Another full night of sleep. The only time I heard from him was when he really laughed in his sleep once. He was then up at 7:40. I went up to turn off the heater and straighten the couch. I told him Mama was downstairs and he was cuddling with her when I came down. He requested Minecraft, but we got into a debate over who would read for him first, and Carly ended up reading him some Clementine.
We all went outside for a few minutes to look at the plants and enjoy the sunshine. We then played Minecraft. We got back to our Mesa Survival world. It’s the most we’ve got into the survival aspect, and we are planting all sorts of crops and taming animals. We found a village and are making plans for trading and working up to the Normal level.
I made us cereal and strawberry for breakfast. Carly and August were drumming rhythms on the table. Carly headed outside to enjoy the sunshine. I put on the Sesame Street Christmas album. August pounded out how rhythms on the table to the music, then he moved to the couch and got his drums out and kept drumming along. I joined him on the xylophone. I liked the Bert and Ernie version of “A Christmas Story”.
They were then going to go outside and paint. Carly took a while upstairs and came down with some presents: August opened them; they were the paints from Oma and Opa. August was excited about the big bottles of white and all of the colors. He was giving them color names. They then went outside and painted. He was mostly mixing colors.
He came in and ate two bowls of the pad thai. He liked the sprouts and the broccoli from the pad see eu. He said he had lied to Mama telling her he liked all of the other dish. He ate those and we played a Brother game where he tried to cook pad thai and brownies on his own. His pad thai ended up too spicy and the brownies burned, and he got burnt a lot.
He then was ready for alone time and did 15 minutes of alone time, doing more drumming. We played Minecraft and that went well, but he had a really hard time stopping after 30 minutes. He started hitting me, then I got him to stay on the couch. He eventually got up and got his iPad. I told him he could only use it for setting a timer for his time in, if he wanted. He apparently set it for 30 or 40 minutes, and after ten minutes or so when Carly tried to talk to him he told her he wasn’t talking to anyone for 30 minutes.
I was cleaning up and working on stuff, and eventually he came over to me at the table and talked to me. I asked him about the timer he set and he admitted, “I was hoping some of it could count as alone time.” We talked, and negotiated, for a long time. He couldn’t really remember why he got upset, and he told me he’d try to end calmly if I’d play with him for his next 30 minutes. He did a few more minutes of alone time, then we played 30 minutes more. He did indeed put his iPad away just fine when we were done.
He then had Brother games. We did some old ones, like Brother cutting his feet and going in the Dead Sea (with the twist of Bar dropping tons of fresh water on him), having dried skin (Bar used a claw to pick him up and wash him in a tub of petroleum jelly), etc. He and I had some pita with tahini (he was skeptical about the tahini at first but tried it and liked it). I got him to get dressed. Carly had found a pair of crocs over across the street that were his size. He tried them and they are going to be his going-into-the-yard shoes. They left for a walk at 3:05.
They walked in a circle (August pointed out it was actually a square) and were back about 3:30. He ate some lunch (broccoli and couscous). As we got going, he asked me, “Were you alive in the industrial evolution?” He then told us he had a new simile: “a country’s military is like its immune system.”
We were driving at 4:10. Carly drove. We listened to the Circle Round story “The Magic Paintbrush”. Then I read from _A Pizza the Size of the Sun. Indelible was a word of the day. We then put music on. It was a new album I’d seen, called I Love Rainy Days by Daniel Tashian. He asked me to put the first song on his playlist. Then a couple minutes later I looked over to find him falling asleep. I suggested things to wake him up, but then asked if I should just let him rest. He said to let him rest, so I did. I figured it best for him to be rested for the party.
I had asked Omar and Marc for leads on places to buy Christmas lights and paper. Omar told us about a book store called Saba. We parked, woke up August, and first found the Hana book store. We got three rolls of wrapping paper there, and the guy directed us to the Saba store a 100 meters farther south. There, we got two strings of lights, and Carly got August a stocking. The idea of a stocking was new to him, and pretty exciting.
We went back to the car and headed to the center for dinner. Omar had said we should come early, at 6, and as we headed there, a couple minutes away, I said, “We have impeccable timing.” He asked what impeccable meant. Traffic was crazy though, and by the time we parked and walked in a sort of half circle it was a little after 6 when we found the place. We found a poster, and then Androus came in, so we knew we were in the right place.
We went down to the hall and found Marc and Lydia, then Omar and Heba and Ghada. Ghada had broken her arm just falling out of bed about a month ago and had to have surgery. Sounded very much like my break. It had happened while Omar was in the Netherlands.
Timing was kind of funny. Omar had told me it started at 6:30. Poster said 7. Reality was it was sometime after that. There was a musical group getting ready to perform, and August and I looked at their instruments and he did some dancing while they tuned their instruments. We ended up sitting at a table in the back right. Also at our table were Marc and Annette (we met them at Marc’s birthday, but the rest of her family wasn’t here), a woman named Nema (sp?) who was from the Phillipines and Toronto sat across from August, and a guy named Peter sat across from me. He is a reporter for the Daily News, and used to be with the Daily Telegraph. He is in the West Bank writing an article about the Christian community here. Andraous and his wife were down at the end. And Omar and Ghada were with us on and off. As he was getting more comfortable, at one point August sang a couple songs/tunes for them.
There were some prayers in Arabic and Aramaic at the beginning. There was a first course of salads and pita and hummus, etc. Peter was pouring the wine. August had orange drink and seconds and thirds. We doled it out in little bits, and that strung him along for quite a while. Sometime after 9 we were still waiting for the main course. I took August up to where Ghada was running down a little ramp. The sort of played together a bit. She was being shy though, but smiling at us a lot.
August really wanted to hold out for dessert. Carly took him out of the hall and read some Clementine to him early on, then I took him out another time and he sat and watched Brainchild. Carly and I switched off. He did it, and some time around 10 dessert (the fried sweet cheese stuff, which was delicious) came. August ate one of his, and offered me the second. Carly had found out that Nena knows Jeff and Tori, who now live in Thailand, after being with us in Korea for 4 years. She is friends with Tori’s mom (who is also from the Philippines and lives in Toronto). Carly offered to give her a ride back to where she was staying in Old Jerusalem.
I drove on the way back. It took about half an hour to get to the place she was staying. It involved driving through the Lion Gate into Old Jerusalem (just north of the Dome of the Rock) and a few hundred meters up this crazy one-lane street, with cars squeezing by in the other direction. We dropped her off, then had to pull off turning around with the use of a little side street.
August had lasted, looking out the window, until we dropped her off, then fell asleep some time around 11. I got us home just after midnight. I carried him up to bed. When we had started driving he had asked us to just carry him up when we got home so he wouldn’t have to go back to sleep. He was just aware enough to sit up so I could take his vest off, then he curled up on his stomach, legs pulled up, and was soundly asleep.
Table drums to the music:
Drums on the couch:
Opening the first present and naming colors:
More percussion set up:
Sabeel Christmas Party 1:
Sabeel Christmas Party 2:
