Stuff

I apologize for my long absence, to try to help make up for it I'm going to do a quick catch-up on the past couple of weeks.

We have officially moved out of our "Survival" phase of Arabic lessons. I'm excited about our next phase. It feels that we are learning more things in context of daily life, instead of random bits of vocabulary. I am pretty happy about where we are after being here two short months. We can pick up words here and there and have very short, specific conversations with people. But we are hearing and understanding more and more words.

We tried incorporating the girls into our lessons yesterday. I want them to learn Arabic as well, they are at the perfect age for it. Two problems arose:
          Emily doesn't want to be wrong, if she is sure of a word, she will interact with our teacher. But if she isn't 100% sure, she won't even try.
          Savannah doesn't really "get" the activities, but she enthusiastically joins in responding to commands. However, she doesn't like to sit and listen to the words being said initially, so she doesn't know what pictures to point at. Then, when we laugh at her, because she is trying so hard and she is just so funny about it, but she got it wrong, she pouts.
          However, I like them being involved and it gives me more practice hearing the words.

We had our first "all tile floor" casualty just this morning. Sadly, it was my jar of expensive American pickles. There is not a dill pickle Egyptian equivalent and for the 4th of July we splurged and bought a six dollar tiny jar of real dill pickles. What was left of them was smashed. Now I have to smell the scent of amazing dill pickles and I can't actually taste it. Sad.

Sophie is now 6 months old. She has eaten applesauce, mashed bananas and baby cereal. She can roll over and sit up fairly well. Although she topples easily and with these hard floors we keep pillows or arms around her at all times. She is still the most pleasant and happiest baby I've ever met. And if you are wearing a hijab, she expects you to smile at her and kiss her and tell her what a beautiful baby she is.

We eat a lot of eggs. Especially compared to when we lived in the States. In 2 days we went through 18 eggs. But lunch meat is crazy expensive and peanut butter gets boring. There are no quick meals here. You can cook a whole meal or you can eat nothing. There isn’t “instant” food, well, there is, but it is crazy expensive imports.

We have found some yummy, yummy cheese and Brian made about 5 gallons of tomato sauce out of fresh tomatoes and fresh herbs. Fresh fruit and vegetables are here in abundance and they are remarkably cheap.

We also eat a lot of cookies. The best cookies to make here are out of cake mixes. Homemade, from scratch, cookies turn into little hockey pucks or they are crispy on the outside and raw in the middle. Plus, no matter how good the recipe was in the States, it just tastes a little “off” here and leave you a bit disgruntled. But cake mix cookies turn out fabulously. Perfectly chewy and yummy.

We just finished a language lesson. My brain hurts. Therefore, this is all the update I have left in me :)