Lotion!

It has been one month since we left the United States, so today I'll confess that I didn't pack lotion. I packed a lot of things, but I didn't pack any lotion. In fact, I gave away a few perfectly good brand new bottles of lotion that had been sitting in our storage room because I didn't want to pack them all the way here. 

Why?

Because they have lotion here. 

Obviously. 

I packed an extra bottle of hair detangling spray because I wasn't sure that they would have that here (I don't know why), but we found some right there beside the children's shampoo (which is in the baby aisle), and it was a good thing, too, because that extra bottle of detangling spray I packed broke on the way over here. 

Which is precisely what I envisioned a bottle of lotion doing.

So I didn't pack any because for sure, for sure they have lotion here, right?

Apparently wrong. 

Rachel's Alberta roadtrip

Rachel and Auntie Josie decided to take advantage of the Labour Day weekend and drove up to Alberta to do some visiting before Rachel leaves on her mission. They drove up to Rexburg on Wednesday after work and spent the night at my cousin Elizabeth's house, and then made it all the way to Grassy Lake to my cousin Eric's house on Thursday. 

I'm so proud of them for taking this road trip! What cool people! 

Earlier in the summer Rachel took a solo roadtrip from Atlanta to Tallahassee, which she was terribly afraid to do, but which she said kind of changed her brain. She managed that drive all on her own, and she managed the drive up to Alberta with Auntie Josie just fine (she said it was even better than all the city traffic in Atlanta/Tallahassee areas....and I believe that...I quite like driving in the middle of nowhere compared to city driving). 

Here's Rachel, having just made it to Alberta:

Crystal Walkway and Hala Summer Contests

Andrew got his residency card and that mean's we're apartment shopping.

Today we looked at some apartments at The Pearl. 

Really I wanted to look at this great apartment right off the Msheireb metro station...but alas it was snapped up before we even got to look at it. But our real estate agent suggested some other apartments at The Pearl.

We looked at one and were not very impressed. I just don't see how it could possibly be as big as they were telling me it was (or perhaps it was simply that a lot of the square metreage was a terrible use of space) and it was rather...run down...though we were still considering it. 

And then he took us to another place that was incredible. It was a little over our housing allowance (meaning we'll have to pay some of our rent out-of-pocket), but for its size and location it feels worth it. Plus, most utilities are included (whereas at the other place no utilities were included). Plus, we get a percentage off because of our corporate connections...so...it all...seemed to even out in the end. 

Eventually we won't need a place quite this big, but with five kids (all homeschooling), it feels necessary. 

We wish the pool were bigger, but it also comes with access to the beach and a long, air-conditioned pedestrian promenade called The Crystal Walkway, which looks beautiful enough in the daytime...but our real estate agent said we had to return in the evening to see it all lit up:

Church City, license plates, and little things

Church City is a designated quarter of the city where churches with official status can rent out buildings for their congregants to worship in. Our friends attend the Anglican church, which shares its facilities with the Seventh Day Adventists. There's a Catholic church as well as a Coptic church, Greek Orthodox...and a handful of other officially recognized religions. And they all meet in that quarter. 

Privilege

We went to IHOP the other day, which was a bit of an extravagance...but was also really good...so I suppose it was somewhat worth it. Phoebe got a funfetti pancake and was thrilled to pieces.

She got ridiculously sticky eating it, so Andrew grabbed one of the "moist towelette" packs the waiter had left on the table and offered to clean her up a bit. 

"What is this?" she asked. 

"It's a moist towelette," Andrew told her.

"Huh," she observed. "It's not even hot! The ones on the airplane are hot!"

We were given hot towels to freshen up with at meals and at waking time on the plane. Miss Fancy Pants thinks that should be normal, apparently.

Ella's chair and cutting with scissors

As promised, here are some pictures of the adaptive chair Phoebe made to help Ella be able to join her friends at the table. 

Phoebe-isms

Today Phoebe was running into our bedroom at top speed—which requires multiple turns down a hallway and a brave dash past the scary full-sized portrait of a falconer—when she "stabbed" her toe. 

"I stabbed my toe!" she shrilly announced. 

"You did what?" I asked. 

"Stabbed my toe!" she repeated. "I stabbed it right into the wall!"

She meant "stubbed."

*****

Every time we get on an escalator—which is a lot these days—Phoebe makes some remark about getting to ride the "excavator."

She also saw a sign at the airport in Turkey that used the word "travelator" for "moving sidewalks" and since that was her first exposure to them, that is 100% what they are to her. She will not be convinced otherwise. 

As I was saying...

"I won't say that the call to prayer is ever disappointing to hear, but we've mostly heard it played quietly over the speakers in the mall or the library, almost like soft background music. We had high hopes that the muezzin at the suq would really belt it out...the way they did in Cairo when we lived there...but it ended up being much quieter than we expected (which was a little disappointing)..."

—me, like two days ago 

This evening was a bit of a circus with Andrew staying late on campus, me having meetings at 4:00 and 7:30, Miriam having a YW activity in one location (7:00), and Benjamin having a YM activity in another location (also at 7:00). 

After my meeting, Miriam and I heated up some boxed soup from France (so fancy) and we quickly ate dinner. And then I took all the kids on the metro down to the Corniche station and then walked Benjamin down to the soccer pitch while Miriam took an Uber to her activity (which isn't precisely on the metro line). 

There was some confusion about which pitch was which (the security guard was certain we* hadn't reserved the pitch we had so wouldn't open the gate), but since Benjamin was with his leaders and peers, we left him to walk across the street to the playground on the other side. It was quite the hike to get to the pedestrian bridge! It looked so close, but the access point was so far. 

* We is doing a lot of work in this sentence because here "we" means...the church? The YM leaders? I think actually the bishop reserved the pitch. We (as in me and the children) merely showed up. We contributed nothing to the logistics of the evening.

I was in a hurry to get to the park and send the kids off to play so I could hop onto my meeting. A lot of video call features on social media apps are blocked in Qatar (like FB is...even WhatsApp), but thankfully Zoom is not, so I was able to connect and have my meeting from the park, which was very convenient. But I wanted to make it to the park before my meeting, so was rushing the children along. 

And then I heard, off in the distance, the call to prayer. 

"Hush, hush," I said to the children. "Be still and listen and you'll hear the call to prayer."

"Oh, yeah! I hear it!" Zoë said. "Where...does it come from?"

"Well, you know the tall towers at the mosques? Those are called minarets and they have a special kind of balcony where a muezzin stands and sings the call to prayer, which is then usually broadcast over a loudspeaker..."

"Too bad," Zoë said looking around. "I don't see any minarets nearby."

"Me neither. Shhh...we'll just listen quietly for a minute."

Arabic Story Time II

We made it to the library for Arabic story time again and it went a lot smoother than last week. It was a different storyteller/librarian, who was much more...excited...about story time than last week's librarian (who, granted, was filling in for someone else). 

Here's Zoë in a little reading nook while waiting for story time to start:

Suq Waqif

Having been here for three weeks and not yet having visited the suq, I suggested we head out for the evening on Thursday and see what the suq had to offer for dinner (Andrew was also in the middle of having an argument with Phoebe about whether or not dinner at McDonald's was a good idea—I'll let you guess whose argument was which). 

Our hotel apartment has a kitchen, but the stove is highly inefficient and the oven is (as a friend put it) EasyBake oven-sized. Our washing machine (which we are very grateful to have, but which is running nearly constantly) also seems to have been made for elves. 

Hotel life is great but...perhaps not suited for a family of seven. 

It's hard to make a full meal with the limited space and dishes that we have and we have laundry hanging to dry everywhere all the time. 

It's fairly glamorous. 

I mean, we love the view. We love that we have beds for everyone. We even enjoy having housekeeping come by three times a week (though I also like they days they don't come by). But we still feel a little bit like we're just camping out...still.

It's been a long time of feeling displaced, first living in our own house for six weeks with little to no furniture, and then living here in our temporary—wonderful but less-than-ideal—apartment. 

Anyway, all that is to say that we've gone to McDonald's three times since moving here and Phoebe thinks it's the absolute best (we used to only get McDonald's on our way home from the beach and whenever the power went out and we couldn't cook any food). She's always trying to convince Daddy it's a good day for a trip to McDonald's.

But I was like, "Why don't we go to the suq, see what kind of places they have down there..."

Andrew thought that was a great idea, so that's what we did. Even though it was hot.