everyday stuff

School time!!! The girls have done great doing school this year. Below we made feather pens and used berry juice to write. We are doing Am. history this year and they love it!



This park is really close to our house, it is really nice to have close! Hard to believe that Addie and Annie lynne almost balance each other, i think they are only about 3 pounds apart!


One of our Christmas presents last year was an e-reader, here is addie reading one of the books we put on it for him. I think we will start using the e-reader a lot with school. Kirk even found one of his books for school that he could load, saved a lot in shipping cost!!! And you can get books from the library which will be a great help with homeschooling!!!


So thankful for technology!!! Annielynne and Brogan are making faces at each other as we talk on skype together.
What did people do before skype???

abram

Abram in his red neck swing! We didn't want to buy anything since we are here for such a short time, so Kirk just hung his car seat up for him. He loves it and i love having somewhere to put him. He sleeps great in that thing!!! The only thing we have to watch is how hard the girls push him! oh yea, it is tied up with broken jump ropes, sure hope it holds :)




Abram is finally turning over, On September 18th he finally flipped over, below are pictures of the day before when he was trying to and then he would get mad so we would just turn him over!
Also thankful for big sister, a few day later I realized I never wrote down when he turned over and I couldn't remember what day it had been on, luckily Adyen had written it in her journal! Glad one of us is keeping up with things!

abram's update

Today he went for his 3 month visit
weight 7.9 kilograms or 17.4 lbs 97 percentile
height 64 cm or 25.2 inches 95th percentile
head circumference 40.5 cm or 15.9 inches 50th percentile

He is growing so fast!!!



almost as big as my sister!

Abram's first cultural experience

I went out walking today with a friend, we went to another area of the city to just walk and pray. Right before we were about to catch a taxi we were invited into a home. It was an interesting experience all the way around and Abram got to have his first cultural experience. After we had been there a while it was time for Abram to eat, I asked the mom of the family if there was another room I could sit in to feed him as here in Jordan men and women visit together so her husband and sons were in there with us. She took Abram and was leading me to another room and she realized his diaper was really wet. So as she is walking down the hall she unbuttons his clothes and takes his diaper off and throws it on the floor. Then she brings him into the bathroom to wash him. Instead of wipes they just run them under water. So she sticks his booty under the cold water and uses her had to wash him all over down there (using no soap) and then uses the same hand and washes his face and head. Of course, he is screaming through this. Then she brings him in the room and lays him on the bed and I had by now gotten out the burp cloth to dry him with so she dries him and then proceeds to tell me the way his diaper was was wrong and she show me how to put on a diaper correctly. (i was thinking, I do have 4 kids) But I didn't say anything, she then shows me how to fold a cloth diaper and tell me that would be better. which i'm sure it would, but I do not want to clean that!!!
Anyway, it was so funny and Abram survived.

The family itself was interesting to visit with, they knew no english, so it was a challenge but it was good Arabic practice, something I have not gotten a lot of since being in this country. The mom and dad had been married for 30 years and they got married when she was 13 and she has had 10 kids, but one died. So know they have 9 and most of them live in that house still. It was a little weird for me because in our other country the men would never have stayed in the room but here we visited with the whole family. Of course, finding out we were American they wanted us to help their children find American spouses, always something we are asked. But please remember this family, we gave them our number, but I don't know if they will call, but when I had the mom alone, while i was feeding Abram, she told me that it has been a hard 30 years, i don't think they have a very happy marriage. Hopefully we will be able to talk to them again and tell them more about where true Joy comes from and that there is a God that loves her.

Addie's tooth

Last Wednesday Addie lost her first tooth eating an apple.
She was soooo EXCITED!!!!!!

Pyramids

The Pyramids! Really amazing to see! Of course, the girls favorite part was the carriage ride, and probably mine too. It would not have been fun to carry Abram around and try to hold on to the girls in the hot sun.







Climbing on the Pyramids. The girls were really disappointed they thought they could climb to the top, especially Addie, our little monkey. They did make it about three big rocks high before the guard came over and made them come down a little :)

more of Egypt

Our last night there we went out to eat with Mandy and we actually ate at TGI Friday's; it was great to have some American food, but the really neat thing was we at on a boat that was docked in the Nile River. Just amazing to sit there and think of all the history!

Ayden, our little book worm. I finally made her put the book down so she could at least see the Nile and we talked some about how cool it is that we have gotten see the river; but then she went back to reading!

The girls had been wanted to ride in one of these little taxis call "tuttuts." They don't go up and down the main roads, but instead just up and down the side roads and back into the neighborhoods. The girls loved it, it is small but you can cram as many people as you want in there! The next picture is just a better view of what the "car" looks like.



one more pic from the village, of course this mummy is just a replica but we saw plenty of real ones in the museum. guess you really can't go to Egypt without seeing one!

more from the village

This was one of the girls favorite things!!! Ayden especially liked the eye liner!
and you really can't go to Egypt without getting a Pharaoh mask!

Pharaonic village

This was a really neat place that someone had told us the girls would like, and they did. It was on the Nile and you took a little boat around and you listened to a recording about how life was during the time of the Pharaohs. They had different people acting out different scenes. Then you got off the boat on this little island in the Nile and they had made a little village you could walk through and see what the houses looked like and in one of the pictures below they showed us how to make fire. The picture of Annielynne below is how they told time, she told us that water clocks like the one here was the oldest way of telling time, even before the sundial. An original one is in the museum and we had seen it the day before. The Egyptians would fill the pitcher with water and it would slowly drip out of a small hole in the bottom. There were marks on the inside to show when one hour had past. In the summer they would put oil on the top so that the water would not all evaporate. very fascinating. Since the museum doesn't allow pictures it was neat to be able to take pics of some of the things we had seen even though they were replicas.

Tahrir Square

It was neat and sad to stand on the outside of Tahrir Square where all the protest just happened a few months ago in Egypt. The museum is right there on the Square, and one of the pictures below is a building right behind the museum that was burned during all the protest. The other pictures or of the riot police that now surround the square. One picture of the men standing around the square, one when they were changing shifts (some leaving and others coming) and then one of all the riot trucks parked along the side street. As I was looking at this I was wondering what was going on in our country and what it would be like to look at so many soldiers everyday protecting certain areas of the city.

museum, metro, and apartment hunting

We did make it to the Cairo Museum, no pictures from inside as the museum does not allow pictures to be taken.
But it was an interesting experience. It is HUGE!!! So much to see, if you are at all interested in Egyptian history it is the place to go. But going in the summer is not a good idea, it is a huge building that does not have air conditioning. Also not the greatest place for kids, because after seeing a couple of statues and mummies, they all start looking very similar. We did all enjoy going into the room with King Tut's belongings, it was a small room that had air conditioning and everything was labeled so you could read about what you were looking at, plus it was just incredible!!! However, other than that room, not many things are labeled, so most of the time you have no idea what or who you are looking at. It was good though for the girls to see and we had lots of talks about what they believed as we looked at statues of their "gods." We talked about how with the mummies they put a mask over their face and painted it to look like that person so that the "gods" would know who it was; Ayden said "their god was pretty small if he couldn't even recognize them, i'm glad we have a God that is a lot more knowing then that." How true, i'm also very thankful that we serve a God that is all knowing and all powerful. So it was a great place to go and have some spiritual talks!


We went to Cairo because we needed to get new visas but we also went to help Mandy find an apartment there. It was Eid when we were there so we actually did most of our apartment looking at night. Here we are waiting in the lobby of this apartment building for the real estate guy to get the key so we could look at the apartment. Addie had had enough and poor Mandy ended up carrying her around the apartment and then down the 9 flights of stairs! (We were there to help her, but I think she really helped me even more!) We took the stairs down, because going up in the elevator was a little scary!



We also rode on the metro, Abram's first metro experience; and not something I would like to do often. The doors open and close so fast, i was afraid we wouldn't all make it on! But thankfully it was not as crowded as it usually is, an we all made it. Thankfully Mandy was with us so I had help, because the men are actually in one car and the women in another so I didn't have Kirk to help me with the kids.

papyrus

We did go to a papyrus store that also taught you how they made papyrus. It was so fascinating how this paper was made so many years ago. It was a great education for the girls and also Kirk and I. From which part of the reed to use and how long to soak it in water to how to lay out the strips in order to make the paper, it was really interesting!