Three Day Weekend

You may wonder if we ever work, but we actually do . . . sometimes.  This part of the year is crazy with holidays.  Today is Saudi National Day so we are not at school, but we spent a good part of yesterday there getting caught up on stuff . . . so we do work.

Not much exciting has gone on in the last week.  The only things I can think to mention are the tinted car windows and our plane tickets to Dubai.  The tinted windows are a step to keep our baby cool in the Saudi heat.  Even with the A/C on the car can heat up quick with the sun coming in.  It isn't the best tint job, but for $20 I can't complain to much.  And yes, you read correctly, we are going to Dubai.  I just booked our tickets from Nov. 11th-17th.  We plan to stay with some friends we've made through the NESA conference for a little bit and then stay at a hotel for a while.  We aren't quite sure what we will do for the week, but I know there will be plenty to choose from.

O.K. that's all I have for now.  Check out the tinted windows.

Looking Good!

Week of vacation

This past week we had off of school to celebrate the end of Ramadan.  Even though we are not Muslim, we have plenty of reasons to celebrate as well.  First, during Ramadan a lot of people are fasting during the day so even if you are not fasting you are not allowed to eat or drink in public.  This includes being in your car because people can still see you which Jamie found out when a Saudi man gave him a nasty look for taking a drink of juice.  Secondly, stores go back to their normal hours.  The people here tend to be night people to start with, but during Ramadan not much is opened until about 9pm.  During the week, this is way too close to my bedtime to be doing shopping.  So you learn to live without unless absolutely necessary.  Lastly, the fasting is over which means my students will be coming back to school with more energy than the first three weeks.  Not a lot of our students were fasting everyday, but they would often choose a few days a week to not eat. I think is would difficult when you are expected to go to school and focus on learning even though you have no "fuel in the tank".  Although Ramadan has its annoyances, it is inspiring to think of all the people who are fasting at one time for something that they believe in.

We were actually pretty productive with our time off.  Jamie and Babu (our school's head custodian) took a day and painted our kitchen, dining room, laundry room, and downstairs bathroom.  It looks beautiful!  We also reorganized the bedrooms upstairs to start getting ready for the arrival of our little boy.  We can now see how much room we have and compare it to the big items we need to get for him.  We took two days and went to Bahrain and Khobar to get out of Jubail for a bit.  Bahrain is always good for some yummy food and a movie.  We saw The Expendables and even ate bacon for breakfast!  The most interesting food we had was at a place called Pastarito.  We ordered a pizza that was 1/2 pizza and 1/2 calzone (look below for a picture).  It was a weird concept, but tasty.  Jamie was also a great trooper as we went bargain hunting and comparison shopping.  I was on the hunt for a maternity swimsuit, but found out that they are "out of season".  What??!!  It is still over 100 F on a daily basis which is actually too hot to swim unless you have a cooled pool (which do exist!) so I'm not quite sure what they were thinking.

Here are some pictures to go with our week.  Enjoy!
Tara

Jamie with our unique pizza/calzone.

Dining room before

Dining room after (and from a different angle)

Kitchen before

Kitchen after, I think it has a much more sophisticated look now!

More Pics of Baby McGuire

Tara had her latest checkup yesterday.  It was another good opportunity to see how our baby is growing.  The doctor took a bunch of measurements and let us watch our baby moving around for a while too.  Baby McGuire gave us what looked like a little smile and a wave.  We also saw him playing with his foot. So far, our boy is bigger than the average 21 week old fetus.  His size says he is closer to 23 weeks in some of the different measurements.  Tara wasn't to pleased to see he has a bigger than average head to go with the rest of him.  This is what we expected though since we were such big babies (Tara - 8+ lbs, Me - 9 lbs 2 oz)

Also, this is our week off of school after Ramadan.  All travel plans fell through due to a lack of planning on our part so we are going to do some shopping for baby stuff, I am going to repaint the kitchen and dinning room, and we are going to go to Bahrain for one night to get out of Saudi.

I think you are going to like these pictures.  Hopefully next week I can put up the video we have of the ultrasound.  I know what you might be thinking and our prenatal care really is awesome!

He's a good looking boy!

Don't mind the crazy looking elbow.  It is an image distortion (I hope).

Who does he look like?

Half Way!

Yes, we have officially passed the half way mark of pregnancy.  Tara hit 20 weeks on Sunday and the little guy is kicking up a storm.  Last Saturday evening (one day shy of 19 weeks) Tara had strong suspicions of feeling a baby kick.  That night I put my hand on her belly and sure enough!  I felt a little thump against my palm.

We have been taking pictures of Tara every four weeks and thought it was about time to share some of them since you can finally see some progression of her belly size.  People have been saying she is going to carry all of it out front, which was what she was hoping for.  Also, she is still feeling good enough to run up to two miles on the treadmill.  Tara says she feels slow, but I think it is impressive she is doing it at all.

Here are the pictures of my beauty and my boy.

Week 4 - She's got nothing to hide

Week 8 - No one is suspecting

Week 12 - maybe she's just really full?

Who's the pregnant one?

Week 16 - Yep, you can tell

And she has finally popped

Year 2 begins....

We've made it through the first week of school successfully!  It was a bit crazy at times, but overall went well.  I personally love our new 7th graders.  They are excited to be "big kids" now and still enjoy learning.  For example, in my classroom the table tops are whiteboards.  If I want them to get excited about a lesson all I have to do it throw out markers and let them do math problems on their tables.  It's wonderful!  We also have a new principal.  So far, my impression is that he is a good guy who has our students' best interests at heart.  I can't ask for much more than that. 

I am going to complain a bit about the heat.  The highs since we've been back have been about 110 F and humid!  I can handle the heat, but the humidity is way worse than last year.  The windows of our house are almost always sweating.  If we have to go anywhere, we pretty much just run to the car and then from the car into whatever building we are going to.  Jamie and I tried swimming this morning which ended much earlier than anticipated.  We only got 10 laps in before we both decided that it was just too hot both in and out of the water. 

Lastly, we did get to celebrate my 26th birthday this week.  Jamie was an amazing husband and made sure it was a special day.  It started with a gift of diamond earrings :) and ended with a homemade meal (and I didn't even have to do the dishes!)  Since it was a school day, there wasn't much to do but Jamie let me pick everything that day and even let me go to bed super early which is what I wanted to do.  On Wednesday (Saudi Friday) we did have some people over for an Indian dinner and socializing.  It was fun having people over and chatting since we've all been pretty consumed with school for the past couple of weeks.  There are three of us on our compound who are pregnant right now which has been a lot of fun.  Below is a picture of us and two of the guys who decided that they felt left out not having a belly. 

Until next time,

Tara

It's A . . .

BOY!  We are happy to report that our doctor's appointment went well and we know what we are going to have in January.  Tara and I thank God everything is going well so far.  Congratulations to all those who voted boy on our poll.  For those of you who voted girl, maybe next time.

Here are some pictures for you to enjoy.  Good job if you can tell what you are looking at.

4D of his face.  He was in an odd position for taking pictures and wouldn't move.
The doctor may have used the word stubborn, although we're not sure where the baby could have gotten that trait from.  

2D head/body shot

Another body shot where he is showing off his family jewels

We Made it!

Hi everybody,

Tara and I made it back to Saudi around 6 am on Thursday morning.   It was a 38 hour trip from door to door, but it wasn't stressful.  Our only hiccup was a seven hour delay in Amsterdam on top of our seven hour layover.

We just finished our first teacher workday today too.  It was good to see all our old and new coworkers and friends.  The day started to drag a bit because we are still fighting jet lag and our internal clocks keep waking us up at three or four in the morning. Yuck!  We should be getting back on schedule any day now, so we look forward to that.

Also, we have posted a poll of the sidebar of our blog.  Please check it out and vote for what you think our baby is.  We will find out on Monday and post it shortly after, so your voting time is limited!


Bye