Rachel's mission farewell

Rachel didn't know this (per se), but she was in charge of the FHE lesson on Sunday night (which is when we do FHE now, I guess) because that's when she was scheduled to give her farewell talk!

Phoebe was so excited to see Rachel on the stand. She waved and waved and waved and waved and then said, "Why won't Rachel wave back to me?"

"Because she can't see us," I explained. "We can see her but she can't see us."

"Oh, fine!" Phoebe huffed, throwing herself backwards against the couch to pout.

I don't know about you...but I'm feeling 42! (or, it's Andrew's Birthday!)

This morning we headed to GUQ for part one of a service project (part two is next weekend). It was the kind of service project that felt almost like cheating because there were so many people there that (from our perspective) we hardly had to do anything (I'm sure the organizers feel differently). We showed up, sorted a few things, and then before we'd even gotten into a rhythm victory was declared!

The very embodiment of "many hands make light work."

After a light lunch (and some time spent playing in the student lounge), we headed home (technically some of the kids went to our friends' house to play, with plans to meet up later at IKEA). We did some laundry and some homework. I took a little nap. So did Miriam (that poor girl work up at 4:45 am to attend a lecture...and ended up only catching the tail end of it because it actually started at four in the morning, not five. It was recorded so she was able to watch the rest of it this evening, but she was rather frustrated about her miscalculation). And...then we headed out to Festival City (where IKEA is). 

We picked out duvet covers and sifted through whatever was still available to cobble together some furnishings (there is quite a lot out of stock—we would love to see shipping passages open). I was excited to find an Arabic majlis sofa online (not from IKEA, which is going to be delivered next Monday). I love its versatility—it can be a couch or a bed! 

I really wanted to get a play couch for the kids (like a Nugget or whatever) to put in our shipment, but wasn't able to get one in time. The kids love building cushion forts—I figure that these majlis sofas will do just the trick!

Anyway, we wandered all through IKEA with our friends, looking at all kinds of things (most of which was out of stock) and selecting many other things to purchase, and then had a little dinner in the cafe (not the restaurant) before heading home for the sad little cake I baked. 

Rachel was pretty eager to get to talk to us on her first P-Day (preparation day: when missionaries get some time off of missionary duties to do laundry, grocery shop, catch up on correspondence, and relax a little). Phone calls home will typically be limited to P-Days, but Rachel's been calling a little more frequently since she's doing home MTC, has no companion, and is feeling a little lonely. 

Miriam has been doing companion study time with Rachel (on the phone). And my mom is trying to see if any ladies in her ward would be willing to take Rachel out for a walk in the middle of the day (like she's a crate-bound puppy—Rachel has been walking laps in the backyard during her class breaks). It will get better for her, I'm sure. 

And look! I don't know if you can see, but her name tags made it to her and she's now officially Chị Heiss! I mean, I suppose she was officially Chị Heiss when she was set apart earlier this week...but now she looks it!

Zoë's first primary talk in Doha

Zoë was asked to give a talk this past Friday. She wrote a first draft all on her own but grew frustrated when she felt that she hadn't covered anything very well (though she had covered many things and still felt like she had more things to cover). Honestly, the topic "God promised to send Jesus Christ to be my Savior" is rather expansive and open-ended, so we read through her talk and I helped her identify some threads she could pull at. She spent quite a lot of time rewriting her talk and then spent even more time rehearsing her talk to an audience of stuffed animals (and then delivered the talk to us during our evening scripture study) before finally feeling like she was ready. 

Here she is standing in front of the primary room delivering her talk:

Books from Memory Lane

One of my favourite childhood book creators is Pat Hutchins. 

We have a well-worn copy of And the Doorbell Rang at our house and every time I read it, I find it delightful. Just last night Phoebe and I read it again and she wanted to know whether the cat had been there all along and belonged to the family, or whether it had sneaked its way inside along with some of the many visitors the family welcomed that day. So we went back and found the cat on each page—and the cat kind of has its own little story within the story, which was fun to discover together. Pat Hutchins hides so many details—and alternative storylines—in her pictures. 

We also have Where, Oh Where is Rosie's Chick (though I believe that one is in our shipment, may it arrive in one piece), which is great for teaching children to look for information in the pictures that is not shared in the text. 

"You know, Pat Hutchins wrote a book that I really like called Which Witch is Which? But I've never been able to find a copy to share with my children and now that my children are all grown up, it doesn't seem worth it to find a copy at all. But I just love that book!" I said to Phoebe as we closed And the Doorbell Rang. 

Phoebe snuggled in closer to me and looked up into my eyes. 

"I am not all grown up," she pointed out. 

And she's right! There's still time to find and share my favourite books with my kids!

Though it seems as if it's a little bit out of print, judging by these prices:

To be fair, it is possible to order a used copy for a much better. I just haven't ever done it. 

What time is it? Some time!

I think we're reaching one of those pivotal points in history where a ball has started rolling and...it's going to just keep gaining momentum having a kind of snowball-like influence on surrounding places until it becomes a somewhat standard thing.

I know there's a word for this. Andrew suggested "cascade" and I suppose "domino effect" would work as well. But I told him I was looking for less of a vocabulary word and more of a bit of jargon and he finally gave me "policy diffusion." I think that may have been what I was after!

Alberta just announced their new time system—Alberta Time! They have done away with clock-switches and are going to permanently stay at their current time, aligned with Mountain Daylight Time, the same time zone Utah is in right now. 

BC made a similar announcement in March. 

The Northwest Territories did so in April. 

There's chatter about ending the practice in other places (such as throughout the United States—but that legislation is yet to become official), but I imagine we'll see other places adopting this practice soon. 

Of course, I could be wrong because good ol' Saskatchewan has been...sticking to their tickings...since 1966, and Arizona has been the odd-duck out in the United States since ending their observation of Daylight Savings Time in 1968. They have been on Mountain Standard Time ever since. 

(And I missed Hawaii in this list—they opted out of the Uniform Time Act 1967, the same year the act came into effect and they observed DST for a few weeks in 1933 before noping out of that, and again were "placed on" Hawaiian War Time in the 1940s for a couple of years—even then they only moved their clocks by half an hour. I'm still trying to figure out how changing clocks changes energy consumption...it seems largely like a remnant from wartime rationing than anything that sounds relevant for the way our power/consumption works today.)

Farmers don't like it (plants and animals don't care about it). Only 34% of the world observes it... 

I'm team "changing the time twice a year is insanity!" and am happy to be in Qatar where they've never participated in such games.

Alive and Well: A Banner Day in the Heiss Household

When our house went under contract, the closing date was set to September 26 (the day before we're set to get the keys to our new apartment), but then the buyers asked if they could move that up to September 15, so we very quickly made arrangements for that. 

This was mostly fine because selling our house was rather passive for us. We had given our neighbours power of attorney, so they went to sign the documents in our place. We just had to help arrange things and be present for an "alive and well" call with the lawyer (who we'd met previously). 

Because of the time difference, this happened right during the dinner rush before mutual. Andrew was just getting out of class, I was in the middle of making dinner, and we were trying to figure out how everyone was going to get to mutual (Andrew was recently called as a teacher's quorum leader so now he goes to mutual as well). Still, we found a few minutes to sit down and hop on a call with the lawyer, verify all our information as correct (for money transfers and taxes and so forth), and then we went on our merry way. 

Alive and well, having made it through most of September 15. 

Rachel, meanwhile, had been having a rough morning and still had much of September 15 ahead of her.

She had gone to get a few vaccines the day before and woke up feeling very sore and rather overwhelmed. 

Andrew and the kids came home from mutual, we put the little kids to bed, and then Benjamin and Miriam settled in to watch Inception (for Miriam's propaganda class) while Andrew and I sat down to hype up Rachel. We talked with her for a while, did our best to make her laugh, and motivated her to do a few of the "adulting" things she still needed to do before her mission started. 

And then we had to get ready for bed because her 7-hour countdown to being set apart for a missionary was also our 7-hour countdown of how long we could possibly sleep before getting up to be present for her setting part (9 PM for her, 6 AM for us). 

We did not get 7 hours of sleep...but we did eventually go to bed.

And we mostly got up to watch Rachel be set apart. 

We decided to not wake Phoebe up, in part because...she's just a force to be reckoned with and once she's up, she's up. It seemed silly to wake her up for this when we could just...leave her sleeping. So we...didn't wake her up. 

Clever signs

A lot of the walking around we end up doing happens to be indoors (so much so that one day Benjamin looked up symptoms of vitamin D deficiency and whether or not you can get vitamin D through a window when he realized he hadn't been outside the entire day...not that a single day without the sun will give you a vitamin D deficiency...but many days without it might). A lot of this indoor walking happens in malls. 

Mall life is alive and well here.

We like to be on the lookout for clever typography and/or names of things when we're out and about...and here are two we've spotted recently. 

First up, "eyewa" or "أيوا":

It's always a good day to accidentally teach your children the word "only" in Arabic

The day after we visited the falcon exhibition, the kids and I went through the worksheet we got on how to help preserve national heritage sites. I didn't pre-read the worksheet so the word "only" came as a bit of a surprise to me, although it makes sense...we say the something similar in English: "Take only pictures." 

And it isn't as "only" is a very difficult word. In fact, it's a pretty basic vocabulary word, so it isn't as if we're gatekeeping "only." It's just that...I dunno...I imagined this maybe said something a little bit different like, "I take photos," or something.

Again, given the fact that we say "Take only pictures" in English, it's perfectly fair that it would say this in Arabic as well. I was simply unprepared to have the discussion that we had to have when we sounded out this sentence around our table... 

The root of "only" is F-Q-T, which you can see above: فَقَطْ. 

You pronounce it as, uh, faqat. 

It was actually (gratefully?) my turn to sound things out when we came to this sentence and I started out very slowly, as one does, stumbling over every word: "'Al...ta... Alta...Altaqit suuuu...waaaaaa...ran... fa...fa... " 

But then I recognized the last word, so I said, "Oh—faqat!"

"MOM!" Zoë shrieked, her mouth falling open.

My bad! I didn't even think before I said it because...it just means "only." But it did inspire a lovely conversation with my children regarding language use. 

(And that's not even the only word that sounds like a curse word in English... Oh, and...for the record, in our household we typically eschew the use of "Christmas words" like stupid so for the kids to hear their mother drop an "only" (in Arabic) was quite...shocking...for the children).

*****

We met up with some friends at the library yesterday and T mentioned that Zoë had said something in the car the other day that he wanted to tell me about, but we ran out of time before we all had to leave, so he said he'd tell me later. 

And I was biting my nails that she'd shared her newly acquired "spicy" Arabic knowledge with her friends. 

But that isn't what it was at all! It was completely (more or less) innocuous (though we did have to have a conversation with her about how far she takes her teasing because it went a little far in the car). 

*****

In other news, I read the book Karma's Rabbit from cover to cover. It was a painstaking process, but I made it through, and Phoebe made it through beside me, and we learned a few new words and happily recognized others. 

On the very first page, Phoebe stopped the story to ask whether it took place in Qatar. I asked her why she thought it might take place in Qatar and she pointed to...

...the electrical socket!

I thought that was pretty clever for her to notice. 

I don't know whether the story really takes place in Qatar. The author, Taghreed Najjar, is Palestinian-Jordanian. The illustrator, Hassan Manasrah, is Jordanian, so I'd wager that neither Najjar or Manasrah were imagining Qatar when they worked on this book, but it's still cute that Phoebe noticed the different electricity. Most of our plugs do have those little switches by them! 

Falconry and things

I am typically a one-outing a day kind of a person, but today we had three outings that had us out and about the whole entire day. 

We spent the morning chatting with Rachel while getting ready to head out. She was up late, having been out late with friends. She remarked that since she's been living with my parents over the summer she hasn't had many late nights (which kind of made her miss her roommates and all the fun they'd have together), instead going to bed by 10 PM most nights and then getting up and going to work...and, honestly, while I'm glad she had a fun time out with her friends, she's going to be adhering to a missionary schedule pretty soon so it's not terrible that she's already in the habit of going to bed by 10 PM and getting up early to get the day started. 

It was wonderful to get to speak with Rachel for a bit, even if it was during our own morning rush. I can't believe she'll be starting her mission so soon (just a couple of days now)! But I'm definitely looking forward to only being 4 hours different from her instead of 9. Surely that will make arranging phone calls a little easier. 

Anyway, our first outing this morning was to brunch at the apartment of some people in our ward. They live in the same area that we'll be moving to and they have three little girls all right around Phoebe's age (3, 4, 6). It was fun to get to know them, even if the kids got a little rambunctious—many little bodies running around squealing and laughing in a small apartment with marble floors can be a bit of a recipe for disaster. I was glad when our hosts asked if they should pull out some LEGO (that seemed to calm the kids down significantly).

From brunch, we made our way to Katara for another visit to the S'hail Falcon Exhibition, this time with some friends. Here are Andrew, Phoebe, and Zoë walking towards an art installation by Lorenzo Quinn called "Building Bridges":

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!