Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to each and everyone of you! The holidays here in the UAE, as you can imagine, are different. First of all, Muslims don’t celebrate the birth of Jesus. Strangely enough, I have noticed that they do celebrate the secular side of the holiday. They love the shopping/presents part and their children absolutely adore Santa Claus. More on Christmas later. Here’s a catch me up…
The family is doing great. Alanna has been working hard and gaining a little bit of ground with her school kids. The language barrier and their total lack of any behavior skills is a tough road for her though. My stay at home Dad job is really easy compared
to what she has to go through every day. But its nice when she comes home and gives me and Logan big kisses. She is very happy to come home to us everyday. Speaking of Logan, he is doing well. Our recent doctor visit has comfirmed that he’s still a healthy baby boy. He’s doubled his birth weight and now sits at about 19lbs. He has such a personality. He’s a charmer with all the ladies. He gets that from me. He is growing by leaps and bounds every week. He sits up so well now, and is trying his best to crawl. He mostly just scoots backards on his stomach, but its progress! I love having a son and I love being a father. It is truly an amazingly rewardable experience.
My job at House of the Arts has been going well. We had 4 youth choir Christmas concerts as well an end of the year performance by my drama classes. They did Casey at the Bat. I basically took a Readers Threatre version of it and added some pantamime. The kids did really well and their parents loved it. The youth choir performances were hectic though. Many of our start times were changed at the last minute due to Muslim tradition and holidays. We never knew when we were starting and most of the time we started an hour late. Our final performance this last Wednesday was a LuLus Supermarket. It’s a big Super Walmart type of store. The whole gig wasn’t planned very well by the store. First of all, they stuck us in a corner where no one could really find us. Next, they didn’t have the sound system or piano set up when we got there, so yes, we started an hour late. They had no microphone stands, so they just… get this… tied microphones to wires and hung them overtop of the kids. They were swinging back and forth. There was also no way to connect the piano to the sound system. So they just taped a microphone under the piano and that … sort… of… worked. Wait, there’s more. LuLus wanted their employees to sing with us, so we let about 15 Filipino guys and girls get up on stage and sing “back up” for us. Since we sang traditional Christmas Carols, we just printed out the lyrics so they could sing along. I never really heard them sing during the performance except during the 12 Days of Christmas. When we got to the 5th day of Christmas, the LuLus employees shouted 5 GOLDEN RINGS each time that phrase came up. My choir kids turned around and starred at them each time. To top the evening off… about half way through our concert we heard someone banging a drum right in the middle of one of our songs. It was… Santa Claus. Yes, he wanted everyone to come see him. So every single kid, along with their parents who were in the audience turned around and ran towards Santa… again.. right in the middle of one of our songs. We were only about half way through our performance, so we basically just cut it short and sang We Wish You a Merry Christmas.
Apparently Santa was part of the LuLus’ staff. Couldn’t they have timed that a LITTLE better? This Santa was scary. He wore a Santa mask! And weird gloves, and well… I made Logan take a picture with him. So Logan’s first ever picture with Santa looks as if a bank robber is holding him.
On to Christmas! Christmas Eve was nice and relaxing. Alanna went out shopping and let me sleep in. She returned with Papa Johns Pizza and Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. She sure knows the way to my heart. We also started a nice tradition of reading the Christmas Story (THE Christmas Story… from the Bible) to Logan. Hopefully we can keep that tradition going each year. Alanna and I didn’t really do the whole present swapping thing for each other this year. We basically went out together and just bought ourselves some things we both could use. First and foremost was a new laptop. Our old one was nice, but it really didn’t have any bells and whistles. So now we have one fast enough for me to play some games (meaning WoW) on, which is something I’ve really been missing in my life! It’s a nice break for me! So now we have two laptops and we each can be on one and not have to share back and forth. Secondly, we bought ourselves an exercise machine. It was cheap but does a lot of stuff. Its basically an Elliptical machine with an added stair climber, dumb bells, ab exerciser and a belt massager. We didn’t pay very much for it here, but it does a lot for us and we’re trying to use it every day. We both have lost almost 20lbs a piece since we’ve been here from dieting alone, so hopefully adding in the daily exercise will help even more. Alanna also snuck out an bought me a cheap handheld GPS so I can go geocaching. There are some good caches over here. I’ve just had no way to locate them effectively until now. I love my wife. She’s so thoughtful.
We did buy Logan some gifts, along with the ones our families sent him. So he got to open some presents. For being only 7 months old, he has already mastered the art of ripping open wrapping paper. We Skyped with both of our families so they could watch him unwrap his gifts. Skype is so good for us. It is really nice to be able to see and hear our families and to let them see
Logan as he grows up this year. We also had a big Christmas dinner with a bunch of our expat friends. Like Thanksgiving, everyone (well not everyone. Some were freeloaders) brought some type of dish. So there was plenty of good homecooked food to go around. We had drawn secret santa gift earlier in the month, so we opened those as well. We got a 50dhs gift certificate to Chillis. We went ahead and cashed that sucker in today. Chillis is by far the best place to get American style food here. So we eat there quite often.
We’ll be spending New Years Eve at our Scottish friends’ place. They are serving Haggis and we’re dancing the Gay Gordons. Look it up on Youtube if you’re interested. I do hope all of you had a Merry Christmas and I wish you a very prosperous 2010!
