Dune Bashing

 

Videos of Peter and Sam sand boarding!  (Really, more like sand sledding)

The Whale Graveyard

This weekend we took a family trip outside of Cairo to Feyoum, about a two hour drive southwest of the city. Feyoum is a quiet desert oasis, set around a lake surrounded by rock cliffs. Besides the many pottery shops in the quaint village, the main attraction in Feyoum is Wadi Hitan, a paleontological site that boasts the largest collection of prehistoric whale bones in the world. About 40 million years ago, this part of the Sahara was covered by the Tethys inland sea and home to bassilisaurus and durodons, enormous, fanged-toothed, carnivorous whales that were more like sea serpents than whales. 

Magic

A was recently talking to a work colleague about the different places we'd lived around the world while watching our kids compete in a swim meet. 

There's, admittedly, little magical about swim meets. I should know. I spent the better part of my youth swimming. Mostly practice but a lot of meets, too. And I can attest swim meets are much longer and much more boring than they appear to be every four years in the Olympics. There's the smell of chlorine, the beep of the timer, and lots of screaming kids. I never actively pushed my kids to follow in my footsteps. Yet, here we are. 

Don't get me wrong. I love the fact that they're swimming. I can't think of an activity that is better at washing the mind after a long day at school in front of a screen. (Except, maybe, fishing.) Swimming tires and mellows them out as it gives them focus and drive. 

While my colleague (who is also a former swimmer) and I were watching our kids swim, he told me about his time in Moscow. He lived on a housing compound with other American families assigned to work in Moscow. One winter day, after a huge blizzard, the a group of young boys built an enormous, elaborate snow fort for the little kids that lived on the compound. They even built a two-story snow slide. He said the memory was 'magical' and that he hadn't experienced any magical moments yet in Cairo. 

I don't know if it is Cairo so much as, maybe, where we are in our lives. It seems as the kids get older there is less day-to-day magic. With babies and toddlers magic is easy to come by. They gurgle and coo and even when they spit up pured avocado there is something magical about it. There is something less magical about the middle and high school routine, getting up early to make lunches, math and French homework, parent-teacher conferences, and swim practices. We run from appointment to appointment, meeting to meeting, class to class, churning through the weeks, Sunday to Thursday, making dinner, doing dishes, folding laundry, studying for tests. It is easy to forget what we are working for or working towards.

Yet, it made me feel sad. This family may be struggling with life in Cairo, and by no means is it easy. Our transition was rough, too, but I think it had more to do with leaving Sri Lanka than it did with Egypt. We could have moved to Disneyland and the transition would have still been difficult.  

But things are looking up. We're finding our groove. Slowly but surely. Magic doesn’t come easily but it is still there. If not a little harder to come by. You just have to know where to look. I have to remind myself the point of work is not work but to allow for these moments. 

Peter and Clementine traveled to Athens for their swim meet, and Sam is in Brussels now for the championship meet where he won a silver medal in the 100 IM and bronze on the 4 x 50 medley relay. And Elise ran her 30k first trail race this morning and smoked it. It's not baby drool, lego on the floor, or swingsets, but it is pretty magical all the same.