Adventures in everyday life

I have mostly posted our big outings on this blog, because they seem the most noteworthy, but I'm dedicating this post to the everyday... and in no particular order: a potpourri of everyday life in Doha.

Dan got his drivers license on Thursday. I seriously almost cried when this happened for the first time:

Dan got a rental car and we went on a date by ourselves. I cannot tell you how wonderful it was not to have to deal with a taxi at all the whole night. 

And technically the rental car fit everyone to go to church the next morning, but it was a little tight :). It took us a while to figure out a configuration that would fit the car seats and allow the kids to actually get in the car.

When you get to church on time, it looks like this:

There are so many people in our congregation that is you get there late, you usually end up in one of the two rooms where they have a TV feed. This is the upstairs room. 

Soooomeone learned to walk right after we got here, and yesterday learned how to climb up on this stool. He's pretty proud of himself.

He was also pretty proud of himself for wriggling his arm out of his onesie.

We made a reading area/fort for the boys under the stairs. I am actually sitting in it as I type this blog post. It's quite possibly the greatest fort ever....

I pulled back the curtain (I don't know what else to call it....) to get a picture of the inside of the fort. The couch is not as close to that pole as it looks... it's about a foot away, probably... We ended up clearing out that area under the bottom stairs, too, so it's all play area. I'm telling you, it's awesome. I go in there whenever the boys will let me.

The furniture slides around really easily on the floors here, which makes it difficult to keep the room looking  nice, but makes it easy to rearrange the couches for a game of paper ball wars....

All the floors in the house are some type of tile, and we routinely find scenes like this when we check on the boys at night... how do they sleep through that???

This little beast has loved trying out all the new fruits we find at the market... little man LOVES dragon fruit!

 While out to dinner one night, the boys were playing in the play area and several times people came in to do their prayers. There were prayer rugs in the play room and a sign with an arrow on it pointing to Mecca. These faithful people taught me a lesson that night. We have always had the family practice that while we always pray before meals at home, we never do at restaurants. After seeing these guys, it made me rethink the way we do things. I thought they were a great example to me personally.

The simple joys of finding a long lost cartoon on the internet....

We saw how to make these paper stars on the Disney channel. The boys instructed me to make them some and hang them in their room. Paper saves the day again!

When your toys are somewhere in a boat on the ocean... you play with what you can find:

 Sam stylin in Daddy's shoes...

The boys selling "potions" at their bedroom door. Some were the colognes and lotions from the business class airplane bags. Others were actually fresh squeezed orange juice with apple pieces, or orange juice with raisins (both surprisingly good!).

Jack's new favorite toy: The dishwasher. 

The glass shower is also lots of fun....

Mom and Dad's bed is also lots of fun....(especially at 6:30 in the morning... sigh...)

Can I just take a moment to express my gratitude to IKEA? THANK YOU IKEA, for everything!

Henry has always been a good kitchen helper, but he has become my constant little cooking buddy. We have made a lot of bread together, and dozens upon dozens of our homemade donuts. 

We are enjoying our every day life here. This summer has been almost exclusively family time, and in all honesty, it's been really nice. We are looking forward to making some new friends at church and school, but we are grateful for the time we've gotten to spend with the people we love best of all. 

Eid-al-Fitr

The end of Ramadan marks the beginning of a week-long festival called Eid-al-Fitr. It's the feast of breaking the fast! There were some fun events around town to celebrate, so we went to one at Katara. It's the same place we went to the Garangao celebration a couple weeks before. They had fireworks and a water and laser show.

It was HOT HOT HOT, which of course is not surprising, but the good thing about Katara is that they have coolers full of ice cold water bottles all over the grounds. That really helped a lot, and with a gentle sea breeze (Katara is right on the water) it was pleasant enough.

 We found this little covered area and set up with our blanket. There was a cooler right in front of it, so that was convenient :)

 When the show began, we realized we were kind of far from it, so we abandoned our post and went to closer to the amphitheater area.

 A glimpse of the water show:

And of course some fireworks over the gulf!

From Dan's iphone

I took a panorama of the amphitheater with my phone. The entire thing is made of travertine marble.

The big boys wanted to run up and down the amphitheater steps, so Dan took them up and I entertained Jack by taking pictures of him and showing them to him. 

 We were both a sweaty mess, but that's par for the course here :)

 This panorama turned out blurry, but this was on our walk back to the taxi stand.

That big ball is about a foot taller than me probably...

Ben discovered things looked pretty cool when he looked through his bottle... can you see Ben waving to me?

 The lights through Ben's water bottle.

We didn't know how long the show was going to go so we just called a taxi for 9pm. As we were loading up, a second fireworks show lit up the sky! So we got to see both sets of fireworks!

It was a fun night and we really enjoyed getting to join in the celebrations with the good people of Qatar.

Ramadan Kareem

I've run in to a backlog on my little blog.. Life is still as busy here as it was in Houston, where I never had time to write on here. But I'm trying to play a little catch up now :


Our family arrived in Doha slightly less than a week before the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan. Ramadan is based on a lunar calendar, so this year it fell in July-August. It's not always the same and changes year to year. When we got here everyone warned us that Ramadan was such a hard time of year here. I have to admit I was a little nervous that it was just going to be awful. If you're not familiar with Ramadan, it is when the Muslims fast during daylight hours. They have a dinner after sunset called Iftar and they also will have a meal before sunrise called Suhoor. One woman at church told me not to listen to what anyone had to say about it, and that Ramadan was a wonderful time. She told me just to enjoy your family during the day and go on outings at night. I wanted to believe her, so I just put it in my head that I would think of it that way. And that's what we did. The boys and I still went on outings, I just made sure to feed them a big meal before we left and not stay out too long so they wouldn't get hungry. Of course, outings were a little tricky because during Ramadan most places would close during the middle of the day and reopen later at night. But with careful planning it could be done. We also just fudged on bedtimes a little during that time. We would go on outings at sunset (right about 6:30) and just figure we would all survive if the boys were up late.

( The part about Ramadan that was hard was that all the permits and everything Dan and I need to be legit here were pretty much just put on hold. Dan got his residence permit right before Ramadan, and we literally got nothing else during the entire month. So right after it ended I was able to get all my paperwork and medical exams in order to get my residence permit. It should arrive any day now and I'll be legal! Then I can move on to getting my drivers license. But seriously people who arrived like two weeks ago are at the same point I am in the process. That is frustrating. But all in all I think we are all still happy that we decided to come together as a family instead of being separated all summer.)

We did, however, have a grand celebration to finish off Ramadan. Every night downtown the army sets off a cannon at sunset to mark the end of the day's fast. We kept meaning to take the boys down there, and on the last night of Ramadan we finally made it. The cannon was just sitting out in the open and kids were climbing all over it. They shoot off a little pistol before they shoot the cannon and they were passing that around to the kids, too. Our kids were pretty happy to get a turn holding "a real gun."

 Here is a little video (it's like 10 seconds long):

Ramadan Cannon

The baby you hear crying is Jack. The cannon was incredibly loud! Dan tried to hold Jack's ears, but wasn't successful.

After the cannon we headed to dinner. During Ramadan, most of the hotels put on a fancy Iftar dinner every night and they are pricey. At the Sheraton kids eat free (definitely got our money's worth on that one...) so that's where we headed! It was all decorated for Ramadan and the kids were pretty impressed.  It was really beautiful.

 People here are so accommodating to children. It is so refreshing. We asked for a high chair and they brought out a real high chair, like you might have at your house, with a tray and everything. They brought out a little cup with a sippy lid for Jack as well. Anyway, we got to try lots of local foods, most of which I will never remember the name for, but one we did remember was labanah balls. We all had fun trying those and watching each other grimace as we ate them. Not our favorite thing ever...But fun nonetheless.

Because they do not drink alcohol here, their selection of drinks is way more fun than anywhere in the states. Half of the fun of the evening was tasting all the different juices. Then there was the dessert table. I guess I should correct myself here and say the dessert TENT. Oh my goodness, my boys' little eyes bugged out when they saw it. We let them each get a plate full and we tried lots of interesting local desserts. Our favorite was called Awama. They were a lot like little donut holes coated in powdered sugar. Num num.

Pictures!


 Inside the Sheraton, a little model of the Dhow boats used for fishing and pearling back in the day.

The boys in a little tent set up inside the Sheraton.

 Dan has stayed at this hotel on previous visits to Qatar and he said those domes are always there, but the extra decorations are just for Ramadan.

 They had these pretty little fountains in the halls of the hotel, with blue lights lighting up the water.

I didn't take any pictures of the buffet. Dang it!! But I did get a picture of the all important:

dessert tent!! 

Yes, thank you...

 Just some pretty Ramadan decorations.

 

 View straight up from my chair.

 You an kind of see the different juices on either side of the musician. The boys wanted to know what he was playing so I went and asked him. It's called an Oud.

And of course our taxi couldn't pick us up until 9pm, so we explored the hotel a bit more until he got there... The boys thought these were the coolest stairs ever.

A bigger dome on the other side of the hotel.

Had to ride the glass elevators, of course...

Looking down from the elevator

Just a giant palm tree shaped chandelier, no big deal...

 Taxi finally arrived... time to go!

The boys were pretty excited about this car parked near the front door...Sam was running his hands down the side of it...

So we made it through Ramadan and summer, the two hardest times of the year, according to those who have lived here a while. And we made it through them both in one fell swoop! So we're pretty proud of ourselves :) and ready for what lies ahead.