You know life is settling down when...

You know life is settling down when you don't feel like anything is novel enough to write about. That's why I tried to write so much when we first got here: I knew I'd eventually find everything normal and mundane, and the urge to write home about it would diminish. Well, it has happened, hence the last 40 days without a blog post. Not that that's stopped Rachel. Go read her posts first if you haven't.






So it's about time. For those of you who read this blog so that you can learn useful things about Doha, here's a quick paragraph. If you want your car's air conditioner recharged (i.e. it doesn't cool anymore and might be out of freon or whatever gas is in there), one place to get it done relatively quickly and cheaply is in a little hole-in-the-wall auto shop at the corner of Afeef St. and Al Yarmouk St. in the area opposite Al Ahli hospital. Here's a map. Note that there is no parking lot, per se, so you just have to drive over the curb into the dirt in front of the shop. If you have to wait an hour for him to get another gas container like I did, you can find several small corner stores and a barber shop down Al Yarmouk St. to help you pass the time. Next, if you need little fiddly hardware, cheap plastic doohicky, or anything else you might find at an old-style Radio Shack or dollar store, go to the 7-riyal store called Dasio inside Homes-R-Us (incidentally, also the best home furnishing store we've found) at the Hyatt Plaza Mall. The whole mall feels just run-down enough that it sort of feels like your typical mall back home, and it's also just run-down enough that most locals wouldn't deign to set foot in there, so it's not always super crowded. It also has a Claire's and a Carter's, so it might be a good place to shop if you have a little girl between the ages of 0 and 16. Rachel wasn't very impressed with the supermarket they had inside, which might have something to do with the fact that birds were flying around the grocery section, and the drop ceiling was entirely missing above the check-out area so that all the bare pipes and wires were exposed and buzzing above us. But that made it feel almost like I was back in Lorain, Ohio!






The weather has been quite pleasant since the end of November. Cool each morning, and almost never too hot during the day. I hope it lasts through February.






The kids are, of course, growing and changing. Miss A walks a lot and falls a lot, racking up probably an injury per day in the last week. She loves to jabber or hum or sing as she toddles around, and the slap slap slap of her bare feet on the floor always lets us know where she is. She likes to hide and play peekaboo and chase in circles, both with me or Rachel and with Big E. He often shares his food with her and us. I could learn a thing or two about sharing from him. He finished his 100th reading lesson with Rachel last week, and though he'll read books with us, trading off a line at a time or a page at a time, he doesn't seem to want to read books on his own yet. He has really taken to water color painting, though, and our bare living room wall that we'd been saving for a large framed landscape photo or something has been filled instead with his paintings. They all started out blue, but he has really expanded his palette.


Big E and I fly a kite together sometimes on windy days. It's a kite Rachel and I bought for a date before I'd even proposed to her back in Rexburg, Idaho, and we've brought it everywhere with us since then. Nice to finally be able to fly it with him.


And now a photo/video dump:


We took a short trip on a motorized dhow in the harbor one day.
















I took Rachel out for a rare night without the kids, and we saw The Hobbit in 3D at an IMAX theater, followed by food (and food poisoning for Rachel) at a Mongolian grill. The theater was packed!



Not. The next picture needs no comment.



Here is Miss A doing raspberries in slow motion.



Here she's helping unload groceries.



We build forts on the couch, and Miss A follows Big E wherever he goes.



Monkey see monkey do!



Thanks, Grandma Becky!



Miss A always wants to open the curtains and look outside first thing in the morning, and sometimes Big E will join her to watch the bigger kids go to school.



Fun on the street.



Rachel brought the kids to eat lunch with me at work one day and check out some books from the school library. They spent very little time eating, and much preferred exploring my office.






And Miss A is walking!



I started this post more than a week ago, and since then we've had our WEEK OF ADVENTURE bookended by Valentine's Day and Rachel's birthday, and consisting of a whole week off from work free to explore Qatar. So my next few posts (and Rachel's) will be about that.