Random Ramblings

Here's a kind of catch all post for all the pictures I have left to put up since late January.

Late March: Mr. O got a real haircut. I might have overdone it with the razor, but I knew I only had one shot with how wiggly this kid is. I think it made him look a lot older, which is sad in a way - he's my baby!

Hailey loves choosing hair bows to match her outfits. She was proud of this combo and wanted a picture

Feb 26: We got to go to what they call here a U.S. National Day celebration at one of the super fancy hotels in the area. I didn't really get any great pictures, but it was fun.

Always fun to run into friends (Petra)!

Ken and I actually went to a birthday party here at the hotel months earlier, when Ashley was visiting us. We took a self guided tour of parts of the hotel, and were very impressed with it!

Late Feb: Our neighborhood is full of kids, and one of the best parts about this is we don't even have to leave our house to go looking for fun. Almost every day, after school gets out, kids begin congregating in our backyard and making up all kinds of fun games. Here they organized musical chairs, complete with music that at first, Tyler was in charge of singing. As he played. (Yeah, I'm sure you could see how well THAT worked out for everyone, since he always won...) We then switched to having someone actually play music from a phone. That was better :)

Mid Feb: We had a picnic at a little park nearby with our good friends. They brought a rope thing (not the technical name, but hey) we could try balancing across. Will was quite talented at it!

Hailey liked having a little extra help :) I have to laugh when I see us all bundled up in sweaters - we thought it was so chilly, because there was some wind and it was all the way down in the 70's, maybe even high 60's.

Discovering all kinds of talents

Owen had to get in on the action as well!

Feb: We celebrated this cool dude's birthday with root beer floats. Hooray for Ken!

Mid January: Ken and I planned an awesome outing, where we were going to go to Fossil Rock, then to a sand waterfall. 

We re-learned a valuable life lesson, one that we get to learn over and over in Abu Dhabi: it is your choice how you react when things don't go according to plan! And boy was this a trip that didn't go according to plan. I think the book we used was old, or the coordinates were off or something, but after a 2.5 hour drive we just could not find the fossil area.

Unfortunately, the area was completely trashed, and I found that maybe I was the one having the harder time adjusting my attitude :) We did find fun rocks for our backyard rock garden though.

Our kids were champs and we tried to make the best of it by eating lunch on the rocks and climbing them. 

Well, we found the sand quarry where this cool sand waterfall was supposed to be ... but no waterfall. At least there was lots of sand to run on, jump in and slide down!

I'd have to say the most rewarding part of the day was the gorgeous sunset we saw on the way home. Hey, at least we got to spend our Saturday together, right?! Ken and I decided to plan our trips better in the future :)