A night under the stars

Since I last wrote, much has happened, yet little worth writing about. We spent our ten day Eid holiday back home in South Africa. We needed some medical advice about Mieke's teeth. We ended up spending a morning in hospital while they performed two root canals and two additional repairs on her little baby teeth. Since she doesn't ever eat sweets or drink juice, the jury's still out on the cause of our problem. But it was a huge relief to be able to speak to someone who we could communicate with and have her teeth seen to. The sight of the black nurses who worked at Femina hospital made me want to cry. They are so warm and soft and sassy. We really shouldn't complain about health care in South Africa, we have much to be thankful for!

Big girl!

Back in Saudi, the long hot summer is slowly drawing to a close. Schools started and kids steadily flowed back into the compound. The poolside had been crowded by moms and kids, all sharing their summer stories. Mieke has started going to the nursery school on the compound. I'm so proud of her, she's so confident and independant and is starting to put together little sentences.

 Three times a week the kids go to the 'Big Gym', a recreation hall next to the restaurant where they play with balls of all shapes and sizes for an hour. The little tots love to stick balls under their T shirts and make 'babies'. Late one afternoon Mieke and Rean went for a walk and she saw one of our neighbours, a man with a big tummy, walking to the pool. She pointed to his tummy and said 'baby!'. I hope he didn't understand, or if he did, that he had a well developed sense of humour.

Jipee, my first ice cream!

Eugh, tiggers don't like ice cream!

 The cooling weather also allows for other activities to recommence, such as camping. On the spur of the moment we decided to join some friends for a night under the stars. We rushed to a huge camping store and had the most incredible fun choosing camping gear. I really learnt something about the local people there. Camping is really a feature, although not really the domain of women. They sell all their equipment in nicely sewn bags with pockets and zips and velcro, toilet paper bags to hook from the roof of whatever, grill bags, cooler bags of all shapes and sizes, wind shields with matching bags etc etc. Camping carpets, amazing sleeping bags. The list just goes on and on. Guess what you're all getting for christmas!

At 4pm on friday afternoon we jumped in our car and drove out to the dunes. Only about an hour out is a wadi that lies between the gravel plains and the red dunes and here is a sheltered spot where we put up our tents. The kids spent the evening climbing up the dunes and sliding down, and the grownups made a fire and cooked dinner, and chatted, or simply listened to the quiet as I did. It was warm and dreamy, quiet and safe. The next morning we had an early breakfast and then packed up and came back home since it still gets quite hot early in the day.

This is definitely something we're going to be doing often in the coming months. It was wonderful!