News from the Jacobs family in Saudi Arabia
Our vacation is slipping by faster than I can get pictures uploaded. These are from a visit to the Jacobs’ Jebel last week where Kai and Nora had a chance to play with the puppies. They really look forward to the dogs and Kai has been putting the hard sell on getting a dog of our own.
I was in the grocery store in Webster the other day with Kai. As we were checking out he announced to the woman ringing up our groceries “I don’t have just two Grandma-Grandpas, I have two Grandmas and two Grandpas.” How lucky we were that both the Wiemanns and the Jacobs were able to visit over the Memorial Day weekend. Aunt Lea Ann and Cousin Nina also came for several days and Uncle Paul and Bev were able to stop by as well. The weather could not have been better!
Here are a few random images from our first couple of weeks in Danbury.
We’ve been back for almost two weeks now and I’m just getting around to posting photos of the Disney trip. It was a hoot and the kids had fun riding the monorail every day. Enjoy the pictures.
We had another uneventful trip back to the USA where we are hanging out in chilly Northern Wisconsin. Just before we left, Kai’s preschool class “graduated” with a very cute ceremony where the kids sang. We were seated with the setting sun behind the children which accounts for the glare in the pictures. We also took the video and I’ll see if I can get some posted here at some point.
The next day was kindergarten visit day where the recent graduates got to tour the campus of the Elementary school. Ben was on hand to lend moral support and take what grainy photos he could with his cell phone camera.
After the recent trek to the desert I took some of the images and sat down with Photoshop. I thought the very bright images might work well in a black and white (or sepia) format. Here’s what I came up with.
While Crystal was still out in the states, our good friends Ellen and Alan Alquist invited us over to lunch and their house just a few blocks away. We decided to make it a bike trip so we packed up and headed off.
When Crystal was in the US for a wedding recently the kids and I packed up some water and headed out to the desert perimeter. We parked at the end of the soccer field across from the Hills fire station ((though it was cricket, not soccer that was being played that day)) and hiked a ways down a wadi. Small hills became mountains and Kai slipped into mountain climbing mode. Nora did her best to keep up.
About half way through the hike I realized I forgot to bring wipes but figured that we would be OK. However, during a rest under the palm tree I was trying to explain cricket to Kai (we had a view of the game about 500 meters away) and Nora came up with a double scooped handful of horse manure ((the hobby farm is not too far away and I think people sometimes ride horses in the area)). “Dad, what is this stuff?” Sure did miss those wipes. Once Nora realized it was “icky” she was eager to clean them off. We used grape halves and old receipts from Dad’s wallet to get the bigger pieces off and Nora walked back to the car with her hands stuck out straight from her sides so she wouldn’t touch anything.
The other day we sat down for art time and Kai and Nora selected fingerpaint as the media of the day. I helped them put on art smocks, set out the bowls of paint and from there on out my only job was to move the finished pieces to the drying area and make sure that they had a steady supply of clean paper.
We had a new lunch item the other day that was quite a hoot and I thought I’d share. A few days ago we had gone to the library to check out the Disney movie of James and the Giant Peach (which we are almost done reading) and, while that was checked out, there was a BBC series on Sperm Whales so we got that instead. There was a lot of talk about the abyss and “Monsters of the deep” and so Kai and Nora started using that in their play (i.e. look out Nora, here comes a Monster of the Deep, let’s get in the cardboard box). Around the same time I saw a web post where you cut a hot dog or sausage into slices and insert dry noodles before cooking. The dry pasta can pierce the hot dog but goes all floppy (like tentacles) when cooked (hence the name it earned – monsters of the deep). The pictures below show the cooks in action.
