News from the Jacobs family in Saudi Arabia
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.
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.
There have been a couple of over 100 degrees days so far but for the most part the weather is still pleasant enough to be outside, even in the afternoon. We are trying to take full advantage of it before the heat drives us indoors for most of the day.
Aunt Julie and Uncle Eric are moving to Bahrain! Uncle Eric has already arrived and we drove over on Friday to spend the morning with him. We had a nice breakfast as Ric’s Country Kitchen across from the Grand Mosque (which hosts the worlds largest fiberglass dome by the way) and then went on to a supermarket with good asian produce for some Thai food fixin’s.
Truth be told it was Friday, not Sunday that the Easter Bunny came. Since Sunday is a work day here we put in a special request that he visit us early and, since Dad has some Easter Bunny wasta, he was happy to comply.
The Easter Bunny hid some baskets with books and a new toy in the house and then left a series of clues scattered through the house. Each clue was a picture inside an egg that led to the next clue until finally the basket was found. Kai and Nora really got into it and it was a hoot to watch them decipher the trail.
When that was done we found the Easter Bunny had left some plastic eggs hidden outside. Some had chocolate and some were filled with confetti that looked like someone had emptied the bin on an automatic 3-hole punch. Clearly the Easter Bunny works in an office when he isn’t doing his egg gig.
The other day a praying mantis was spotted hanging out directly above the dinner table. It was not the largest one that has been seen but perched above us as we ate he captured our attention just the same. Oh, and a few bonus picture of Nora playing with an Omani dish-dash are thrown in.
