Update

Hi friends,

It has been a much better week this week.  In fact, I would call it a nice week.  The boat is here but of course we have not heard anything about when our container will clear customs.  Let's all cross our fingers that it can be delivered on Saturday, okay? Because Eli is going to LA on Saturday night for a business trip.  If I am still in the hotel, this trip could be really horrible for me; if I am in our house, this trip could be great because I can spend all my time getting our house organized.

The resolution to the big school question is that we are going to leave Tommy in TAISM.  This is for many reasons but first because he has had some adjustment difficulty (e.g. punching a kid) and it seems unfair to ask him to do it all over again in September, and second, because it's better for our family schedule which has to count for something.  There are also lots of kids from TAISM who live in our little community and I like that he bumps into friends at the playground when we go.  (He's really funny now that I've gotten his football blown up.  We go, run into one of three little Spanish-speaking boys who are really, really good at football, and then Tommy bosses them around even though they are one million times better at football than he is.  One thing I love about Tommy is that when he says his friends names, it is in perfectly accented Spanish.)

The car is working fine now.  It's a long story but some water got somewhere there shouldn't have been any and it had to work its way out of the system which it has now done.

Did you guys like that Dubai post with the sideways pictures? I thought so.  I promise to get my act together some day, I really do.  All I know is that nobody is reading this blog because it's visually pleasing.  It's totally not.  I have no excuse.

Today Lizzie and I met Eli in the mall for lunch. (I also had to go to the Carrefour to fuel Eli's lemon almond addiction.  I have no idea how they make them, but these almonds are so delicious and they have a lemon juice coating on the outside.)  Now what's odd about it is that it feels so normal to be one of a handful of westerners in a food court full of men in dishdashas and women in abayas.

It's getting hotter here.  My friend Kathy described the heat as escalating a bit each week, "like boiling a frog."  However, it is nice to know we will be out of here for the worst of it.

Guess what?  Such exciting news:  Sarah Reed had her baby and he is GORGEOUS.

And that's all I've got for you today.  xoxo