Growing Up, Fast!

A common question I’ve been getting from friends and family recently is, of course, ‘How are the boys taking the change?’  The answer is that they have done spectacularly well so far.  But it’s been a funny mix of growing up way too fast and regression, all at once.  

Of course, everyone has had to do a lot of adjusting over the last month or so, so I wasn’t surprised when both boys backslid a little, in small and inconsequential ways.  For example, Everett has his Hippo that he sleeps with.  He used to only sleep with it – now it comes with us everywhere.  It’s his little comforting crutch that keeps him feeling safe.  Lawrence is the same with his Sleep Sack.  It used to be only the white sleep sack at night and naps, but now, it’s either the blue or white one, nearly all the time.  We can hardly pry the thing off of his arms (he sucks on the sleeves for comfort).  And if he’s wearing one, he wants to be holding the other, which is also new.  Those of you who have seen him wearing it know that it’s just a bag with sleeves, and he likes to walk around the house in it, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, like our own little Geisha.  What’s funny now is that we have no rugs, carpet, or even doormats, and with all tile and laminate flooring, the sand and dirt is just spread all throughout the house all the time.  So I’m going to rename Lawrence to Swiffer Boy.  Every morning after morning nap, I steal both sacks and wash them because they are FILTHY from the floor!  No matter how much I sweep and mop!  It’s that same old ‘If your floors are clean, why are your socks dirty?’ conundrum.  Suck, suck, suck, swiffer, swiffer, swiffer.  Who needs a house boy when your own son is a Roomba?

Note Hippo and Blue Sleep Sack seem permanently attached.

Lawrence has had to do an awful lot of growing up fast this last month, too.  In the span of one week, he got moved to a big-boy-bed (the crib is in the shipment) and learned how to climb up and down the stairs without supervision (our baby gates are in the E-box).  He has to sit in an adult chair for meals (the booster seat is in the E-box), eat from adult dishes (our plastic kid-ware is in the E-box), and drink from a glass (our sippy cups are in the E-box).  It’s a lot of change!  But he’s handled it all (although we do have the occasional Helen Keller moment at the dinner table when he gets down from his seat and walks around the table grabbing food in what we call ‘drive-by’ style).  All told, suddenly he does not seem so little anymore.  My baby boy is getting so big!  

Everett, too, seems to have matured mentally.  He’s got a new dimension to his sense of humor, and I’ve been really impressed at how much of all this change he has really actually grasped.  Almost all!  We went to see his new preschool today (a program run by a lady out of her house on the compound).  He was pensive about it.  I think we both miss his wonderful preschool in Charlotte, and I know he misses his two best friends and his teachers.  He starts on Saturday, and I hope it will help the transition for him to get to make some new friends. 

Finally - Reconnected to the Outside World!

Feels like we've just come up for air after being held under water for a long time.  Our internet is back!  Our phone works!  HOORAY!!  

This is not only a good and relieving thing in general, it means that we suddenly have much better information and access here on the compound.  For example, you can't buy a car without a residency permit, called an Iqama (hope I spelled that right).  You can't get an Iqama until you have had a blood test to make sure you aren't bringing in various diseases to the country, like malaria.  You can't get a blood test until you make an appointment at the lab.  The only way to make an appointment at the lab is to request one online.  So we've been stuck, waiting for nearly everything to get rolling until we got our internet up and going.  (What's more, the only way to get the Aramco DSL is to request it ONLINE.  (Hello?!)  This goes along with the equally crazy requirement that the only way to get local phone service is to CALL for it.  Aramco is maddening this way.)  We do have some very generous friends who have let us come over to their house and use their internet, so we got the DSL request made, and thus we are now good to go.  Many thanks!

So now maybe all the pieces will begin to fall into place, and we can begin to get set up.  Now if only the E-box would hurry up and get here!  We really need that bed rail for Lawrence that we packed...and I could use a couple of pairs of the flip flops in there.  All in good time.   I've been told Aramco teaches patience.  I believe it. 

Alien Ironing Board

When we arrived in our empty house after getting off the plane, all we had was what we brought with us in our 6 checked bags and entirely too many carry-on bags.  Because you’re arriving to a house to live there, Aramco does a pretty good job of getting you set up so you can at least get through the first 24 hours.  We each had a bed which was already made, and there was a set of 4 dishes, glasses, and glasses on the counter.  The refrigerator had milk, eggs, cheese, and fruit, and there was peanut butter and bread on the counter.  The only other things they left us were a phone, an iron, and an ironing board.   

Apparently, all my life I have been living a lie.  I thought I knew all there was to know about ironing.  But I have been proven wrong.  When I look at our Aramco ironing board, I feel like a 16^th century American Indian trying to figure out an iPhone.  It’s got all kinds of crazy gadgets and gizmos that I have no idea how to use or what they are!  Like take the antenna on the side, for instance.  Is it a radio?  A hidden camera?  We’ve been using it as a really long jaw harp, twang twang twang, while giggling hysterically because we can’t figure out the purpose.  (This doesn’t help me feel any more savvy or civilized about the situation, though.)  On the other side, it has a cord and a plug.  The plug does not match the iron (my theory was that the iron plugs into the board and the board plugs into the wall…alas!  Not so.)  And the cord does not connect to the antenna at all, so they are not related.  Then there’s the big metal framework that sticks out in front (rudder?)(baby seat?)(computer desk?)  I am at a loss. 

To make it all the funnier, the iron they gave us is this tiny fold-up travel iron.  So we iron our clothes on this mega-fancy pimped out ironing board with a tiny, primitive, Cabbage Patch Kids iron.  Good thing it’s funny and entertaining (yes, entertaining – we still don’t have a TV), because it takes forever!  

And if the aliens land tomorrow, it’s because our ironing board called them here.  Guaranteed.

Go metric!

Of course, everything here is in metric.  I actually find this hard to believe, because the company is the Arabian AMERICAN Oil Company, and everything else is just like it is at home.  Like the outlets!  They are the usual 110V regular old American outlets on the compound, not the 220 V ones that Europe and everyone else uses.  And the Official Company Language is English, not Arabic.  So why metric?  I’ve been told nothing here is logical, and you’ll go insane trying to figure it out if you try to force logic in this place.  So , huh, whatever, I guess I’ll just learn to be metric-girl.  

You might think that, as a scientist, metric would come easy to me.  Remember, I have been taught to think in metric, after all.  You know, like the acceleration of gravity is 9.8 m/s².  Or the gravitational constant is 6.67e-11 m³/kg/s².  So far, the ONLY instance where this training has come in handy is on the back of a food label.  The Nutrition Information doesn’t use Calories (I just accidentally typed “Carolina” instead of “Calories”.  Missing home, much?), it uses KJ, kiloJoules!  OK, I can handle that.  I know how much a Joule is, and these numbers make sense to me.  Bring on the metric system!

Unfortunately, the rest of the time, I am much too ingrained with English units.  Take driving.  In theory, I know how fast 1 km/hr is.  So I should be able to extrapolate to know how fast, say, 80 km/s is.  Right?  Turns out I am much better in km/second than km/hr.  I can tell you that the Sun is orbiting the center of the Galaxy at about 250 km/s, for example, or that the particles in the Solar Wind can reach 1000 km/s if the Sun is in active phase.  And I have a good handle on how fast that is, relative to other things.  But I have to keep looking at the speedometer to make sure I’m not going to get a ticket for driving over 80 km/hr, because I have no feel for it.  And today it was 20 degrees.  Celsius.   I bought 400 mL of shampoo the other day.  My shoe size is now 40.  And Mike usually gets home at 16:06.  Military time?  REALLY?  

So watch out on Baby Girl Benchich’s birth announcement – hopefully she will arrive at a nice 3 kg and 50 cm.  The scales they use in the hospital are not electronic, so they don’t convert for you – I will leave it as an exercise for my students to figure out how much she is in pounds and inches! 

The House and The Help

So, many of our friends back in Charlotte want to know what our house looks like, and what the compound in general looks like!  Here are a few pictures of our house.  We have three bedrooms upstairs and a living room, dining room, kitchen, and porch downstairs.  Our backyard is literally about 200 square feet, but it has both a 35-40 foot palmetto palm and another unidentified tree in it.  (!)  Not much room left for typical backyard activities, like, oh, say, STANDING or SITTING.  The rooms look pretty bare because our stuff is still in the container!  I hope the container is on a container SHIP by now, hopefully sailing over the ocean to us.  But we don’t expect it until June.  In the meantime, we rent the furniture you see from the company.  There is not much of it, and it’s not that great.  But hey, it’s something to sit on.  We also got 4 each of plates, cups, saucers, bowls, and glasses, and an ironing board and an iron.  On the upside, it’s not much to clean when the house is so empty! 

Our House from the street

Front Gate

Front Yard

View Down the Street

Back Patio and Back Yard

Backyard

Foyer

Downstairs looking past the foyer into the kitchen

Dining Room

Kitchen

Study

Living Room

On the landing to go upstairs

Upstairs Hallway

Lawrence's Room, soon to be Baby Girl's Room

Master Bedroom

View of Front Yard from Master Bedroom

Our ENORMOUS closet!

Everett and Lawrence's room - Everett is demonstrating how he sleeps in his bed.  We had to push the dressers up next to Lawrence's bed until the bedrail arrives in the e-box. 

We also have already (inadvertently) acquired three – count ‘em, three! – gardeners, who come and water our sand every morning!  (I wonder if they will mow the sand when it gets warmer?) We will get grass and plants soon, but we need to figure out which gardener to keep first.  Next on the agenda – line up a house boy!  Go, go, oh yeah, domestic help!  Good things are on the way! 

Friends On Both Sides of the World

We never would have made it here had it not been for our devoted friends in Charlotte, and for our family in Knoxville.  It would have been a physically impossible task.  Within the first 48 hours of being here, we’ve found out that for getting set up, it’s the same over here!  We have been enveloped by two families who knew Mike’s family from before, and they have scooped us up and begun to help us get on our feet.  We’ve confiscated their car, borrowed bed linens, eaten the dinners they have brought over, depended on them for groceries, hogged their phone lines, used their kids for babysitting, and plied them for advice of all kinds.  I am going to write all this down, so that I will know and remember what to do when I’ve become a seasoned Aramcon and a new family comes.  Thank you, thank you, Aramco friends!

Moving here is a REALLY big transition, and I miss Charlotte a lot; but with wonderful friends like these, it makes the transition as easy as it can be.  We met a family in the airport Aramco office when we arrived, and they were arriving cold – never been here before, no friends on camp, starting from scratch.  We saw them in the Commissary on the second day, and they looked pretty frazzled.  (Granted, I probably looked frazzled, too, but I felt much less frazzled than they looked!)  What a lucky situation we have!  We are well taken care of, and Mike already knows so much anyway.  It’s just so much less to figure out on our own. 

24 Hours In

We’ve been here nearly 24 hours now, and things are going ok.  Everyone was tired last night (seeing as how it was 1:30 am here when we finally got settled into the house), so going to bed was not a problem.  Mike and I both woke up around 8 am Saudi time to the VERY LOUD sounds of fighter jets going over AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN.  I still can’t believe the boys slept through all that.  It continued all day long.  As I understand it, that it is the Saudi military practicing (for what? I try not to think about that) from the nearby Dhahran airport.  Lawrence finally did wake up about 1 pm to a really loud one going very low over our house, but Everett didn’t wake up until nearly 3.  Mike took an afternoon nap, and Lawrence and I both took early evening naps, and then the boys went to bed at the (closer to normal) time of 9 pm tonight.  Hopefully we will get our sleep schedule sorted out tomorrow or the next day. 

We’ve been to the Commissary two times now, and I’m trying hard to remember how to get there.  It’s more confusing than you might think!  The compound is not that big, but all the buildings are tucked away and the parking is not obvious; it’s not really clear if you’ve arrived where you are supposed to or not.  The Commissary itself is also going to take some effort to figure out – there’s the exchange rate for starters, and then everything is price-tagged, old-timey style, but half the items do not have a tag (so I say they are free!)  And it’s this wild assortment of brands, too.  They have some items with US and foreign brands (e.g., Lipton Tea next to the Arabic tea), but some are only foreign, and some are only our same familiar American brands.  The only kind of molasses is the exact same kind I just threw out from our pantry in Charlotte!  Go figure.  The Arabic laundry detergent has a huge logo on the front that says “DIRT IS GOOD.”  Hmmm.  Don’t think I’ll be trying that one out.  That company and I clearly have a difference of opinion about the morals involved with a load of laundry. 

Mike starts work tomorrow!  Hopefully the kids and I can get all the suitcase clothes put away and the kitchen arranged while he is out.  We’re planning on checking out our neighborhood park, too!  More soon!