside. He was yelling Arabic at someone on the roof, and that man was shouting instructions back at Andrew.

They were throwing wires down from the roof and feeding them through our window, again. At least we didn’t have to worry about Templeton this time, but there were other worries…like the fact that the ends of the wires were completely exposed and had no plug on them. I wondered how we were going to plug in the cord. But I didn’t need to wonder for long. Once Andrew caught the cord he marched over to the outlet and jammed the wires into the socket.

“Do you have power?” he yelled in Arabic and then, having received a positive response, turned to me. “Do you want to just hold these for a minute?”

Of course I do. Of course I want to hold live wires into an electrical socket while our 1.5 year old baby is watching me. It’s setting the perfect example for her, don’t you think?

That “minute” turned into “a few minutes,” which turned into a “where-the-heck-is-he?” I didn’t mind it too much until Rachel announced that she had to go potty and I turned to look at her, which jostled the wires, which caused them to start sparking, which caused me to freak out.

I eventually convinced Rachel that, since she didn’t have any pants on (thank goodness), she could go to the potty by herself, despite all the tugging on me and her many pleas of “Hep me!” and “Mama go!”

She went by herself in the correct place (thank goodness) and then I spent the rest of my time as a “plug” trying to get Rachel to stay away from the sparks, while managing, miraculously, not to get electrocuted, myself.

Our old dish

Meanwhile, back on the roof, Andrew was having his first lesson in masonry. Apparently our old satellite was so ancient and rusty and bent that it wouldn’t work anymore, so the satellite guy went out to get a new one.

Our roof is so full of construction materials (bricks, window panes, etc.) and other satellite dishes that it took them a while to decide where to put the new one. The satellite man decided to put it in a spot that looks like will one day end up being someone’s new kitchen. Andrew asked him if that was going to be a problem.

“Oh, no,” he assured Andrew, “This floor won’t be finished for years!”

That is probably true. If you’ve seen the way construction works here, it’s very easy to believe that it could take several years to build a new storey onto a building, as is the case with our building.

We don’t have an elevator so everything is carried up the stairs by a few workers. Bricks are usually delivered between 11 PM and 1 AM, (which is the perfect bedtime lullaby, let me tell you) and then sit there, in front of our main entrance, until around 6 AM when the workers show up to carry them up the stairs. They load piles of brick on old cardboard boxes, heft those onto their shoulders, and trudge up the stairs. The same thing happens with bags up cement mix and piles of sand.

It’s a pretty slow process. Granted, these men carry in one trip what would take me 5 or 6 (or more). But still…it’s a long and slow process. They’ve been doing it the whole time we’ve lived here, and probably before that, too, and there’s not really much to speak of up on the roof that’s been built up.

So it’s probably okay that our new satellite is in someone’s future kitchen. Our old one was in their living room and our neighbours each have one as well. In short, the whole roof is full of satellite dishes. I don’t know what they’re going to do when the time comes to actually finish the little renovation project they have going on.

Anyway, the satellite guy wanted Andrew’s help installing the new satellite. They mixed cement using a bag of cement the satellite guy brought with him (and some other random ingredients from the construction hud on the roof) and made a big pile of it, and then they stuck the satellite dish in the middle. Unfortunately, there was too much satellite and not enough cement. Fortunately, the satellite guy is a quick thinker and he thought to put some bricks around the base of the dish to help prop it up.

I think they did a great job. It looks very classy.

All the other dishes have nice, smoothly shaped cones of cement holding theirs up. Our stand is more 20th century impressionist stand. It really sets us apart from our neighbours. I think they’ll all be jealous.

When I asked Andrew how much this cost he prefaced his answer by telling me that Hatim was going to reimburse us and then said it was 200 LE for the dish and 150 LE for labour (about 62 USD, total).

That’s really not very expensive, I don’t think, but, all things considered, shouldn’t we have gotten at least half of the labour money? After all, I spent the evening holding wires into an electrical socket and Andrew learned how to mix cement. Exactly what did the satellite guy do?