Jenyfer Matthews

My husband, being a little older than I am, decided that he wanted to balance the children’s musical exposure by including some 70s music in the line-up. I’m certainly enjoying it – and you haven’t seen anything funnier than a 9 year old dancing hip-hop to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”!

We don’t need no education…
We don’t need no mind control…

While I was looking forward to the children going back to school, one thing I wasn’t looking forward to was the crazy schedule that tends to go hand in hand with being back in school. Some parents do Scouts, some do music lessons. We do sports.

If it were just one sport, I’d probably manage well enough. But it’s THREE sports x TWO children. That makes for a fairly busy and complicated schedule trying to remember who has to be where at what time on which days.

Truly, I never thought I’d be that mom – the one who scheduled ever minute of their child’s day. And I know what you’re thinking – why do I let them participate in so much? I could always do what my mother did which was to say “no, no time/money”. But she worked full time so she had a built in excuse for not being able to pick me up after school, and if I had really cared I probably would have pushed harder. I have no such excuse, and you should see the puppy eyes they give me! How can I tell them no when all of the activities they are asking for are such healthy pursuits that they are also good at?

They each take tennis lessons: a sport which they can continue to play their entire lives so long as they can find one other person to play. Those lessons account for five evenings a week between the two of them.

They are both about to start playing in the community soccer league. Soccer is an excellent companion sport to tennis because they build up stamina from all the running and good footwork besides. It’s not as if I had to twist their arms either – both of them love soccer. That accounts for one evening of practice and a Saturday morning game for each child – at different locations for their different age groups of course.

The one sport I actively tried to discourage was the swim team at school. On the plus side, swimming is a wonderful exercise. On the other, it’s just one more day of practice and another obligation during an already packed schedule. I’ve reluctantly given in but if it starts to interfere too much with other things – like school work – it’s the first thing that will be cut.

They have so much going on that it’s actually beginning to interfere with my own exercise schedule. But I’m hoping that running them from one place to the next will make up the difference!

Really? So how the $%&* else are you supposed to get water out of a stack of sopping wet clothes?

I did two largish loads of clothes in my bathtub yesterday and let me say it was no fun. And I did wring AND twist them to get enough water out of them to make it reasonable to hang them up to dry and I still had a large puddle on my balcony when I was done.

I myself went on a clothes ration at the first sign of trouble – generally speaking I can wear a pair of pants several times before they need washing. Unfortunately, it is still pretty hot in Cairo so we’re all sweating. And I live with a six year old boy who is a dirt magnet. He doesn’t really even have to try very hard and he comes home covered in a layer of grime at the end of the day. Between the dirt and the sweat there is no way he can wear his clothes more than once and still look presentable.

I will never complain about hand washing my dishes again. That’s a walk in the park on a spring day compared to hand washing clothes!

Ironically, I feel as if I’ve been through the wringer. I didn’t suffer any muscle soreness after my water aerobics class on Sunday evening, nor after my power yoga class on Wednesday night, in spite of the fact I’ve done no yoga since the studio closed in late June and no formal exercise regime all summer. But every muscle in my body is sore after a day of hand washing clothes and vacuuming. I woke myself up rolling over my muscles are so achy!

Astonishingly enough, the repairman showed up late yesterday afternoon, two days before I expected him and replaced the motor and a belt for FREE – just over three years from when we purchased the machine. After experiencing hand washing, I would have gratefully paid for the parts! (Nope – not going to catch on as an exercise regime!!) It’s an LG if anyone cares. They’ve just created one loyal customer!

Why is it that when I was away on vacation I’d have 20+ emails in my inbox every time I checked it, but now that I have the time to sit down and read them and respond I have none? Where is everyone? Or do you think it might be more a factor of the frequency with which I check my email when I am at home (every 10 minutes or so, give or take)?

I actually have other things I could be doing but I’m restless and bored. I’m home but not really back in my routine yet. It’s the lull before the sports crazy fall starts – the children want to do tennis AND soccer AND swim team. All that in addition to school and homework. Soon I’ll be too busy to check email again and no doubt there will be a deluge.

What are you up to today?

I got all of my suitcases unpacked and am slowly taming the rest of our apartment. It helps that the plant sitter did a pretty thorough clean-up before we arrived home. But I still have plenty to do – it would just be easier if I could kick the jet lag.

The first couple of nights I fell into bed exhausted by 10pm. Then I woke up and tossed and turned between midnight and 4am, finally falling back asleep and intending to get myself up at 8am – or by 9am at the latest. Instead, I slept until 10am. Last night I actually slept most of the night, until one of the usual Cairo summertime brown-outs occurred about 3am, requiring me to get up and deal with the AC in the children’s room when the electricity came back on. I was drowsy but didn’t fall back to sleep immediately. I woke up when my husband went to work then blinked and it was 10am again. The only improvement on this scenario is that at least this time the children were up before me.

We have another week off of school so it’s not crucial that we get up before 10am. I could just go with it and enjoy it. But I have things to do!! In the beginning of the summer when it seemed like I had all the time in the world I didn’t worry about all those math pages the teachers sent home to help give the children a head start for the new year (at my request I feel compelled to add). Now we only have a week left and they each have a stack of pages to do. Since it’s not their fault I procrastinated, I’m picking and choosing which ones we complete.

But we’d get a whole lot more done if I didn’t sleep half the day away!

My son has always been a real BOY. Since he was old enough to express an opinion, he’s preferred toys with wheels (cars) and he can get dirtier faster than my daughter, even if they are playing the same game. Few to none of his clothes survive him to be passed on to anyone else. Shoes? I’m lucky if they last a few months. It’s the rare pair that doesn’t fall apart from abuse before he outgrows them.

This summer he’s really been in his element. He got an early birthday present of a screened bug house. He collects grasshoppers, lady bugs, and anything else he can find – including garter snakes (that snake was not happy to be in the bug house!) His lack of fear is scaring me – I looked out of the window of the house and saw him walking up to a deer in the yard!

Some of his activities are pretty yucky though – and I’m not just saying that because I’m a girl. When we were having our extreme hike up the creek, he found a fairly well preserved dead frog. Did he fling it away in disgust? Nope, he raced it down the rapids like most kids would do with a paper boat or a stick. Not just once either – he followed it, retrieved it, and did it over and over again until the current finally swept the frog corpse under a large boulder. Even that didn’t discourage my son. At that point he attempted to build a dam so he could divert the water and reclaim the frog!

I’m glad he found a way to amuse himself so well, and maybe it is because I’m a girl, but I still can’t help thinking that the activity was more than a little gross!

So I brought my laptop along with me, planning on writing in the evenings after I put the children to bed. It hasn’t really worked out as well as I had hoped.

It’s hard enough for me to get started on a new story. What’s so vivid in my head evaporates as I stare at the blank page. Being here helps, because this is in fact where my next story is set, and the details of the story are growing in my mind every day. So what’s the problem?

The children aren’t cooperating with me.

I do my best to keep them busy all day long and I put them to bed at 8:30pm, but do they go to sleep? Nope. No matter how tired they are, they mess around and giggle and play for at least an hour. I usually have to go in and yell at them at least twice before they finally consent to at least whisper. It’s distracting to the writing process to say the least. They finally settle down somewhere close to 10pm, by which time I’m exhausted myself!

The only night they fell asleep easily in the last couple of weeks was after having completed a 7 mile hike up Eagle Mountain and back. Do I need to say that they weren’t the only ones who were tired that night?!

I have been making lots of notes on random thoughts that have popped into my head and I am happy to say I managed a few pages last night. I’m hoping to squeak out a few more tonight. But I don’t think I’m going to get as much done on this trip as I had hoped…

One of the things I miss living I’m in Egypt is driving. I enjoy driving, but not only that, driving was always the time when I was able to listen to music. Since I don’t drive in Egypt my music listening habits have been much curtailed. Not that I’m missing much in Cairo. The one Western music radio station I’ve heard plays a bizarre mix of old and new pop with the occasional Arabic track mixed in and certain times of the day seem to be dedicated to techno dance music or other themes – honestly, I’ve never listened long enough to discern the pattern.

Now that I’m back in the US and on vacation, I’m driving again. But I still can’t listen to the music I like. There isn’t much in the way of radio reception way back here in the woods. That doesn’t faze my children at all, however.

Way back when I was a child, my musical choices were pretty much dictated by my parents – particularly when traveling in a car. I listened to what they listened to, which given the technological limitations of the time period pretty much meant that we listened to the radio. One of the earliest songs I can remember singing along to was “Rhinestone Cowboy” by Glen Campbell. I have a vast repertoire of lyrics from Barry Manilow, Billy Joel, and Neil Diamond to name a few, and there was one memorable summer when my father tortured me on a cross country drive with tapes of Woody Guthrie. Though I might have made other choices myself – and very likely made some disparaging remarks about their choices in my adolescent years – I never managed to impose my own music on them.

Somehow, that all seems to have changed. I regularly end up listening to CDs my children select instead of things I might prefer myself. Last summer, that meant that we listened to the Grease soundtrack on an endless loop. This summer was threatening to turn into the summer of the Jonas Brothers. I don’t actually hate the Jonas Brothers but I’ve heard “The Year 3000” more than enough times, so I decided to take charge and broaden their musical horizons.

Inspired by a recent trip to a bowling alley, I bought three CDs of hits from the 1980s. The bowling alley was playing music videos from that time period and we were all enjoying the music, a rare occurrence. These CDs haven’t done anything toward introducing me to any new popular music, but they seemed like a good idea at the time.
“We Got the Beat” by the GoGos, “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves, and “Walk Like an Egyptian” by The Bangles were all big hits. And then I heard the lyrics to “My Angel is a Centerfold” by the J. Giles Band coming from my six year olds mouth and it put a new spin on things. And that wasn’t as half as bad as “My Sharona” or “Good Girls Don’t” by The Knack:

You’re alone with her at last,
And you’re waiting til you think the time is right.
Cause you’ve heard she’s pretty fast.
And you’re hoping that she’ll give you some tonight.
So, you start to make your play,
Cause you could’ve sworn you thought you heard her saying…

And it’s a teenage sadness
Everyone has got to taste.
An in-between age madness
That you know you can’t erase
Til she’s sitting on your face.

They haven’t asked for any interpretation of the lyrics so for now I’m just going to enjoy the music. My alternative is either more of Grease, The Jonas Brothers, or the two High School Musical CDs my daughter got for her birthday. I think I’d rather take my chances with the 80s for now…

Yesterday was the last day of school and both children arrived home weeping. I was a good student and liked my teachers well enough, but crying because school was finished for the year was never my reaction to the last day of school!

The kids seem happier today – and have kept themselves busy. The pop-up soccer goals that Santa brought haven’t seen much action in their intended capacity but they are being used today – as tents. The kids have put them side by side, covered them with a fleece blanket and dragged their pillows inside along with their flashlights. Their intention is to sleep in “the tent” tonight. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Their room is currently a disaster, but hey, it’s better than watching TV all day and I have only heard the words “I’m bored” once today so far…

It really heated up in Cairo over the weekend. Great for drying clothes outside but not for much else. And because it’s so hot, people are running their air conditioners more which does two things: pumps yet more and hotter air back outside and puts more strain on the already inadequate electrical infrastructure of the city. It won’t be long before the rotational black-outs start. We’re lucky because our power is rarely off for more than half an hour, and usually in the middle of the night. But once in a while an unplanned black out occurs. Yesterday I had to grocery shop by the light of the flashlight in my cell phone because the transformer in the building next to the grocery store had blown. Smoke was billowing out from between the cracks in the pavement as I walked home. Is it any wonder that the quality of frozen foods isn’t the best here?

I have lots to accomplish in the few weeks that remain before I leave Egypt for the summer (provided I don’t contract H1N1 flu and get quarantined or grounded before I leave, touch wood) but all this heat is making me lethargic. I need to get busy quilting the moose head wall hanging but have found that my thread colors aren’t quite right. It may be some sort of elaborate procrastination method generated by my genuine fear of messing this thing up, but I can’t start until I get the right colors of thread and yesterday when I went to the shop it was closed. Will try again tomorrow.

And today I got another commission, this time for a bed scarf (they are all the rage, darling!) The project itself isn’t such a big deal, the problem is that the family is leaving Egypt at the end of September so I have to get a start on it now if I have any hope of completing it before they leave, given that I will be away shortly for six weeks myself. If the school shuts down because of H1N1 flu, I’ll be totally screwed.

(No, H1N1 is not actually such a big deal here but the Egyptian government is taking no chances at all – hence the senseless slaughtering of masses of pigs.)

Basically, I’m just trying to prioritize and get through it all – and stay cool in the process…