Jenyfer Matthews

Where I hear to what lengths other parents have gone to entertain their children during school holidays, I sometimes feel a little guilty that I don’t try a little harder myself. Not having a car limits us, but I *could* make arrangements if I really wanted to. So that’s what I did this last week of their school holiday. A friend and I arranged for a van from her husband’s company and we took all of our children ice skating at a mall in another part of Cairo called Nasr City.

It’s not that far to Nasr City but once we got on the road I was immediately reminded why I don’t do such things more often – it took us a little more than an hour to get to the mall with all the (scary) traffic on the roads. The mall itself looked fairly nice – and oddly enough was decorated for Christmas. There was even a large Christmas tree right in the middle of the ice rink (which itself was in the middle of the mall) I didn’t have any time to look around however – the van needed to be back and available for employee transport by 4pm. Once we finally arrived, the children had an hour to skate before we had to jump back in the van and drive the hour back home.

But what a fun hour it was. The children had an absolute blast. They started out hanging on the rail around the rink and by the end were playing ice tag. Our time passed much, much too quickly. In an ideal world, it wouldn’t take so long to get back there. But since it does, I think next time I’ll arrange our transport a bit differently so we have the option to stay a bit longer if we wish. Skate, lunch, skate some more.

Any maybe next time I won’t have twisted my ankle the week before and will be able to join them!

The children’s tennis coach is a funny guy. One of his main objectives with younger children is to make them “love tennis” and to achieve this, he rewards them with various things. Once in a while he comes up with something practical like a tennis bag or wrist bands but most of the time he gives them candy and inexpensive stuffed animals that make LOUD animal noises and have creepy flashing eyes.

This week, the coach had an impromptu mini-tournament in my son’s group. Since my son won 4 of his 4 games, he was #1 in the tournament and won the grand prize, to be given to his mother.

(click image to enlarge – if necessary!)

As you can see, he stuck to the animal theme! They are at least a size too big for me and the sole is pretty insubstantial and squashy so my foot is always slipping off to one side – not to mention that the bottom is sort of sticky and loud when I walk.

I have a couple of nice pairs of slippers from L.L. Bean and Cabelas, but the little man is so proud I just have to wear these for a while, even if they make my feet sweat.

I suppose it could be worse – at least I can make an argument for not wearing them in public!

I hadn’t been out of the house a whole lot for any length of time while tending to the sick boy, so let me tell you it was a nice change of pace to go to my daughter’s tennis lesson Wednesday night. Only when I got home again I noticed a distinct smell. Not a rotten smell, just sort of musty. I am fairly sensitive to smells – I don’t like strong fragrances and avoid detergents and paper products with scents – so this smell, mild as it was, was disturbing to say the least.

I had been parked in front of my computer working on various writing tasks for most of the week, but yesterday I spent the morning cleaning. I had to get rid of the mysterious funk.

I went a bit above and beyond my norm. I changed my sheets and washed the shower curtain. I sprinkled baking soda on the carpets – and if you knew how much that stuff costs here, you would know how drastic a measure that was. I bring it back in my suitcases and hoard it. (I was really annoyed when I returned one summer and found that my former housekeeper had taken it upon herself to open a box in my spice cabinet to absorb odors. What odor? It’s a spice cabinet!)

I dusted and vacuumed and opened the windows briefly. Opening the windows in Cairo is a mixed bag. The air isn’t all that fresh and leaving them open for any length of time just undoes the dusting and vacuuming in record time. The last thing I did was light a scented candle – drastic measure indeed. I love candles but really can’t be trusted with them. I get distracted and leave them unattended. I’ve had a few minor fires start as a result of unattended pillar candles. This one was in a jar so it was less of a hazard.

Now it smells of “sweet pea” in here, which is a vast improvement. And my floors are clean, for now.

My children decided the time had come to make their Dear Santa Christmas lists. They were a few hours too late as I had already hit the “submit order” button at Amazon, but I left them to it to see what they came up with and whether anything on their list matched what I had chosen.

My Son:

-a pet turtle
-spiderman toy
-a big tent
-cannonbolt (ben 10)
-guitar
-”trumpit”
-sunglasses
-scooby doo 3 (does not exist!)
-a “bezuca”
-police sketchers (shoes)
-lego fire station
-lego star wars
-American football helmet and clothes

My Daughter:

-a big tent
-police sketchers
-a ds game
-a gameboy (why??? she just got a Nintendo DS for her birthday!)
-Shrek movies
-goal keeper gloves
-a gun
-a “trumpit”
-sunglasses
-Phineas and Ferb collection
-American football helmet and clothes

Okay, some of these I can work with, but in my house Santa does not give pets as presents and where exactly they thing they are each going to pitch a “big tent” is a mystery to me. And a bazooka? When I questioned that one, I got an eyeroll and the answer “just a toy one.” Like that was what I needed clarification on!

I have already done some shopping and gotten them some things they didn’t even know they wanted. Tell me – what kid wouldn’t want night vision binoculars???

Now I have to find a way to “post” the letters while secretly keeping them for posterity…

I’m happy to report that the little man is on the mend. I am going to keep him home for a few more days just to ensure that no complications arise. He has a rather nasty sounding cough I’d just as soon not develop into anything else.

Little did I know exactly how many children were out sick at their school. No one is talking about it and they certainly aren’t using the “f” word to describe the illness for fear of the government swooping down to whisk your child away to be quarantined in one of the local hospitals, a horrifying thought if ever there was one. What better place to pick up a secondary infection than in a hospital full of really sick people? Also, no one wants to give the government the excuse to shut down the schools again, even if this might be an appropriate time to do so.

All this drama reminded me of the winter I was in eighth grade and there was a nasty bug going around. I can’t honestly remember what the bug was because I never caught it, but I do remember that at least a third of the class was absent on any given day for a period of about two weeks. Why didn’t I catch it? Who knows. I can’t imagine that my hand washing habits were so stellar and there were no hand gels back then. My homeroom teacher, a mentally unbalanced nun, had her theory though: she advised no one to play with me because obviously since I hadn’t contracted the virus, I must be the carrier. She didn’t do it on an individual basis either – she made an announcement in front of all three of the eighth grade classes. Fortunately, no one paid her much attention. Everyone knew she was nuts.

Fingers crossed my immunity now is as good as it was back then. It’s no fun being sick when you’re the mom…

That’s my girl – dressed as a Tudor boy. The many hours I put into making the hat and robe are almost worth it. Doesn’t she look great?

But what are the odds that the day I send my child to school wearing velvet it rains in Cairo!? Fortunately it was a short, isolated shower but still!

I admit I kind of lost it yesterday afternoon. I had just spent an hour or so fussing with getting the feather on the hat just right when my daughter comes home and announces that I need to make cookies or sandwiches for her to bring in to share with her class for their Tudor banquet. Um, no – I think not! The teachers sent home a note a week ago about the big day but never mentioned that we would need to contribute food. Daughter then had a fit because they told the class that if they didn’t contribute that they would be last in line to choose food as well.

Ok, I get the reason the teacher told the class that, to encourage them all to participate, but come on – they could have given us a bit of notice. A few extra words on the note that came home last week would have sufficed. I felt like sending in a stale loaf of coarse bread and a bit of dried meat. Maybe something from this menu:

FIRST COURSE
Miniature pastries filled either with cod liver or beef marrow
Eels in a thick spicy puree
Loach in a cold green sauce flavored with spices and sage
Saltwater fish

SECOND COURSE
Capon pasties and crisps
Bream and eel pasties
Blang Mange

THIRD COURSE
Frumenty
Venison
Lampreys with hot sauce
Roast bream and darioles
Sturgeon

I think the cod liver stuffed pastries might have expressed my displeasure quite well. Instead her father went out and bought her some chocolate cookies.

I’m not out of the woods with costumes yet since the children have their Halloween fair at the end of the week but I can guarantee you that I will be giving that minimal effort! Especially since the little ingrate didn’t even want to wear the Tudor hat once she got to school!

So I made the hat yesterday. It wasn’t really so difficult, though when the directions say “don’t iron velvet” it’s for a reason and you should just take it on faith! Many thanks to an old friend who once gave me a few yards of forest green velvet and said “you might need to make a costume one day.” How did she know? Then again, she was English

The hat pretty much looks like this. The only thing left is to track down a large plume. I’m going to the mall today to see if I can find something. Otherwise I may have to go to the zoo and mug an ostrich.

Ironically, I’m pretty sure I hat in a very similar style when I was about 20 years old, only it was black. I have no idea what might have become of that hat now, but it’s one of those times when you realize the advantage to not moving around so much and just saving old stuff for a dress-up trunk.

Since I’ve gone this far, I’m going to see about taking the remaining yardage into some sort of flowing robe / vest. It all reminds me a bit of Scarlett O’Hara making those old velvet curtains into a dress. This scrap of velvet has served as a Christmas tree skirt up til now!

Even though I let myself off the hook by not hosting a big “friend” party for my son’s 7th birthday, I still spent a lot of time running around on Saturday and Sunday preparing for his big day. As a compromise for not having a party, I sent cupcakes to his class which meant I spent much of Saturday afternoon baking them and then got up early on Sunday to frost them. Sunday there was more baking to be done.

Every year the little man asks me for a cake “with fruit on top.” One year I did a white cake with whipped cream and slices of kiwi and pomegranate seeds on top which was both lovely and tasty but he didn’t care for it. Turns out he doesn’t like whipped cream (little freak!) Last year I did a pineapple upside down cake – again lovely and tasty but he didn’t even try it! This year I decided to give him what he didn’t know he wanted: a pumpkin “donut” cake with cream cheese frosting. It was a big hit with everyone, and he was over the moon with his presents.

If I thought that this week was going to be calmer, I should have known better. It isn’t enough that in addition to Halloween this month, the school scheduled Victorian dress-up day last week – next week my daughter is doing Tudor dress-up day. I really should have seen this one coming. She has decided to be a boy rather than a girl, which I am totally in favor of because I have many of the basics already: she can wear a long sleeved white shirt with her baggy black soccer shorts (which I’ll gather with elastic bands at the bottom to make them puffy), and she can wear her long white soccer socks for tights. But it all comes down to the vest and the hat again. The cop-out in me who is tired of designing costumes is sort of thinking she can wear the vest I made last week and I’ll stick a long feather in the corduroy “Victorian” hat. But the overachiever in me found a pattern for an authentic Tudor style hat and I happen to have some green velvet in my fabric stash from which I could probably make both a hat AND a drapey vest / robe. I still don’t have a feather, but who would care if she were wearing velvet?

Tuck a pillow in her shirt and add a turkey leg as a prop and she could be Henry VIII for Halloween

It’s hot and dusty and miserable here at the moment and I have no water yet again so what else have I got to do but spend all my time making a hat, right?

I know it’s only hair and that it will grow back quickly enough – this time next month it will likely be fine – but wouldn’t it just figure that the haircut I would most like to forget my son ever sported would be the one he would get just before a series of photo events occur: his 7th birthday, school calendar photos, and soccer team pictures? It’ll probably show up in the school yearbook as well!

He was totally adorable dressed as a Victorian schoolboy yesterday, but a key costume detail was a floppy flat hat!

It’s an unfortunate fact that I’ve gotten so used to being patronized for being a stay at home mother (SAHM) that now when I meet anyone new and they ask me what I do, I tell them but immediately feel defensive. What is it about a woman deciding to stay home and raise her own children that weirds people out so much? Do they feel somehow that my decision not to work outside the home is an unspoken indictment of their own decisions to go out and have a job? Why else would they care so much about what I do with my time? You wouldn’t believe some of the passive aggressive condescending crap I’ve heard over the years. Now that the kids are in school much of the day, people seem to think I’m spending all my time lunching with the ladies and being groomed at the spa. Because isn’t that what all SAHMs do all day long??

Just because my children are in school all day doesn’t automatically mean I need to go back to work. I’ve been working a few days here and there in addition to everything else I do all day every day and let me tell you – I don’t know how working moms do it. And when the children get older they are going to require more of my attention, not less. Teenagers alone in the house several hours a day? I was a teenager once myself – sounds like a very bad idea to me!

Last week I was at a farewell party for some friends and was introduced to a woman there. She asked me what I did and I immediately felt my defenses rise. She surprised me however by saying how refreshing she found it to find women in the younger generation who were making the decision to stay home with their children while they were young. I was nearly speechless with shock, so rare is it to meet anyone who understands and appreciates what I do all day long. I only wish there were more people out there like her.

I made it through the toddler years without even a small scissor incident – any bad haircuts the children ever sported were entirely my fault. So why did my son, only days before his 7th birthday, decide that NOW was the time to try his hand at cutting his own hair? He cut his hair very short right across the front, at a slant. I thought I’d make him wear it that way for a few days, just to have the lesson sink in.

My husband had another plan: give him a buzz cut.

It looks awful. Even with the clipper set on the “tallest” setting, he’s still pretty well bald. And since he’s a very pale redhead, I fear for the skin of his scalp. I ordered him to wear his hat outside at school until his hair grows back. Between the (temporary) tattoo of a cobra on his bicep and the buzz cut, he looks a bit like a prisoner.

I’m only glad that I got some decent pictures of him on Sunday at his father’s birthday party…and that his hair grows really fast!