a KK to you and other celebrations

So a lot has happened since I last updated!  Ahh I'm so bad at this updating thing!!  We've made it through our first Thanksgiving and Christmas without any family and we survived thanks to the wonderful friends that we've made.  Let's start where we left off....

Thanksgiving:
So after the Halloween hoopla we moved on to Thanksgiving.  Our wonderful friends Jelica and Scott and their daughter Tiana (who is in Cecilia's class) invited us over for Thanksgiving.  Cecilia had off from school, so we spent the morning at home and I prepared the dishes that I had agreed to bring while the girls played.  Tommy, of course, had to work.  Around 2 the girls and I caught a cab to Jelica and Scott's building and Tommy joined us around 5:30.  We had a blast!!  The girls played while the adults talked and then we all sat down to a wonderful dinner.  I couldn't have asked for a better way to celebrate!!

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The Kids' table

Our Thanksgiving Feast

The beautiful table

 















Keira's B-day:
Keira's birthday was right after Thanksgiving on December 6th.  Since we really didn't have time to put together a big party and since it was during the week we got her a big plastic slide to play on outside.  Also I made cupcakes (or KKs as Keira calls them).  She loved her slide and had a great time smashing and eating her KK.  Ever since her birthday she walks around saying "a KK to you!"

Carols in the Desert:  
So the woman who runs Kindermusik in Abu Dhabi puts on something call Carols in the Desert every year and our friends invited us to go with them.  It is exactly what it sounds like.  A bunch (almost 1000)  of people go out in to the desert and hang out and grill and camp out and once it gets dark they start singing Christmas Carols.  It's a pretty spectacular sight!  Our friends like to camp out in the desert so they brought their tent and everything thing they needed to spend the night, while we just stayed till about 8pm.  We had a wonderful time.  The girls played in the sand while the adults talked and enjoyed themselves.  The only thing I could complain about is that the sand gets all over you and everything you have.  Keira, who decided it would be fun to roll around in the sand, was covered from head to toe!  I think we brought home about half of the desert in her shoes.

   

Christmas: 
After coming home from summer vacation, Tommy and I decided that there was no way we could make the trip home for Christmas because Keira had the worst jet lag so I decided that I wanted to have a relaxed and uneventful Christmas at home.  We had never had a Christmas at our home. 
I heard through a friend that the hotels here offer 'Turkey Boxes' which have all of the components of a Christmas dinner already cooked and ready to eat when you pick it up.  Pretty freakin' awesome in my book!!! So Tommy took the whole week of Christmas off from work and I frantically tried to get all of my shopping done, which isn't easy when you can't order things online.  Christmas Eve I made cookies and Tommy went and picked up the turkey box we ordered and later we all sat down (sorta) and had a lovely Christmas dinner.  Later, we ate cookies and the girls each opened one present.  Then we drank hot chocolate and watched a Christmas movie together.  It was calm and perfect!  Then the girls went to bed and the fun began!  Tommy and I went outside to put together the trampoline we bought for the girls.  Well.....really Tommy put it together and I held the flashlight!  Once we finished, I proceeded to finish wrapping the rest of the presents.

Christmas morning the girls got us up and we opened presents and played with them all morning.  After Keira's nap we went over to Tina and Aneesh's house for dinner.  Their son is in Cecilia's class and their youngest is close to Keira's age.  Jelica, Scott and Tiana came too.  We had such a wonderful time and although we missed our families, it was nice to finally have our own Christmas.

National Day: 
I forgot to add National day which was December 2nd and 3rd.   National day is like the 4th of July in the UAE only much more extravagant!!  Locals spend thousands of dollars decorating their already expensive cars with pictures of the Sheiks (rulars) and all other things green, red, white and black. 

Small example of what they do to their cars

There are tons of festivities including two days of air shows and fire works.

So it was really interesting and fun to see all of the activity going on around us.  Pretty much everything in the city shut down for 2 days meaning all of the workers were off too.  So Tommy, the girls and I walked to the Corniche (which is boardwalk in Arabic) to see all of the action and the air show.  Once on the Corniche I felt 300 pairs of eyes staring at me and no, I'm not exaggerating.  In the States you might have one or two obnoxious people(assuming you aren't dressed outrageously)  who overtly stare at you, whereas here anytime you walk anywhere you get stared at by every worker within a 1 mile radius(okay I'm exaggerating a little bit).  On National Day there is a high concentration of men who stare at you as if they had never seen a woman and you were walking down the street completely naked.  I've NEVER been so uncomfortable in my life!

Wow... that was a lot!  That's all I got for now!  Love you all and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone this summer!  

The little things...

So it's been a while since my last post which was surprisingly upbeat compared to my first few post.  I'm happy to say that things are still going well here and part of it is due to a conscious change in attitude.  Moving here has taught me to really look for the little victories instead on focusing on the defeats.  Earlier this month I managed to get 3 days worth of activities and errands done all in one day.  Now keep in mind, what takes me 3 days to do here is one day of errands and such in the states.  At the end of that day I felt so accomplished and energized mainly because I began to realize that maybe I could survive here.

So enough about me because this is supposed to be about all of us.....

Cecilia has really settled in to her new life here and even though we think and talk about all of her friends in Texas and Louisiana she has really made some sweet and wonderful friends here.  She goes on play dates all the time and is happy and thriving!  School and learning are fun for her which I truly hope continues for years to come.  I love her creative spirit and her ability to find joy in almost every situation.

Keira and I have been getting out a lot more going to play groups and Kindermusik and parks (now that the temperature has dropped below 100 degrees).  We have made some friends and are enjoying our one on one time together.  It's lots of fun to see her personality developing!

This past week was Halloween which is somewhat celebrated here because of the large expat community.  We are fortunate enough to have a neighborhood full of expats so there were many houses participating, so we invited a friend of Cecilia's from school and we went trick-or-treating.  Cecilia was dressed as a pink My Little Pony and Keira was a little fairy.  We all had a blast and it was nice to have another little sense of normalcy here.

Cecilia and her friend Tiana

Keira's Costume from the back

Cecilia's school had it's Fall Festival, which is also Halloween themed, the day after Halloween.  They had a parade of costumes for all of the Elementary School and then had booths set up with games to play to win candy.  All of Cecilia's classmates were there and she had a great time running around with them and getting candy. 

On a not so fun note we've had to say goodbye to 2 families in the last month or so who were moving on to bigger and better things.  It's difficult living in such an ever changing expat community.  I'm not big change that I can't control and I'm used to having the same people around me all of the time so I have trouble when I have to watch friends leave not knowing when or if I'll ever see them again.  I guess it's something that I'll have to get used to experiencing. 

Anyways, that's all for now so I'll leave you with a few more pictures

A Sense of Normalcy! Back to the UAE....

So we have been back from the States for about 2 1/2 weeks now and are slowly getting into a normal routine.  While the girls and I were away for the summer, Tommy hired a WONDERFUL woman to be our live-in maid and did I mention she is WONDERFUL!!!!  After all of the hell we went through with our sea freight container getting sent back to Houston and having to go through it in a hot warehouse I was dreading coming back and unpacking all of it.  To my surprise, however, Heizle (our maid) had unpacked 90% of it!!  All I have left to do is hang the artwork and move a few things around and we have a fully put together house! YAY!  

Also on the positive side, my sweet Cecilia started Kindergarten or KG2 as they call it here.  Last Tuesday was her first day and she really loved it!  Her teacher is very sweet and the school is wonderful.  Cecilia is growing up so fast and while we have our little setbacks every now and then, I am amazed at how responsible she has become.  Every night before we go to bed she helps me pack her lunch and we pick out her clothes for the next day.  In the morning we put all of the food in her lunchbox, make sure her folder is in her bag, make sure she has her water bottle, get dressed and brush her teeth.  Granted I give her gentle reminders along the way till these things become routine. 

I didn't think that I would ever be happy to be back here but I had forgotten how wonderful it is to have Tommy home every night.  It has been great to have his support every night in getting the girls fed, bathed and in bed!  The girls are even doing better now that Daddy is home every night and they get so excited when he walks in the door.  Now, not everything is perfect but I don't expect perfect, just normal which I finally feel like I have even though I had to move halfway across the world to get it!

Well that's all for now!  I'll try to be better about updating from now on!

Mal

Carpets and Dubai

It's almost been a month since we left our life in the states and I miss it more than ever.   It's true that you don't know what you have till it's gone and lately I have realized how much we take for granted living in the states.  For example: clean tap water.  Now, I know that not everyone likes to drink tap water and most of us have refrigerators that filter the water for us but here you can't even drink filtered tap water without the fear of getting sick.  The only thing we use the filtered tap water for is for cooking (as long as it comes to a complete boil and sometimes I won't use it even then!).  Another thing is I used to only have to do laundry once a week, however here I have to do laundry every day and I still never finish.  There is always a full laundry basket at the end of the day because the washing machines are tiny and the dryers take four hours to dry your clothes!!!! I also miss being able to get my grocery shopping done in one store as well as relying on a store to have the same products from week to week. I know it sounds like I'm just complaining for the sake of complaining, which I am a bit, but, as many of you know, it is really difficult to cart more than one kid around to several different stores just to finish your grocery list and on top of that it seems that I have to go grocery shopping EVERY DAY!! This is my idea of hell!  

On a happier note, we bought carpets for some of the rooms which has vastly improved the look and feel of the house.  We went to the carpet souk (i.e. open market), which is like a strip mall with only carpet shops.

 

 This is the shop from which we bought our carpets.

 This is what it looks like inside, floor to ceiling carpets.

The Souk was interesting to say the least.  As you pull in to the parking lot the are men without shoes outside of each shop waving for you to come to their shop.  They are so eager that it made me a little nervous about trying to walk around.  I'm definitely one of those people who doesn't like to be bothered when I shop unless I ask a question.  Anyway, we did find 3 carpets:

one for the living room

one for the master bedroom

and one for Cecilia's room (which Keira is currently using) 

We still have more to get but for now it is amazing how much just these 3 cut down on the echoes!!!

The next day we took a trip to Dubai Mall, which is the largest mall in the world!  As much as I hate shopping I think I would love to take a trip there by myself and spend the day shopping, however that was not really the case this time around.  The drive took us about an hour and a half and by the time we got there we were all hungry for lunch so we headed to the food court.  There was every type of cuisine you could think of and some of it was actually good!  We spent a good hour, if not longer, trying to figure out what everyone wanted all while chasing Keira all over the place.  Once we all ate we actually got to look around.  There is an aquarium, an ice-skating rink, multiple fountains and waterfalls all over the place.  If Keira weren't with us we could have gone in more shops but instead we just walked around and took in everything there was to see.  

Once we left everyone was tired and a bit cranky.  Cecilia fell asleep which was nice but Keira had a MASSIVE diaper blowout which she proceeded to put her hands in.  So we had to pull over and completely wipe her down, change her and wipe up as much as we could off of her car seat.

Well that's all for now but I'll leave you with some pictures from Dubai Mall.

  

Surviving...

So here are the things that I have managed to accomplish so far:

1. I have made it to several grocery stores and malls (there are a ton of malls!)with both kids which is a huge undertaking for me!

2. With the help of the other ExxonMobil wives I have found a babysitter who lives next door and a part-time maid.  I never had a babysitter in the almost 5 years that we lived in Texas.

3. Tommy and I were able to attend a Dinner with other ExxonMobil employees and their spouses.  I met a lot of wonderful women who have taken me under their wings and helped me to adjust to life here.

4.  The girls and I took a trip to the beach with a friend and had a wonderful time playing in the sand and water.

5.  I have gotten most of the girls clothes out of the suitcases and in to the closets (even though I'll have to pack them up again in about a month or so)

6. I have ordered lots and lots of takeout! I only have three pots for the time being and no storage containers so I can only cook once every few days.  The food is pretty good here!

We are supposed to receive our air shipment in the next few days so at least then the girls will have some toys and I will have more pots and utensils. It really is difficult to cook anything when you only have three pots. Also we'll be able to start sleeping in the master bedroom since the sheets and comforter are in the air shipment.

The house is coming along but we still desperately need rugs to absorb some of the echo. Oh yeah and furniture would be nice too considering poor Keira is sleeping in her pack-n-play in an empty room. 

Here are some of the pictures Tommy has taken so far...

 

Love you all!!

Pictures from the plane

Here are the few pictures we took of the flight over here.  As you will notice I have a glass of champagne in almost every shot!!!

This is in the Lounge before we got on the plane

Had Keira in the car seat initially but it didn't last long 

This is what she looked like after screaming for 10 minutes before and during takeoff