Jenyfer Matthews

Just in case you thought I am only taking pictures of foxes and other wildlife, allow me a moment to brag on my daughter. She played her very first tennis tournament last week and won the girls under 12s category.

I admit that I was on pins and needles much of the time. Since it was her first tournament, I wanted so much for her to play well and have a good experience. She lost to a girl she should have defeated in her first match in the under 14s category and was very upset about it, so it was doubly thrilling to see her come back so strong in her second match in the under 12s category.

Putting it in perspective, there was only one other girl in her category she had to beat, but they were both very good players. They had to play the best 2 of 3 sets. My daughter won the first set in a tie breaker and took the second set easily.

Considering that it was her first tournament, she was playing on a hard court (rather than clay, which is her usual surface) in front of an audience, and she came back after a defeat, I was tremendously proud of her for doing so well even if she did only have to play one opponent. She won a $20 gift certificate to a local store for her achievement.

Her first prize money

The only thing better than a swim in a cold lake on a hot summer day…

is a beer margarita on a hot summer day!

My son is off on his overnight camping trip with his grandpa and step-grandma – and I’m on fox feeding duty this evening and tomorrow morning. The question remains whether I’m brave enough to try hand feeding them and whether or not they’d come up to me if I did.

Stay tuned and have a great weekend!

My son is a chip off the old block when it comes to his love of harvesting free wild food. I myself have the fondest memories of picking wild blackberries in North Carolina (or at least the product of the picking, between the heat and the thorns the berry-picking itself wasn’t much fun at all) and I have been known to grab big handfuls of basil growing along the curbs in our neighborhood in Cairo. When we are home in the summertime, I can hardly keep my son out of the woods so great is the lure of raspberries, blueberries, thimbleberries, and June berries. He will hike for miles and miles without complaint, munching his way along.

We were at our neighborhood club last week and my son was bored because none of his friends were around. We were planning to stay for a while so rather than listen to him whine, I suggested he go check out the trees at the back of the lawn to see if there were any “limes” growing. I’m calling them limes for lack of a better term – they aren’t really limes as I know them. Perhaps an ornamental version?

It was a good suggestion since it kept him occupied for a very long time, but little did I know what I was letting myself in for: the little man picked 6.2 pounds of limes!

My son was absolutely filthy by the time he was done (the last place you want to stand during a rain storm in Cairo is under a tree – they accumulate a huge amount of dust in between showers!) and he may rethink his enthusiasm next time as I made him carry the bag home.

The next morning he washed all the limes off and demanded we make juice. Since it was my idea in the first place, I could hardly refuse. What else were we going to do with them?

They didn’t look too bad when we cut them open so we got to work. Need I say that in spite of my son’s declaration that he wanted to make juice every day, he quickly grew bored with the whole process? We juiced every lime in that bag and all we got for our efforts were 1 1/4 cups of juice and a sore arm!

I added about 1/2 cup of sugar and 2 cups of water to make the juice. In the end it was…a bit strange. Not bad exactly, but not a roaring success. We did something similar last year and the children liked it more so I suspect I added more sugar last time. They aren’t so enthusiastic this year. I might like it better myself if I added a cup of gin to it.

Does this count as a new recipe for July? Nah…I didn’t think so!

I’ve been making a bit of a spectacle of myself around the neighborhood recently because I have had it up to here with nearly being run down in the street every time I step outside these days. Since I’ve lived in the same neighborhood for the last four years and the driving / traffic hasn’t really changed much, I can only surmise that the difference is me.

I really need a change of scene.

Since the children have tennis lessons five days a week, I spend a lot of time walking them back and forth to our club. It’s not really that far, and most of the time it isn’t that big a deal. But there is one large, often problematic intersection that we need to cross in order to get to the club.

Picture it: first there is a busy traffic circle with six spokes coming in and out of it. Traffic in Egypt flows counterclockwise, as it would in the US, and were I to walk around that way, I would end up on the closer side to get to our club. However, one of the spokes in that direction is a particularly busy two-way street and the entrance off the circle is a bit blind for the cars so all in all it is worth the extra time and distance for me to play it safe and go around the other way.

Another spoke out of the traffic circle crosses over a railroad track and becomes a two-way boulevard which is immediately crossed by a large one-way street that runs parallel to the railroad track – this is of course the spoke I need to follow. Most of the time walking around the traffic circle clockwise isn’t a big deal, in spite of the one-way boulevard that feeds two lanes of traffic into the circle which I have to cross before I get to the railroad. The trains run infrequently and the parallel street to the railroad is often blocked by the traffic coming from the perpendicular street in to and out of the circle so crossing there isn’t always so bad either, even at rush hour.

(Traffic signals? Police directing traffic? Pshaw! It’s more of an ebb and flow. There are actually a few zebra crossings painted on the road but I’m sure that drivers are perplexed as to the purpose of such patterns.)

The problem lately has been in crossing the boulevard on the other side of the railroad track. There is an island in the middle of the lanes at the top of the street and I cross there so I only have to attempt half the street at a time. There is also a small snack kiosk on this island as well as a florist and people will pull up and park to get what they want – blocking traffic. The people coming along the street then become frustrated by the large speed bump and also the parked cars and will dart in and around, often at high speeds. And did I mention the side street that feeds in just there at a diagonal? That street is after the speed bump so most of the time cars coming from that direction will just merge as quickly as possible so as to get in front of the cars delayed by all the other obstacles. (You really do have to have eyes in the back of you head around here.)

It’s bad enough when I’m alone and some schmuck comes racing around a corner or around another car and misses me by inches, but it really pisses me off when my kids are with me. It scares them and me too. Most of the year I just mutter obscenities under my breath and keep going.

(My children are always so amazed when we are in another country and people actually yield to pedestrians. How sad is it that that makes such an impression on such young children?)

Lately I’ve been a bit more dramatic. I’ve only let a few colorful phrases fly, but I have been stopping in the middle of the street and ushering cars past with an exaggerated double arm wave and a bow. Occasionally I take a swing at them with a bag as they pass and have seriously contemplated kicking out a few headlights. I’ve yelled in a few open windows too. It hasn’t done much to change anyone’s behavior but it makes me feel a little better and I’m sure it amuses the traffic police who are loitering in the intersections smoking.

Yesterday evening as I was crossing with my daughter, a car came over the railroad at a high speed for a neighborhood street and then accelerated in spite of the fact that we were in the middle of the street and directly in his path. I had my hands full of stuff so wasn’t able to make the gesture I wanted, but I did yell. As we cleared the street and the driver passed me, he said “What?” Stop the car, buddy, and I’ll be happy to tell you what.

Need I say that I am counting down the days until my vacation??

I often long to have a day free of obligations, chores, and errands – a long expanse of time that is open to all possibility. I dream of hours of open time in which to do anything I like or nothing at all. Hours in which I can choose not to go out, not to do any housework, not to do anything at all.

Those sorts of days are few and far between, and the sad truth of the matter is that when I do actually manage to get a day like that I find that time drags and I am left with a listless, restless, unsatisfied feeling of having done nothing. I really do prefer to be busy than not.

Yesterday was one of those long, dragging days. I started out tired and unmotivated to do much because we’d been out late the night before and it was already hot at 8am. I had already done the weekly shopping over the weekend and I let myself off the hook for cleaning the floor*. I thought instead I might finish up the tiny bit of quilting that is left to be done on the Noah’s Ark quilt and also start the final formatting of Separation Anxiety. I did complete the formatting but never did get to the quilting. Instead I found myself killing time, clicking from here to there on the internet, staring at Facebook willing someone to interact with me.

No wonder I felt depressed.

(*I’m glad I didn’t do the floors however because a sand storm blew started in the evening while we were at tennis practice. Yuck. I have some workmen coming on Thursday to install weatherstripping. Not a moment too soon!)

Today I kicked myself in the butt first thing in the morning and got going. I still didn’t get to the quilting but I did get the floors cleaned and ran out to do a few errands. Not exactly fun but necessary and at least I feel productive. And I now have a definite plan on how to do the quilting which was the main stumbling block to actually getting started. There’s always tomorrow…

With all of my recently enforced home time due to my mystery illness, I am at least a week ahead of schedule on my quilt projects. I’m about 20 inches from being done on the binding edge on the queen sized commission I’m working on and just about done with the Noah’s Ark baby quilt as well. I am determined to finish up the queen sized quilt today so I can wash it tomorrow morning and hopefully deliver it by the end of the week.

What a load off my mind that will be. I’ll post pictures as soon as I wash off the chalk marks.

As if my children’s tennis schedule wasn’t onerous enough before, it’s recently been increased. I am now sitting at tennis practice for 13 – yes, I said 13 – hours a week. I anticipate much bonding time with my netbook (her name is Rosemary). I took her along last night so I could do a little editing during my long vigil. If I can reclaim even half of that time every week, just imagine what I could accomplish?

And because you can never start shopping too far ahead of time, I ordered my daughter her very own multi-colored rotating dance ball for her birthday next month. Now we can have a disco any night the mood hits. I also ordered a Nintendo DS for my son to be delivered to me in the US this summer, for his big Christmas present. I even scare myself when I get this efficient.

This is what happens when mommy is too sick and tired to play with the children on a holiday weekend and allows them to play with her digital camera instead of taking them out.

They take pictures of the television.

They also took pictures of each other, but frankly, most of these were better.

See what I mean?

I’m going to need a reprieve on the new-recipe-a-month resolution thing. Pain and illness are both excellent appetite suppressants and no inspiration for cooking for others. I’ll try to do TWO in June as soon as I’m up to speed again. We’ll see how that works out…

I remember when I was small, The Wizard of Oz came on network TV every year. It didn’t matter that I’d seen it before, I watched it faithfully every time. I loved Glenda the Good Witch (I really wanted a dress like hers), knew the songs by heart, and feared the flying monkeys.

But it wasn’t until I moved abroad that I became fully conscious of how many quotes from the movie had made their way into everyday American colloquial language and it was a shock to realize that while The Wizard of Oz is very much an American classic, it is largely unknown in the greater world. I suppose it makes sense that other countries would have their own classics and pop culture icons, but given how many references I can think of from the movie, it still seems odd that it’s so very local to America:

I’ll get you my pretty…and your little dog too!

Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

There’s no place like home.

I bought the movie for my children but waited a long time before I let them watch it – I didn’t want those flying monkeys to freak them out. Having watched it as an adult I found the monkeys and the scene where Dorothy melts the Wicked Witch of the West a bit anticlimactic. It’s nice to watch the children’s reactions though – they haven’t yet been spoiled by modern cinematic effects.

And the monkeys still freak them out as much as ever.

My son is only seven, in grade two in the British system. Every year since he’s started school his teachers have expressed concern about his handwriting and his ability to “express his thoughts” in writing. When I tried once to respond to this concern by saying I thought it was quite common for little boys to have poor handwriting and that we were practicing writing his name at home, his teacher at the time gave me a serious look and said “you did give him a really long name.” As if handwriting should have been on my mind when I chose his name!

Of course, things have only progressed as he’s moved up through the grades. His handwriting hasn’t improved much, nor has his spelling, and asking him to sit down and write a couple of sentences for homework is pure torture – for both of us. This week’s assignment: Imagine a new planet where (pick a scenario) time runs backward, there is no day or night, people are tiny, etc and then explain how life is from when you wake up in the morning to when you go to sleep at night. What things are easier? What things are more difficult?

I know adults who would have trouble coming up with a decent response to such an assignment let alone a seven year old boy who’d rather be doing just about anything else but sitting still and writing an essay after a long day spent at school sitting still and doing work.

What makes it all worse is that I know my son could do it if he wanted to. He has the fine motor skills to trace detailed pictures and to color elaborate illustrations inside the lines. There are even times when he will sit down with a notebook and write himself a story out of his head, complete with illustrations. What’s the difference? Motivation. He wants to do his thing, not theirs. I get that – I can’t write someone else’s story ideas either. I, however, was always a good student and did my assignments well to please my teacher if nothing else. Hard to know how to instill that desire in my own children.

Every year I tell myself that I’ll work with the children during the summer to improve the subject they are having the most difficulty with: math for my daughter and writing for my son. Then by the end of the school year I’m so tired and fed up with fighting with them both to get through the required school work that I let it slide… for the whole summer. When will *I* learn?

As we come up to the last month of school and the end of the year, I’m dreading the next parent teacher conference where I’ll have to sit and nod while the teachers tell me about my son’s failure to perform up to their (in my opinion, ridiculous) standards in writing and how my daughter knows the math but doesn’t test well. Blah blah blah. Both of these things are well documented already. Surprise me and tell me something new, please.

Five weeks of school left and counting…

My daughter’s tenth birthday is in mid-July but we had her party on Friday so she could have it with her friends before school ends. All in all it seemed to be a success.

I was fairly stressed out during the planning however. I know it sounds stupid – it’s just a child’s party after all. You’d have to have seen some of the parties I’ve seen here to understand.

Many of the families at the school my children attend work in the oil industry – a more lucrative career choice than academics. In my time here I’ve seen parties where the parents take the entire class bowling and out for lunch at Chilis. Parties where the parents rent space and hire bouncy castles and/or bungee jumping trampolines. In addition they might also hire clowns, magicians, DJs, bubble machines, popcorn carts, cotton candy machines, and face painters. There are party planners you can call and get complete packages – pay them enough and they’ll even manage the games for you. One party we attended was catered by a rather swish Indian restaurant.

Then there’s me with the at-home do-it-yourself party.

I truly do believe that simple is better and that while the children find all of the above options fun, they aren’t really necessary. Ever see a kid play with a stick? Or a rock? I apply the same concept to the birthday party, though I admit I do worry about the consequences of my choices. No one wants their child to be embarrassed by their parents. On the other hand, how do you continue to top yourself from year to year when you set the bar so high, so young?

My daughter and I decided on a dance party and invited fourteen girls. I compiled two disks of music from our CDs and iTunes, cleared the living room of furniture, picked up the carpets, and borrowed a multi-colored dance globe. I littered the floor with balloons and hooked the video camera up to the TV so they could watch themselves dance. I hung a small disco ball over the food table and a ran strand of twinkling white lights on the side board near the stereo.

Since I didn’t rent a dance hall or hire a DJ, I decided to wow them with hard-to-find American junk food: mini bagel pizzas, popcorn, puffed twisted Cheetos, four flavors of Kool-Aid, and watermelon and instead of cake I planned to serve build-your-own ice cream sundaes complete with choices of M&Ms, Oreos, sprinkles, chocolate or strawberry sauce, whipped cream, and maraschino cherries. I figured if I supplied enough sugar, they would supply the fun

In spite of the fact that everything was coming together nicely, the night before the party I woke in the early hours of the morning from a vivid dream that the party was over but that I’d forgotten to serve the ice cream sundaes!!

We ended up having nearly 100% attendance – only one girl couldn’t make it. Picture it: fourteen little girls dancing and playing in my living room sticking balloons to their heads with static electricity. They even initiated and ran a game of musical statues on their own. My main function was to serve food and stay out of the way. My daughter really didn’t want me to join in the dancing, though I admit to bopping around the kitchen a bit.

I did not forgot the ice cream – believe me, I was very focused on that – but I did forget to carve and serve the watermelon!

The only thing that would have been better would have been if I’d had the party at night to maximize the effect of the dance light, but since we have floor to ceiling windows covered only by sheers and it doesn’t get dark now until nearly 8pm that wasn’t really an option – at least not until she turns sixteen!

The dance light and the music brought back fond memories of my own birthday parties at the local roller rink. When I told my daughter about it, she thought it sounded really great and it’s sad to think that roller rinks don’t seem to exist anymore. Whatever happened to them, do you think? Out of fashion? Too big a space to rent? Too much liability insurance required against injuries? How many of you remember doing the Hokey-Pokey on rollerskates?