It's Been a While.....

Well, after a significant number of months, it's time to come back to this labour of love and start to update again. We've had the first term and a half of a new school. Nanny and Grandad Don visited last November and we had Christmas with the pleasure of Grandma and Grandad Michael as guests. It was the first time that we've ever shared Christmas with the Sullivan side of the family and it was wonderful for them to see how we do things here in our family home.

The girls are now well settled into school and they strengthening their friendships and progressing beautifully. Rosie is now reading almost fluently and displays a congenital lust for books and fiction. Emily is becoming quite the artist and her creations from nursery are breeding and the box of precious artwork is overflowing. Culling will, I fear, become necessary very soon.

Rosie is doing tons of after school activities and has found that she can indulge her passion for music and making stuff there which goes some way to assuaging her rage at just how much work she has to do as a big Year 1 girl and the lack of fun stuff going on in her classroom. Both girls have joined a gymnastics club and their confidence on the beam, the bars and the trampoline grows weekly. I'm not sure that we have any Olympic hopefuls on our hands but they are getting strong and supple and most importantly they are having a great deal of fun.

The weather at the moment is Dubai is just perfect. Imagine the most perfect English summer day; blue sky, warm breeze and sunshine. We are spending as much time as we can outside before the hot weather arrives. It won't be long before the soles of our shoes start to melt if we stand in one place for long enough.

We're approaching our half year anniversary of moving to Dubai. It's not always been easy and we have a long way to go before we can honestly call this place home. There have been more positives than negatives to the move and this bodes well for our happy future. Patience is the key to the process.

Rainbow Rosie

Rosie loves all things crafty and after speaking to some little girls in her class, asked me if she could start going to Rainbows. For those of you who don't know, Rainbows is the little, little girls version of Brownies and Guides. It's open to girls aged between 5 and 7. The usual helpfulness and resourcefulness is encouraged and it's altogether a good thing. I contacted the delightfully named leader, Daffodil, asking for a place for Rosie and volunteering to be a helper at the same time since I'm not averse to a bit of crafting myself. We duly secured a place for Rosie and a police check for me since working with children and the Girlguiding Association dictates this.

We miraculously found our way there on Wednesday afternoon and took possession of a brand new Rainbow uniform for Rosie and a helpers t-shirt for me. Rosie was very shy and reluctant to join in despite there being 9 new Rainbows this week (it's the start of a new term), 2 of which are her classmates. After a little bit of coaxing and a promise that I would be right there the whole time, she joined the circle and we learnt the Rainbow Promise and the song that we will sing every week. We made a helpful horse out of washing up brushes and j-cloths (?), played a guess what's inside the bag game and altogether had a fine old hour.

My homework for the week is to come up with a flower name for myself. Rosie thinks that I should be called Snapdragon but all the Rainbows have the ultimate say next week when we will take a vote. She fails to see the humour in this but it's not lost on me - I think that it's probably the most appropriate flower name and I think that any naughty Rainbows who need some firm control may be in agreement some time soon......

Winners

We've had a run of good luck in our family lately. When Andy bought his new car in June he was entered into a lucky draw. Thinking that nobody ever wins these things, he promptly forgot about it until the other day when he got a phone call from Arabian Automobiles telling him that he'd won a family holiday to Hawaii! Instead of calling me in an excited frenzy as I would have been sure to do, I received a one line email saying "I've won a holiday to Hawaii". Yeah, yeah I thought but nevertheless called him to get all the details and indeed we had won a holiday to Hawaii. The problem is that it would take a very, very long time to fly to Hawaii from Dubai in fact there aren't many places in the world that are further away. Doing the calculations, it would seem that we could fly Dubai - Singapore - Tokyo - Hawaii. Or..... Dubai - London - New York - Hawaii. Either way you look at it, not a fun prospect with 2 small children. Since our move from Asia, we were also kind of thinking that we'd give really long haul journeys a miss for a while. Luckily for us, the competition prize could also be taken as a cash equivalent which after a quick think we decided to take. Since moving into our lovely new house, we have realised that we need some new pieces of furniture so we're choosing to spend our windfall on that.

The same week, Andy and I joined some friends for a weekly quiz at a local golf club. We're proud to report that we won by a margin and the 4 ladies in the team were presented with jewellery vouchers to spend which was rather nice for a Tuesday night out. They say that good luck comes in threes so watch this space.

Playdoh Police.

One of the casualties of our move to Dubai were the tubs of playdoh belonging to the girls. The journey, the storage and the months since it was last played with rendered their tubs hard and impossible to play with. We are 'told' that the modelling medium is necessary for improvement of their fine motor skills and that, coupled with the fact that it's enormous fun, dictated that a trip to Toys R Us was necessary to replenish the stocks. Well, I was amazed. There is every hue in the spectrum. There are sparkles and there are sprinkles. And the tools available put my kitchen, which I previously considered to be well equipped, to shame. Of course, the sprinkles and sparkles won the day and we threw a couple of twisty and confetti makers (they look like sea salt grinders!) in for good measure. Once home, we opened all the pots and I spent a very stressful hour playing playdoh police because the first thing that Emily wanted to do was mix the colours and they had a fight over the purple pot. Emily's attention span is limited. It's a combination of her age and her personality and not much can engross her for longer than 10 minutes or so. It was lovely then to see her play for an extended period with Rosie. They cooperated and after the disagreement over the purple was arbitrated to everyone's satisfaction (we split it!), spent over an hour kneeding and rolling and generally making squidgy stuff. It was then that I realised that mixing the colours is just a sign that the stuff is being played with properly. After all, who wants a totally blue pizza or a caterpillar made from only pink? At that point, I stopped nagging and everybody was much happier. If many a happy hour results in sparkly brown playdoh streaked with blue and grey sprinkles, who am I stand in the way?

Life Moves On....

The girls are well settled into the school routine now. They're both making friends and we have the prospect of a playdate for Rosie and a birthday party for each of them to attend before the end of September. Andy and I met lots of our neighbours last night when we attended the monthly resident's drinks party at the bar in the hotel here at Desert Palm. With free flowing beer and wine, the atmosphere was definitely conducive to socialising and it was lovely to meet some people away from the child centered atmosphere of the pool and school environment. It will take time to make friends but we met some lovely people and we were made to feel extremely welcome which reinforced our decision to live here and become a part of this community. Everyone that we spoke to, without exception, loves it here and it was said more than once that this is THE best place in Dubai to live. The driving is getting easier and I'm actually using the map that Andy bought me to find my way around! I'm taking it one journey at a time and slowly but surely getting a feel for the roads and my brain is starting to compute what it must to navigate from the 'wrong' side of the road. Andy continues to be busy at work, but since we are all forced to leave the house very early in the morning (an underyeye bagging 7.00 a.m.!) to make it to school on time, he feels justified in leaving the office earlier and we're seeing much more of him in the evenings. All in all we're doing OK. I figure it takes 6 months to get a feel for a place and for it to start to feel like 'home' so it really is early days yet. Most importantly, we not regretting for one minute our decision to move here; our home is beautiful, the girls' school is outstanding and we're starting to meet some people. Result.

Twitching

Andy is turning into a bird watcher. Our new house in Dubai is in a bit of an oasis. It's situated in the middle of a polo club and stables so as we look outside we can see trees and grass and paddocks which is a real departure from most of the rest of Dubai which is just beige. Our house is upside down which means that the living space is on the top floor and the bedrooms are on the bottom and they lead out into our garden. Consequently when we're sat on our sofas we can see out to the tops of the trees (we have no curtains yet so the view is unimpeded) and the little time that Andy spends at home is punctuated by excited yelps at spotting another bird with "a brilliant blue underside" or "one with the spikes on it's head" or "that big one that looks like it can't fly". It's obviously not very scientific but it's given me a great idea for Christmas. What do you buy a man who needs nothing and wants even less? A pair of binoculars and a book on indigenous bird species of the UAE...... It's official, I married a geek.

Stumped

I think that I need to go back to school. Rosie is moving away from the usual 'Why' which plagues us for the first 4 or so years of a child's life. She's getting smarter and so are her questions. After breakfast this morning, at a mind numbingly early 6.45 a.m. she said to me that she had a very important question to ask. Floundering, I imagined that some sort of heaven vs hell or birds and bees analysis was to follow.... "Go on", I encouraged. "Why doesn't water just slip down your throat when you drink it?". I assured her that it does just slip down your throat. "No it doesn't, you have to swallow." I tried to recall my biology lessons of 20 years ago and managed to dredge something about having a valve that stops stuff going into your lungs and allows stuff only into your stomach when you swallow. That's why you cough when something 'goes down the wrong hole'. "That's rubbish", she replied. "You don't have to swallow candy floss, it just melts and slips down your throat so why doesn't water?". Hmmm, defeated by spun sugar. I briefly considered making this an afternoon project of internet searching and a trip to the bookshop to find a human biology encyclopedia suitable for a five year old but in the end said what any mum with a shred of self respect remaining in the face of daughter disdain at her lack of answers would say...."Ask your teacher, she knows everything."