Amharic language spurt!

So the other day I was reading my friend and travel mate Nancy's blog (Hi Nancy!) and salivating over the super cool Amharic alphabet workbook she found for her daughter, and thinking: Aaah, if I only lived in the U.S. I would have so much access to so much cool Amharic stuff.

Then I started trying to figure out if it was realistic for me to try to buy the book and somehow get it over to Egypt. Well, I think Mike's best friend has been in Chicago a lot on business and was thinking of seeing if he is still there and if I can dispatch him to the Ethiopian market to buy the book and then hold on to it until we are next in the U.S. And then I thought, hmmm, that sounds like a pretty shaky little plan. And I thought about just sending money by mail to the guy who made the book and asking him to mail it to me, and that sounded kinda iffy also.

So imagine my surprise when Tiberh walked into our house this morning with two books for Maya including an Amharic alphabet book! You know, the kind where you can trace out the letters and there are pictures with words starting with the letter you are learning to write. What a bizarre coincidence. It turns out Tiberh's housemate and friend Helen had picked it up for Maya on a recent trip to Addis. Actually, we had asked Helen to see if she could find any children's books in Addis before her trip, but it had been quite a while since we spoke to her and I had forgotten all about it. So thanks Helen!!

If anyone else wants to surprise us with Amharic stuff... We could really use some Amharic fridge magnets!! Or Amharic kids videos, other than the one 30-minute DVD that we already have. Yeah, yeah, I know, not a chance...

But speaking of language, Maya has been having a major Amharic language spurt. She actually volunteers words in Amharic to Tiberh. She knows lots of words now and is learning to count in both languages. It is actually very cute as she mixes the numbers. She will say something like: One, two, sost. Or Und, three, five. Very cute.

We also have had very cute conversations about who is beautiful (or konjo), which according to maya is only her. Here is our sample conversation.

Maya: Maya konjo!
Me: Yes, Maya konjo. Mommy konjo?
Maya: Maya konjo!
Me: Daddy konjo?
Maya: Daddy, Daddy ... Maya konjo!
Me: Tibi konjo?
Maya: Maya konjo
Me: Daddy konjo?
Maya (whispering and barely audible): Daddy konjo...

Hunkering Down

Well, Mike is off to Geneva for a refugee convention from tomorrow morning, so it will just be me and Maya for the next few days in Cairo. Unfortunately, his trip coincides with my scheduled weekend shift so we are in for some not fun few days. Grrrr.

But on the bright side, I will have Sunday and Monday off and Mike will be arriving back in Cairo Saturday afternoon, just in time to spend a faux weekend with me and Maya.

I will try to take some pictures of Maya soon and post them...

Diaper crisis!!!

We are operating in crisis mode. Cloth-like Pampers -- you know, the good ones imported from Saudi Arabia -- have virtually disappeared from the Egyptian market. Seriously, if I have to go back to using the plastic diapers I am going to be very unhappy. And I hope Maya is ready for a crash course in potty training.

So last weekend we casually went to the supermarket (the big one in Maadi) to get some diapers. We had noticed that they'd been a bit difficult to find recently, so we thought we'd try a different place than Alpha Market, where we normally go. But no luck, the cloth-like Pampers were nowhere to be found. But we figured, no big deal, they would be back soon. We did notice there are new Egyptian-made Pampers that are being all hyped up in the store, but alas they are plastic and no good for us.

So this weekend we went back to Alpha in Zamalek, and there were NO Saudi Pampers to be found. Instead, there was a girl in the diaper section with an open Egyptian-made Pamper on a silver tray pouring water into it to demonstrate to customers how absorbent the new and improved Egyptian Pampers are. Well, they may be absorbent, but they are still plastic. Yuck!

While Mike was checking out at the supermarket I decided to run across the street to a little pharmacy to see if, by any chance, they had Saudi Pampers. They looked up on their upper shelves and found three packages of Saudi Pampers -- not in Maya's size but in one size larger. I told them I'd take all three, ran back across the street to get some money from Mike, and bought the Pampers. I had to pay 117 Egyptian pounds for three packs of 16 diapers each -- that's $20.78 for 48 diapers -- ouch! That's kinda pricey, probably because they are pull-up type diapers. But at least I have staved off plastic for another couple weeks.

Meanwhile, we are stepping up the potty training. Maya is pretty much going regularly on the potty in the mornings and evenings when we put her there. So hopefully soon we won't have to worry about finding diapers anymore.

Toddler fears

For a very long time, we thought Maya was a totally fearless baby. She was not jolted by falling off a queen size hotel bed at age 7 months, or going down a big slide at 12 months, or climbing to the top of a playground tower at 15 months. She wasn't scared of the dark, in fact she asked for the lights to "click" off at bedtime. There were a couple times when I accidently locked her in the bathroom with the light turned off because I didn;t see her sneak in after me, and she was totally unfazed.

But now she is a totally different creature. Everything is either "scawy" or "dangerous", and if it's neither of those, it must be at least "hot".

Maya used to love horses, which she calls "neigh neighs". But yesterday when we were walking along the corniche in Zamalek and passed a few very mellow horses, she complained: "Scawy neigh neigh" and demanded to be picked up.

We have a house guest staying with us for a few days, who arrived yesterday after Maya had gone to bed. She woke up and saw him around midnight, then refused to go back to sleep in her bed, claiming: "Scawy this grandpa" (OK he is not her grandpa, and I am not sure why she is calling him this). Of course, in the morning she was fine and became good friends.

She is also afraid of the cats who live in the building next door -- the ones she used to love. And she is absolutely terrified of dogs. The other day she refused to get out of the elevator in the lobby of our building, claiming that there were "Scawy dogs" nearby (There weren't any).

She used to play this game with Mike where they would pretend to be lions or dinosaurs and roar at each other. They were playing this today, and Mike pretended that his dinosaur had fallen asleep and was snoring -- this too was "scawy".

I have no idea what prompted these fears to appear. But I hope they will go away soon. I kinda liked my fearless toddler...

Another picture

OK, just one more picture to tide you all over. This is Maya at the bottom of the slide.

Park pictures

I know I've been a little negligent in posting pictures recently. There's a good reason too. After going to the park last weekend, I misplaced the camera. Apparently I left it in the car, where it has sat all week.

This morning, when our doorbell rang, it was the local car mafia who find our car a safe place to sleep every night where it won't get ticketed or, god forbid, clubbed by the Egyptian traffic police. The car mafia guy had two things to tell us. First, our tire was flat. Second, he found the camera in the car.

Anyway, we got the tire fixed, and now I will post photos from the park from several different recent visits.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that al-Azhar park added a new playground area for little kids like Maya over the winter? We thought it would be another year before she could really play there, as the climbing equipment is a bit much for a not-quite 2-year-old. But we were pleasantly surprised that they added a little kid area with plastic yellow slides. So now I'm sure we're going to be at al-Azhar park all the time.

Ramadan Karim

Ramadan started today -- that's the month when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. So Happy Ramadan everyone, or as they would say here, Ramadan Karim.

We are grateful that the hot weather seems to have finally broken this week and it is finally starting to feel like fall in Cairo, meaning we are not sweating like crazy every time we open the door to walk outside.

Ramadan in some ways is a super month, full of evening iftar dinners where local restaurants have special set dinners and everyone breaks their fast simultaneously with a glass of fresh apricot juice. The shops are filled with huge selections of dried fruits and nuts, and special "Ramadan lanterns" are for sale on all the street corners.

In the evenings, stores and cafes host free Ramadan tables where anyone can sit down and break their fast with a simple (and did I mention free) meal. I went to one of these tables a few years ago with a close friend who now lives in Canada and I remember it as a wonderful experience.

Also during Ramadan, I get a free dinner at work -- if I am working a late shift and if I put my name in earlier in the day. It is usually smething simple like kabab with rice or a macaroni-type baked casserole ordered from a local restaurant, but the atmosphere among my Egyptian colleagues is really nice at iftar time.

But Ramadan is also the month of grumpy, nicotine-deprived people. It's definitely nice that people are not smoking as much, but wow can people get grumpy from not being able to smoke, and it seems to hit really early in the day. I have to sneak my diet cokes in the office where my fasting colleagues can't see me, and it is nearly impossible to get a taxi to go home at the end of my working day because the streets are empty. After all, nobody wants to be late to break their fast.

But it is all worth it at the end of the month, because we get a big holiday weekend. We're planning to go to the beach!

Three cheers for Maya

Guess what Maya did last night -- she peed in her potty!! I honestly do not know if this will ever repeat itself, but it is a major achievement for her, and one that won lots of mommy praise.

Maya has been obsessed for the past week or so with her new Elmo panties (to go along with her Elmo potty doll) that we picked up in the U.S. But up until yesterday she had been demanding to wear the panties but refusing the potty. Not a good combination... And we were wondering if we needed to put the panties and the potty away for a while.

So last night as we were getting ready to bed, Maya asked to use the potty. I took off her diaper and she sat on the potty and peed. Wow!! I never imagined I'd be so excited about potty training. But there it is. We'll see if she can repeat her success tonight.

Meanwhile, I have been home sick from work for the past two days with a fever that came on suddenly on Saturday night. I was fine all day, and then about 10 p.m. I started feeling terrible and had a fever -- and I never get fevers even when I am deathly ill. I had no other real symptoms other than a fever of around 102, chills and a splitting headache.

But my fever seems to have finally broken after a lukewarm shower this morning and while I am still tired, hopefully I will be better by tomorrow.

A little story

So Maya was home with me yesterday when I was off work, and she decided it was a good day to ditch her diapers. So I brought her potty downstairs to the living room and had her sit on it about every 15 minutes.

Naturally, when she did have to pee, she just ran around the corner into the dining area where I couldn't see her and peed on the floor. That only made me more aggressive with the potty sitting.

One time, after sitting on the potty for a few minutes with no success, she got up and came over to me, pointed at the potty and said: "Mommy, potty not working".

More Maya pictures