This week things really started to settle into a pattern. I feel like we are just at this point finally starting to decompress from all the traveling, although with two kids, a busy school schedule and a very hot apartment, decompress is a relative term. I am getting more regular at housework, got some yoga and exercise in, as well as some good meditation sessions. We even had our first semi-successful "no screen" day, which is something we would do in Wisconsin to try to reset our screen habits a little bit, although this one broke down around five or six. We are also getting more regular in cooking at home (I think we got chicken and rice once this week).
Other things of note:
Fourth of July party. We had a couple of girls from Cait's class over for an impromptu 4th party, that consisted of us splurging for Coke (that we added ice cream to for Coke floats) and Oreos and chips, as well as having some melon and a quinoa dish to make things somewhat healthy. That was pretty much it. It was nice to have people over though.
Lots of swimming. We are definitely making use of our swim passes, and the kids are slowly warming to the luxury of having a nice pool to retreat to on hot days.
Lots of reading. Cait and I both made it through Wild, Cait finished Poisonwood Bible and I read it through, and I finished two books of poetry that I have been putting off for a long time (I have always struggled with poetry), Emily Dickinson and Sapphro. Cait has started into Flight Behaviour also by Margaret Atwood, and I am reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. We have enjoyed all these books immensely and it has been a literary golden period in our lives. A kindle with an increasingly thorough digital public library collection is a beautiful thing.
I've also been watching a number of Al Jazeera documentaries, which they publish as a really beautiful podcast. Al Jazeera just makes so much awesome stuff and puts so much of it for free. The podcasts are really nice because I can download them when we have internet access, and watch them when we don't. So far, I watched a two-part history of Hafez Al-Asad's rule in Syria (the father of the current ruler) that helped me to understand more of the conflict now, the story of a Serbia general who fought with the Bosnian's during the war (I really don't know anything about that conflict) and the bloody history of the Circasian people that were ejected from the site of the 2016 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia (I'm afraid I'll have to boycott watching these olympics, which is unfortunate, because I love the olympics).
We also had our first big trip on Saturday, but I'll go ahead and put that in its own post, even though it leaves this one a little empty.
Some good times making the park workers jobs more difficult (these are actually two separate incidences):
If you are a Moroccan stalker and can figure out where we live based on these shots from the roof, hats off to you, come over for tea, just don't steal our kids:
And finally, Tallulah will one day thank us for putting this photo up:
Weird situation. Strange they were so inquisitive about your financial situation, but maybe that's a cultural thing. Still, it's always best to go with your gut.
ReplyDeleteAnd isn't Keen a great company? One of our Keens broke, and they didn't hesitate to send us a coupon for a free pair. After Gavin wore them every day for months.