Heard the call to prayer at 4:56. August rolled around a lot in bed and fell off the bed three times. He woke up kind of startled at 7:30. I came out from taking a shower and he felt my neck and forehead and hair. Carly said he was being a good argheologist. She then told him I could nurse him today. He said he would investigate and came and put his hand down my shirt and said she was wrong.
Breakfast was up on the 4th floor. A decent buffet and August and I peeled a hard boiled egg together and other foods. Chuck had a lot of packing and stuff piled on his plate at the end and August was impressed: “You ate a lot!…Why did you have so much food?” We left the hotel at 9:15, got our tickets at Petra, and were walking with August in the backpack at 9:45.
Petra was amazing – no need to go into details. August and Carly were being archeologists, and he was really interested in the green horse poop. He liked the water system into the city and asked a lot of questions. I carried him in the backpack for awhile, then he walked and we took turns with him. When he was hungry Carly sneaked granola bar to him in the backpack so supposedly I didn’t see it. He that that was really funny. We got to the Treasury and he got out of the backpack. He saw two camels walking, one tied to the other: “They’re connected!” We slowly made our way through the rest of Petra, looking at gift shops and the ruins, through the street of colonnades, to the end where we sat at a picnic table and had our lunch from the hotel and our snacks.
I took photos of Smokey while we were there, then when we got going we walked up the path towards the monastery a little, just to where the steps began. Chuck had joked that he needed a sign saying “No donkey” as we were asked if we needed rides dozens of times. It was fun to see the Bedouin horsemen and musicians and families, but there were way too many people coming up to you and aggressively trying to get you to take a ride. And then the child labor; children selling postcards or leading donkeys, etc. when the brochure clearly said it was illegal.
The Treasury was impressive (and I liked telling August the story of how a pharaoh supposedly hid a treasure in the urn carved at the top – now pocked with bullet holes from people trying to get the treasure), but my favorite spot was the theater. Would have loved it if they had performances of Greco-Roman/etc. plays going on there.
We headed back, stopping briefly to have Carly take photos of August and me in the backamapack, perhaps for the last time, and Vivian’s Minnie Mouse shoes at Petra. We set a faster pace on the way back and stopped at the Why Not Shop shop for a break, a little before 1:30. I bought a fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice and an orange juice and we shared those. While the rest sat and rested I went a little ways up the stair/trail that was right there to get a few down at the valley.
We walked some more, August walking and carrying him, then put him in the backpack at the Treasury. I then carried him the last 2km out through El Siq. At one point I pointed out to August that a couple horses, walking slowly, were faster than me. He said they weren’t faster than him, and he gave me some energy. I then passed them up again. When the horse drawn carriages rattled by, fast, August would warn me that they were coming. We were done right at 3.
We sat in the shade and Cherie did some gift shopping. We got back to the hotel and unwound a bit, then left after 4. We met Chuck and Cherie down in the lobby. August started to run, slipped on the thick rug by the table, and hit his chin on the glass table. Left a little mark on his chin but could have been much worse.
We went to a coffee shop we had spotted just down the hill. He watched some Sarah and duck with his headphones and we read. He was hungry and they weren’t open for food so I went across to the minimart. The guy was from Yemen and helped me with a little arabic. I got a yougurt, dried apricots, and a couple of little seed/nut bars. Went back and August was happy with those. He read the Critters Fall Festival book with Cherie. She’s great with the reading strategies: asking him for predictions, looking at details, etc. They then read Lulu the Witch and read part of Pablo and His Chair. A boy came and gave him a cookie thing before we left. Carly took him to the bathroom and we left at 5:40.
Chuck and Cherie went back to the hotel and the three of us went for a walk up the hill and onwards up behind our hotel. The wedding procession of cars, which we had seen earlier, after Petra, drove by and their were people calling out to us. When a second car went by with loud music playing August broke out dancing in my arms as I carried him. We also saw a bunch of chicken. Admired the view of the valley from up there then headed back.
Back at the hotel he and I waited downstairs in the lobby and played with the rainbows produced by the sun hitting a crystal bowl. When Carly and then Chuck and Cherie came down he showed them the rainbows. One of them was trying to teach him something about prisms and light and he said “I already knowed that. I just haven’t told anyone yet.”
At 6:30 we went to the Alqantarah Restaurant up the hill, where we had tried to go yesterday. It was a set menu, with salads, then gifta and kofta as main dishes, then the harisa (coconut) dessert. He made inventions out of silverware while we waited. Carly asked “Can I walk across it?” He said “Be careful: there’s no railing.” I then had my fingers fall of and sue him. When August asked what that meant Carly stole my fork. We then had a big court case with Chuck as my lawyer. When August heard we were doing a court case like we had once done in Carly’s classroom he pounded on the table and called “Order in the court!” He remembered that part. We continued the case until the salads came. August was the judge and since he had seen Carly take the court he sentenced her to 3 minutes of jail. Think she only served a few seconds.
Anyway, the food was great. He ate a lot and was getting strong from the chicken. He would then go under the table to grab Cherie’s leg and show her how strong he was. At one point I taught him the phrase ‘I don’t have to prove anything to you’. Then to Chuck he said “I don’t have to prove anything to you…but I’m stringer then rugrats.” He said he was so strong that “I can even hold up gravity.”
We had dessert, then just before 8, as Carly took him to the bathroom, I ran back to the hotel to use the internet to by a ticket to a Posies concert this summer as it went on sale at 8pm. Wasn’t working at first, just getting a generic error message from Ticketmaster, which quickly reminded me that Ticketmaster is one of the worst companies in the world. It turned out I just couldn’t order the ticket from abroad – when I connected to a VPN and it thought I was in the U.S. it worked just fine. But they couldn’t be bothered to tell me why it wasn’t working in the first place.
I read Kipper’s Birthday to him and Carly brushed his hair. Turned off the lights and they nursed. At 8:50 I heard him whisper “Mama, can you tell me a story of when you were a kid?” Sometime after 9 I had him get up on the bed with me. I sang him some songs and he just lay with me for awhile. Finally, he said he wanted to go back to mama. He went back down to her and fell asleep about 9:55.
