Don't ya just hate it when...

a baby sneezes right after you put a spoonful of food in his mouth?

Baby breakfast all over. Yippy!

Blogger hates me

Every time I try to post Blogger refuses to connect and allow me. That's one reason I haven't posted any updates in the last week. 6 tries at posting a long update post with no luck. I'll keep trying though.

Testing

Blogger has been really picky the last couple of days and not letting me post a new message so here's a test message to see if it is the message it doesn't like or just me. ;P

Castaway

Castaway came on tv last night and it was striking in a way how much I can relate to Tom Hanks' character. Moving to a different country has resulted in being virtually cut off from friends and family, not that it has to be that way thanks to the telephone and internet. However, most of the time, I'm the only one that calls or writes e-mail and only one friend ever responds to my e-mail but no regularly. For me, my dh could be my version of "Wilson". He tries but just can't really relate. Then you've got that whole idea of stumbling about trying to take care of basic needs. It's all here, you just have to figure out how to get it in unfamiliar surroundings. I can also relate to him getting hurt so much at the beginning. The first month or so I was here, I managed to hurt myself so many times it's not even funny. All of which were mostly the result of adjusting to new surroundings but still, it got really annoying. I can even relate to the tooth scene where he knocks out an infected molar since I had to have a couple of teeth pulled soon after arriving here. (I have lousy teeth.)

On the up side, Hanks' finds his grove and becomes an expert in his surroundings. I know that given time I'll figure everything out and I'll probably even get up the courage to start driving here. (The driving here is crazy, but people are used to it. Whatever, whenever is no big deal. Stuck at a traffic light, go ahead and make another lane or two or three. Need to make a right hand turn but you're in the far left lane? No, problem just cut in front of the four lanes of traffic to the right. The mom of one of my students put it this way..."We're comfortable.")

No Sick Days

Yes, one of the major down sides of being a parent, particularly a mother is that you don't get any sick days. Babies still have to be nursed, kids have to be fed, everyone has to be cleaned up after, and laundry has to be washed. Now, alhamdullelah, I don't get sick that often but I've managed to catch my first cold since we got here 4 1/2 months ago. That's not bad considering EVERYONE got sick about a month ago (including in-laws) and I managed to stay healthy. The first time I came to Iran 8 years ago, I managed to get sick about once a month, so all in all I can't complain this time around. I really only start to feel bad at night or early in the morning. The rest of the time I just suck it up, get moving and feel ok. I really do believe that alot of how a person deals with being sick is mind over matter. If you let yourself act sick then you'll just feel worse. Also, I've noticed that since I cut way back on red meat (maybe once every two or three weeks) and started eating lots more veggies, I don't get sick nearly as often as I used to even in times of stress when the immune system can be compromised.

TV here

One of the great things about living in Iran is that you get TV programming from all over. We just watched an awesome BBC nature show. Among my favorites here are a French police drama with a female lead and an Italian forensics drama similar to CSI in US. A few months ago there was a great Iranian serial that I'd try to catch. It was tough to catch though since it was during time I have to get kids ready for bed. There's also a few game shows that I like to watch. When we first got here, one of the stations was finishing up it's Summer Film Festival with movies from around the world. This weekend another station is playing the original German movie "Wings of Desire"(?) that "City of Angels" is based off of. Next week their playing "March of the Penguins". Having lots of interesting stuff to watch certainly helps me work on my Farsi.

Homeschooling

I truly miss homeschooling our kids this year. I mentioned before that we aren't homeschooling here because of our desire for the kids to learn Farsi and my very limited Farsi skills. I've basically been "homeschooling" them since they were babies. I can say this because all parents teach their kids the first few years of life unless they've choosen to pass off that responsiblity to some other full-time caregiver like a nanny. We basically unschooled for the last two years and my kids learned so much in that time. We'd have discussions on everything from space to organ transplants. We did verbal math word problems in the car while running errands which included all three kids from 6 down to 3. (Although at 3, all of her answers tended to be 5 so I tried to make sure her problems added up to 5.) Because of this, my 5 and now 4 year old do very well at mental math. Their 7 year old brother is not as good at mental math but is well above grade level once you give him pencil and paper. He's also well versed in a variety of science subjects including some at a high school level because that is where his interests lie. I watched my oldest two become fast readers because they were given the materials they needed and left to work at their own pace. My son worked through the entire 5 levels of the Hooked on Phonics program in 5 months somedays working for 2 hours straight, at other times not touching it for up to a week. My 5 year old decided she didn't need the program anymore after working half way through the second level and she was absolutely correct. They both can read just about anything they want now. Mustafa is an avid reader. We recently received a box of books that we had shipped and he devoured 3 Magic School Bus books and was hungry for more so he started reading one of my magazines. Safiya is more apt to read only when she's in the mood but has wonderful retention and surprisingly good spelling, which means no more spelling out things we don't want them to hear.

Since moving here and the kids starting school, we just haven't had the same kind of time for our in-depth discussions or following lots of tangents when a subject comes up. Despite the fact that the kids are only at school 4 hours a day 6 days a week, we've only had two really good conversations that I can remember and the last time Mustafa was begging for more. Mustafa has ended up with lots of busy work which takes him quite a while to do since he's not a very fast writer. They also have to be in bed by 8:30 or they're nearly impossible to get up for school which starts at 8. This a big contrast to how we used to live. I would take classes at night so the kids were usually up until at least 10:30 every night, midnight if it was a masjid night. They were then allowed to sleep as long as they wanted to which usually meant until somewhere between 8:30 and 9:30. Here kids stay up late but only because they usually take a nap during the afternoon like their parents. My kids rarely ever take naps after they're about 18 months old. Even my 8 month old only naps twice a day for about 10-20 minutes at a time usually.

Oh well, I'll keep gently reminding them that learning is not something that ends when school ends. So far, they're still doing alright and are interested in learning more about their world but I really do wish we were still homeschooling.

Laundry at 3 a.m.

Yes, last night I was up at 3 a.m. doing laundry. It seems my kids managed to produce 3 loads of laundry in 2 days. Don't ask me how. I still can't figure it out. Granted my washing machine here holds smaller loads than I was used to in the U.S. but I'm now doing an average of 2 loads every 2 days where I used to do about 5 loads a week. I know it doesn't help having an 8 month old who is such a drool machine that can soak a shirt in less than an hour but baby clothes aren't that big. As for mine and hubby's clothes, I've now finished two loads and so far there are only 5 articles of our clothing. How in the world do moms of really big families manage? There's one mom of 8 that has an unschooling blog which led me to start my own blog. Maybe I could ask her since her family includes little children. I can't imagine how our foremothers used to manage. I had a great, great, great, great grandmother who had 26 kids according to family lore. Imagine her laundry day or any mealtime! God bless her!

What's in a name?

I just looked at the top 100 names from Parent Center for 2005 and I was surprised to see that Michelle didn't even make it into the top 100. When I was a kid there was always at least one other Michelle in my grade or even in my class. Because of this when it came time to name our kids I (usually) tried to pick Islamic names that were not incredibly common. But wouldn't ya know, it didn't exactly turn out the way I planned. Our third child is named Zahra and our best friends decided to name their third child Zahra as well. (Their's is about a year younger than our's.) Then a few other kids named Zahra started going to the masjid we attended and now one of my students is named Zahra. All told we know at least 5 other kids named Zahra. Oh, well. I tried.

My wierd kids

Leave it to my family to have wierd stuff happen. About a month ago, Mustafa, oldest, showed my that for some odd reason, when his six year molars came in the gums did not separate as usual but came off the teeth as a flap which remained attached by a few millimeters. So, he basically had two flaps of gum hangs down next to his upper molars. A few days ago, I was brushing Safiya's teeth and found that her two lower front permenant teeth were coming up BEHIND her baby teeth! Needless to say, she had to go and have her baby teeth pulled. Because the dentist was worried about crowding, he pulled all four front baby teeth. She's now ahead of Mustafa for losing baby teeth and she did remarkably well considering she is an absolute sissy when it comes to pain.

This is me

Wondering what in the world an American woman is doing living in Iran?

You might be surprised to find out that there are many women from all over the west living here. Some have been here for decades.

Me, I've only been here for about 4 months but this is the third time I've come. I first came about 8 years ago not long after I got married. We stayed for 7 months but decided to head back to the States so that I could finish school. Three pregnancies delayed my re-entry into the world of academia and the forth played havoc with my finishing. (I found out I was pregnant again with only 7 classes left to take. I stayed on full-time the first semester but reduced the number of classes I was taking from 6 to 4 because of fatigue and all day morning sickness. I took 2 finals just about a week after delivery and finished my last class before my son was 2 months old.) But finish I did. (with Honors I might add)

We had talked about coming back to Iran and after I finished school it seemed like the best time. My father-in-law has had several health problems and he continues to deteriorate and my mother-in-law's health seems to be declining as well. I wanted our kids to have a chance to really get to know at least one set of their grandparents. My parents have been largely absent from their lives. My dad hasn't seen my oldest two since my 7 year old's 2nd birthday. My mom has been slightly better but only because we've gone to see her. (Dad was too far away for us to travel to on a limited budget with small children.) It reminds me very much of the limited contact I had with my dad's parents. Grandma died when I was little more than a toddler and Grandpa did when I was somewhere around 5-7, but I only remember spending any time with him twice and seeing him once in the hospital right before he died. On the other hand, I grew up in close contact with my mom's family, including spending several summers with them. I wanted to give our kids that kind of connection.

Also, I want our kids to be fluent in both English and Farsi. I've spent the last 2 years working on a degree in Linguistics and learned that my son was getting very near the end of "the window of opportunity" for achieving full native fluency.

So, combine my in-laws declining health, our desire that the kids learn both languages and our original intent to return to Iran and here we are. For having only been here 4 months, we're all doing surprisingly well. The two oldest have really excelled in picking up the language, in large part because they are in school. (This goes against my homeschooling beliefs but I know that, at least for now, it's necessary since my Farsi isn't strong enough help them achieve fluency.) We're all having to make adjustments to how things function here, basically just because it's a different set-up than we're used to, so it takes time to figure things out.

Also, I have chosen not to drive here because the driving is just so crazy while I tend to be a very "by the book" kind of driver so I know I'd be way to nervous to drive with four kids in the car. Because of this, hubby has had to take on the role of errand-runner and kid transporter that I used to hold. We'll see how long I can hold out for with not driving since for me it feels very restricting sometimes since, even with kids, I'm so used to jumping in the car whenever I need to take care of business or just get out for a bit. They have lots of taxis and buses here but I'm not quite brave enough to take them with a preschooler and a toddler in tow although I used to take the bus all the time 8 years ago before kids.

It's almost 2 a.m. and I still have laundry to fold and school clothes to iron for tomorrow. Yippy! Oh, well. That's what I get for playing on the computer so long.

Message in a bottle

Writing a blog seems very much like sending out a message in a bottle. Or perhaps like tying a note to a balloon hoping that where ever it lands, someone will care enough to read it and maybe even reply. We use to do this at school when I was a kid. You tie some kind of note and contact info to the string, let it go and wait. Waiting for a kid is so very hard. Your expectations are so high and you hope each and every day for a reply. But the fact is that very few of the balloons we ever released at school ever received a reply. So it must be for posting blogs. The chances are one in several million that anyone will ever care to even take a peek at what you've written yet millions of people post every day.

Oh, well. Still I'll hope and send my balloons up into the air, cross my fingers and wait.