3 Movies by Maijke, Abby and Sammy at OneTrueMedia.com

In case you can't totally understand them, the movies (in this order) are:
"Selling Lemonade"
"Lemonade Thief"
"Worm Cookies"
Enjoy!
Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

PRIVATE

I have been contemplating making my blog "private" lately. I have been thinking about it for a few months now. After all, I do have three growing girls to worry about and going "private" gives me an extra peace of mind. I think that since we are moving to London in August, it would be the perfect time to do it. Hopefully, the curiosity of our life and transition there will be enough to lure some of my faithful readers and friends to follow me and make the extra effort to sign in and read my blog. So if you are still interested in reading and viewing this blog, contact me and let me know.

Thank you!!

We had a very busy but fun 4th of July. I guess you could say we made the most of it since we are not sure when we will be in the country for another one. We started the day hosting two families for a breakfast of Charles' whole-wheat pancakes, sausage, fruit, whole-wheat banana chocolate-chip muffins and a bunch of other lovely breakfast treats. We then headed over to the parade in our neighborhood and then down to the neighborhood party. Above are some of the kids watching the parade.

After the parade, the girls headed off to friends' houses and Charles went to the movies with his buddies. I took a nap and prepared for hosting a second party at our house - dinner. We had four families come so that made five families total or 10 adults and 17 kids. We had the biggest pile of hamburgers and hot dogs I have ever seen at my house before. The lines for the bathroom before we left for the fireworks were so long it made me laugh. We watched the fireworks downtown and had the best seats ever. We got home at almost 11pm and were all exhausted. I think we definitely made the most of our holiday.

Here are the kids crammed into the wagon because they were all too lazy to walk the two blocks to see the parade. It looked like they enjoyed the ride though.

Saturday, July 2nd we spent the day at Silver Beach in St. Joseph's, Michigan (our second time this week) as part of our 4th of July weekend celebration. Abby rarely came out of the water so I don't have too many pictures of her.

Two Beach Babes soaking up the sand! (Alexandra and her friend Nora)

My sand!

The big kids found a giant hole to jump into. (This is Sammy in mid-jump.)

The little ones found their own hole.

Sammy was pretty exhausted.

Here is Alexandra on the beach with the ENTIRE bag of sandy Cheetos - delicious! She never seemed to mind how much sand was in any of the food. She happily ate it regardless.

All the girls (including friends of ours) on the beach building some kind of damn. It was a team effort. They worked long and hard to keep the buckets of water inside the walls of sand. Even Alexandra helped though I am not sure how much "help" she was...

Abby has been taking swimming lesson lately and has made HUGE progress. We are so happy that she can now put her head UNDER the water. Hooray! She loves it. This is her at her last swimming lesson over at the high school.

This was a spontaneous photo-shoot of Sammy. What a poser!

Beautiful!

We have spent so much time cleaning out our house and doing various projects to get our house ready to sell, that I was feeling bad about neglecting the girls so much. I was constantly shipping them off to friend's houses or having playdates here to keep them occupied so I could get something done. So after our house was up on the market and we had no showings one day, we decided to make cars out of cardboard boxes. They were so excited to be doing something with ME for once. Sammy's was a "candy car" (I guess that means it was made of candy).

Abby's car was a Nissan.

Little Alexandra in her tutu and one dress-up high heel shoe

This is how these two watch t.v. these days. I think it is so sweet.

That's all for now!

It's Official...

It's official, we are moving back to London, England. When we left three years ago, I never thought we would move back. (We lived there previously from 2003 - 2008.) We are excited though because we still have many good friends there and many countries left unexplored. Abby and Sammy understand we are moving but in some ways it has not completely sunk in for them yet. They still talk about going to school here next year etc. I have to remind them that we won't be here. They are excited to go on an airplane again though. They look forward to that a lot. But first they look forward to visiting our family in Utah first. It has been two years since we have made that trip. We will certainly miss our friends here in Naperville when we move. Our time here has gone by so fast but well worth the three years. I didn't get to do nearly any of the projects, updates or changes to my house that I envisioned but in some ways it will be a relief NOT to be a homeowner again. So if you are ever flying through London, please stop by and fee lfree to stay a while but give us a little time to find and place and get settled first. We leave some time in August.

Back to The Little Girls...

It has been a while since I posted pictures of my girls so here is a blog post devoted solely to cuteness.

We played "restaurant" one day with Sammy, Alex and Sammy's friend. The restaurant was Filangi's and they loved the food and service!

This is Abby's first grade class. I went and helped with field day. She is now done with the first grade, I can't believe it. She worshipped her teacher again this year. She has really lucked out with such awesome teachers suited perfectly for her. She even got her first little crush on a little Jewish neighbor boy in her class.

Alex is quite the independent little girl these days. She climbs up the ladder to the tree house with no problem. She is constantly outside and wants to go everywhere and do everything that Abby and Sammy do. She loves to go around the house and say, "Daddy where are you?" She is also constantly pointing out her different body parts as well as everyone else's. She hides in cupboards, helps herself to the food in the cupboard and loves to go up in her room, close the door and sit on her rocking chair and sing to herself. She's a keeper!

Why is it that when my girls play with "boy toys" it makes me so happy? I love that they were swording fighting with their masks on and running around as wild as ever yet at the same time wearing their cute skirts and outfits while being furocious! I have got to invest in some light sabers and air guns.

Our good friends came to town. It is ALWAYS good to see them!

These pictures are a little out of order but here is the fighting action.

I must admit, I too got a sword and was fighting them all. It was great. Makes me long for the days when I did fencing.

Picnic in the backyard under my favorite tree

What is better than a bath with a good friend?

A Woman to Admire

Recently I have been learning a lot about Benazir Bhutto. Let me tell you why I admire her.

• She was the first WOMAN Prime Minister of an Islamic country (she served as Prime Minister of Pakistan twice from 1988 to 1990, and from 1993 to 1996).
• She is the mother of three children (two of whom she gave birth to during her first term as Prime Minister).
• Her father who was also Prime Minister in the early 1970s, was hung after a military coup. She was then incarcerated for a total of seven years because of her family name. The worst part of her incarceration was when she was put in solitary confinement (for almost five years) in a desert cell during the summer of 1981. (I saw pictures of her desert prison that horrified me.) She described the conditions in her wall-less cage as follows:
  
  "The summer heat turned my cell into an oven. My skin split and peeled, coming off my hands in sheets. Boils erupted on my face. My hair, which had always been thick, began to come out by the handful. Insects crept into the cell like invading armies. Grasshoppers, mosquitoes, stinging flies, bees and bugs came up through the cracks in the floor and through the open bars from the courtyard. Big black ants, cockroaches, seething clumps of little red ants and spiders. I tried pulling the sheet over my head at night to hide from their bites, pushing it back when it got too hot to breathe."
  
  She remained hospitalized for months as a result.
  
  
• After her imprisonment, she was more determined than ever to fight for democracy in Pakistan.
• At the height of her popularity - shortly after her first election - she was one of the most high-profile women leaders in the world.
  
• After all she went through, she never completely loses faith in, or gives up on the hope and the dream that Pakistan can turn itself around and become the kind of open democracy she envisioned it to be.
• On 27 December 2007, Bhutto was killed while leaving a campaign rally. She had given a spirited address to party supporters in the run-up to the January 2008 parliamentary elections. After entering her bulletproof vehicle, Bhutto stood up through its sunroof to wave to the crowds. At this point, a gunman fired shots at her and subsequently explosives were detonated near the vehicle killing approximately 20 people.
  
• I hope that in the future, a definitive and balanced account of her leadership and life as well as her family's reign will be written.

A Syrian-Style Mother's Day

Bashar al-Assad, ruler of Syria is killing more and more of his own people everyday. In their hearts, I think the Syrian people knew that they would pay a heavy price for freedom. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons it took so long for protests to take off there, even though Syria is high on the list of the most repressive governments in the world. Emergency laws, in place for the past fifty years, allow the government to censor, arrest, torture, intimidate, and suspend most constitutional rights. If that isn't enough to intimidate and suppress the people there is always the lingering nightmare of 1982 in their minds. Hafez al-Assad, father of the current dictator, presided over a massacre in the city of Hama that left tens of thousands of people dead. Just how many nobody knows for certain. Word didn’t leak out to the international community for weeks, and by then the dead had been interred in mass graves, and a blanket of enforced secrecy had fallen over the incident. In Syria, even mentioning the events in Hama is strictly forbidden. However, a full description of the massacre (not for the faint of heart) has been compiled by the Syrian Human Rights Committee.

It is against this backdrop that the Syrians are exhibiting extraordinary courage as they defy a government that until now has so effectively controlled them by fear and force. I have a special feeling for Syria, and have been waiting anxiously for this moment. In January of 2001, when I arrived in Damascus for a second time, Bashar al-Assad was the new president. (I was also there in the summer of 1999 when Bashar’s father Hafez al Assad was still in power) The new president filled me with optimism, mainly because Bashar was not originally chosen to succeed his father. He also had a very decidedly unpolitical original career choice. The newly “elected” Bashar seemed less formidable than his father. It was possible, just faintly possible for the optimistic, that under his leadership Syria might peacefully transition to a more free and open society.

But all the trappings of dictatorship remained, and I was to become intimately acquainted with many of them during my stay in Damascus. First, there were the pictures of the president. Everywhere. And often they weren’t just pictures, they were adoring collages of the president and his father and his deceased elder brother, all framed by such a profusion of sentimental flowers that it would be amusing if you could forget the circumstances. The regime also actively promotes hatred of Israel as a tool for domestic political support and stability, so Bashar could be found dressed in fatigues with a machine gun, or with his arm extended, Hitler-style, over cheering crowds and rows of troops. I still have posters and pamphlets and my Bashar keychain, I guess I could burn them in solidarity. (In the future, I will have to write about the Hizbollah rally I went to.)

While in Syria, we were told to assume that our living quarters were bugged by the mukhabarat, the infamous secret police of Syria. So my fellow American students and I would often joke about the mukhabarat in our ceiling fan. Maybe they were there, and maybe they weren’t. But on one memorable day, a friend of mine broke down and spent an hour or so ranting to the ceiling fan mukhabarat about just what she thought of them. Living under a repressive dictatorship, even if it’s not your own, really does strange things to a person.

However, the incident I really need to get off my chest happened on Mother’s Day of 2001. As part of our cultural outreach activities, members of my study group were spread throughout the city of Damascus participating in ongoing service projects. The project I picked was teaching songs to the children at a special ed school in preparation for a Mother’s Day performance. I went every week with a couple of other American students to teach twenty or so sweet, adorable down syndrome children how to sing a few songs, both in English and in Arabic. The songs we chose were simple ones expressing love for their mothers. It took a long time to teach them, but it didn’t matter. I loved visiting those children. They were so kind to each other and loving to us. And they didn’t care at all that my Arabic was rudimentary. They would always greet us with smiles and hugs, and we usually stayed after music time to play with them at recess.

However, an odd thing began to happen after a few weeks. The teachers at the school apologetically informed us that the songs we were to teach the children had changed. In fact, they changed several times over the next few weeks. We had one cold and formal interview with a school administrator, in which we feebly suggested that our songs had been more appropriate for Mother’s Day than the increasingly politically-toned songs they were insisting that we replace them with. In the end though, rather than our sentimental mother-I-love-you songs, we had to settle for teaching the children songs about the glory of the Syrian Republic, and standing for Bashar al-Assad “with heart, with blood,” etc. (I still remember that ridiculous chant we would recite.)

I still held out the hope, though, that even though the songs were decidedly not to do with mothers at all, at least the program would be a nice tribute to the mothers, who would think their children adorable no matter what songs they sang. When we arrived at the room where the Mother’s Day performance was to be held, I was impressed with the grandeur of the setting. A stage festooned with flowers was crowned by a gigantic projection screen. The audience was full of parents and grandparents, and children from a dozen or more schools were dressed in various costumes (including a group of very blonde Russian girls dressed up with their hair braided in ribbons to do a traditional Russian dance, reminding me that Russia’s cold war ties with Syria remain warm).

But as we settled back to enjoy the program, my warm and fuzzy Mother’s Day thoughts about my own mother in faraway America were intruded upon by my dawning realization that Mother’s Day in autocratic Syria is more about glorifying Bashar and the Regime than it is about honoring mothers. Most of the performances had overtly political themes. To me, there was just something obscene about twisting a celebration of children honoring the maternal bond into a blatant glorification of political repression and violence. The worst was a large group of identically-dressed children who couldn’t have been older than five or six, singing their hearts out with lyrics about being ready to fight to the death and bleed for the fatherland. As they sang, the screen behind them played video of graphic scenes of fire and bloodshed from various wars with Israel. By the time I got up on stage with my sweet, innocent charges to lead them through a political rallying cry for President Bashar (yes, complete with the Hitler-salute), I was feeling sick with anger and betrayal.
How was it that the tender family moment I had planned to share with these children had been perverted by a self-serving government into just another showy display of the “grassroots support” enjoyed by the regime? I felt used. I felt violated. I felt guilty for having been caught up in something I would never have done had I understood what it was from the beginning. My efforts to bridge cultural gaps and forge friendships between my country and Syria had, in this case, backfired on me in a way I never expected. It had all happened so gradually, and with such smooth and understated but iron-clad control that before I knew it, I was on Syrian national television (yes, the whole thing was filmed and broadcast) leading the most innocent of the innocent in saluting President Bashar like a dyed-in-the-wool Ba’ath partisan.
And now, as I watch Syrians being gunned down by that very same government as they demonstrate for basic human rights, I cringe again. Of course I wouldn’t obey Bashar if he told me to go out and shoot protesters. But I joined the faceless masses, however unwillingly, in singing his praises. All I can say is, I’m sorry. With all my heart, I support the Syrians in their cause, and wish them success and Godspeed as they begin their perilous journey toward freedom.

(Thank you to Thuriyah, one of my Arabic study buddies for reminding me of these events.)