The Heat

Before I start on this subject, I just want to make one announcement: This is a conveyance of facts only and it’s not in any way a complaint!!!!
So, now that I have that out of the way…..I thought I would tell you what the weather is like in Abu Dhabi. In a word….hot. Most of the days that I have been here it has been in the hundreds. The humidity is relatively high all the time as well. Who knew the dessert would be wet (the air that is)??
It’s amazing how quickly that I have become accustomed to the weather here. The other day I went outside in the morning (I like to go and sit by the pool early in the morning) and I thought, “Wow, it’s really nice out here”….it was 96.
The highest I have seen the thermometer go up to so far is 118 and I was duly impressed by that. I had never seen a thermometer go that high before. On the other hand, I haven’t seen a temperature below 90 yet.
Steve had been preparing me for months for the heat. For some background….Steve hates any temperature above 70. Within 5 minutes of him walking outside, he starts sweating profusely. It’s almost as if he’s trying to evaporate himself! After all his talk, I was expecting to be miserable out here. To a certain point it is no fun. The other day when I went about town to take pictures, I was soaking wet by the time I was done (2+ hours in 110 heat and 80% humidity) But, I can honestly say it is not as bad as I thought it was going to be. Although I have noticed I can sweat in areas that I have never sweated before (who knew that your upper lip had sweat glands).
Caitlin (taking after her Dad) does not enjoy being out in the heat. Her whole body turns bright red with more than 5 minutes of exposure. As she is the drama queen of the group, she feels like she has to complain non-stop about the heat and the fact that the car is too hot when we get back into it (as if we didn’t already know this information). Needless to say, we have not made any long trips to any outdoors venues yet. I don’t think that Steve and Caitlin would survive.
Luckily, we have the pool which we use constantly. We were worried initially that the water would be too hot, but oddly enough 90 degree water is oddly refreshing when it is 112!
It has not rained here since we got here almost 5 weeks ago. That is very strange for me. I have never lived somewhere where it does not rain (usually it’s the exact opposite). Steve and I got a little excited when we looked up the weather and there was a 10% chance of rain for a day last week. Prior to that there had been 0% on every forecast we had seen. Alas…no rain, but I did see a few clouds (another rarity here).
So, to sum it up…..it’s hot and always sunny. Not too bad in my book, although certain people in the same household would beg to differ. I hear that it is quite pleasant in the winter here (70s). I’ll probably freeze my butt off! Until then….maybe I’ll try frying an egg on my patio.
I didn’t hear one complaint in that post did you????

Water, water everywhere????

So, I now have been living in a desert for one month today. I know…I can’t believe that it has been a month either. Time flies when you’re having fun! In the last month, I have made many observations of different things, but there’s one in particular that fascinates me.
I have not seen a drop of rain since we arrived (a great improvement in my opinion to the weather I was subjected to in Maryland before I left). True this is a city that is surrounded by water (it is an island) and I knew that before I came, but what I was not prepared for is all the water everywhere!
You cannot go more than a block without encountering some kind of water feature or water fountain. Also in order to grow any kind of vegetation there must be a sprinkler system in place (which seem to go off non-stop). The streets are lined with beautiful trees and vegetation that must be watered several times a day. I myself have not only a pool full of water, but a small water feature by my front door and a sprinkler system that goes off 3 times a day to water all the plants and grass in my yard. I didn’t even mention drinking/bathing water!
Abu Dhabi is a fairly large city (about 1.2 million). How the heck do they get so much water????? There must be some mack-Daddy desalination plant around here that I am not aware of!
I took some time to just drive around the city the other day to just observe and take pictures (I could do this in peace since the girls were in camp). I was awed by the water fountains and the beautiful parks and I can’t wait until it’s actually cool enough to enjoy them all. Until then, I’ll just jump in the water!

To the Hospital We Go!

Well, we haven't had internet for about 3 weeks so I'm behind. I actually wrote this post a week ago. Ashli is doing much better now. I removed her stitches on Monday and she is happily enjoying the pool again. She is probably going to have a small, "character mark," as Steve calls it, but she's so darn cute...who's going to notice????

To the Hospital We Go!
If you haven’t heard yet, we had to make our first trip to the ER here in Abu Dhabi. I know…it didn’t take long!
In the wee hours of July 5th (3:30 am to be exact), I was awaking by a horrible screaming sound. That sound was coming from Ashli and I rushed into her room to find her and her bed covered in blood. It took me awhile to determine where the blood was coming from (her mouth) and then a lot longer for me to get her calmed down enough to tell me what happened. She claims she was having a dream about a dragon that was trying to “fire her.” (No she hasn’t recently watched anything with scary dragons in it…we don’t even have cable yet).
As I took a closer look at her lip, I discovered that she had completely bitten through it and I knew that she would need stitches. The problem that I had was two-fold. First, I was in a foreign country and had no idea where to take her or where they accepted our new insurance. Second, we still had no internet access, so I couldn’t look these things up. Since it was now about 4am on a Sunday (Sunday is Monday here) I didn’t want to wake up anyone with a phone call. I had stopped most of the bleeding and she was falling back to sleep. I let her go back to sleep after I bandaged it up as best as I could.
As soon as we could, we started making phone calls and found out what hospital to go to. We went to a small hospital about 20 minutes from our house and we had to wait maybe 10 minutes before they took us back to the triage area. The triage nurse took one look at her and told us she would need sutures. They then moved us to a curtained booth very similar to areas that you would see in a US ER.
The ER doc came in almost immediately and took a quick look and decided to page the surgeon on call. We waited about 20 minutes for him. He was very nice for a surgeon, but there was definitely a language barrier with him. I did however immediately understand the term “general anesthesia” when it came out of his mouth. That’s when the butterflies started in my stomach. Here we were in a foreign country and they were talking about putting my baby under!
Now, if we were back in Maryland, I don’t think that I would have been as nervous. First, I would have probably known the anesthesiologist and the surgeon would have understood all my questions. Because I’m a nurse, I know all the bad things that can go wrong under general and of course all those things started to run rampant through my head. I couldn’t even call any of my close friends to get moral support (Tina…I desperately wanted to talk to you about this!!!) because it was in the middle of the night back home.
I swallowed my fears and played a game of constructing paper jewelry out of paper bed linings with Ashli while Steve paced and we waiting for the insurance to pre-approve the surgery (which took 2 hours!)
Instead of doing this as an outpatient thing, they actually admitted Ashli to a room in a Peds unit (which thankfully had a TV!) and we waited there until there was an OR available. She was an amazing trooper the entire time. They stuck her with several needles and messed with her very sore mouth many times and not once did she cry. She gave everyone who walked into her room one of her famous Ashli smiles and had everyone in the hospital wrapped around her pinky finger in no time at all!
We walked her down to the OR finally around 1pm. They wouldn’t let us go back at all and I spoke to the anesthesiologist (who thankfully knew a lot more English). She looked so tiny in the big stretcher that it broke my heart. As soon as she couldn’t see me, I started crying and struggled not to break into the “Ugly Cry,” with so many people watching me.
We had to wait for her back in her room for what seemed like an eternity (it actually was only 90 minutes). When she came back to her room, she acted like she’d had a little too much tequila (picture the little boy that the father videotaped after having some surgery and posted it on UTube and times that by 10). Her main concerns were A) she was dizzy and B) she didn’t have any panties on. We had a lengthy conversation on why I had panties on and she didn’t! They also gave her pain medicine rectally which did not go over well with her at all. Lucky me…they sent her home with the same meds!
It took her about 2 hours to really come out of it. The surgeon came in and told us that she had only one external suture on the outside of her lip, but wound up with several internal sutures. Her lip was about 10 times its normal size and looked terrible, but she didn’t complain of any pain. I think they must have REALLY good drugs in the OR.
We left the hospital at 5pm (9 hours after we got there). In retrospect, it could have been much worse. The staff at the hospital was very nice and treated Ashli like a little princess. Thankfully, we had just gotten our new insurance cards the day before. The way things work here, they would have wanted cash up front for her surgery if we didn’t have proof of insurance (I don’t even want to think about how much that would have been). Ashli was a model patient. She didn’t cry once and was very patient (it helped that Alanna the Elephant was with us the entire time!). We also have great friends here that helped us out with Caitlin so that she didn’t have to go through the long day with us.
I really wanted to see how things worked here in the hospitals, but not in this way! They certainly do things differently here and the language barrier was a problem at some points, but it was a great learning experience.
She is doing much better now. Today (3 days post-op) was the first day that she was able to eat something other than yogurt/jello without wincing in pain. Her biggest complaint now is that she can’t swim in the pool (which we opened the day before she did this) for a week( I did break down and let her get in a tube for a little while).
I don’t think we are going to talk, watch, play or otherwise engage in any activities that involve dragons for a VERY long time!

A Land Far, Far Away!

OK...so enough about Ashli. Cate has definitely been doing her share of exploring and pondering too. Let's look through her eyes for a little bit!

Looking through the eyes of your children can definitely be enlightening. If only we could see things the way that they do. If only I could see through Caitlin’s rose-colored glasses the world would be so much nicer!
Caitlin believes that we are in a land of Royalty (and to a certain degree, we are). There are palaces and mansions all over the place, but the buildings that she has become most fond of are the mosques. There are hundreds of mosques all over the city and you can see them building more. Construction is rampant here and I’ve even seen cardboard cutouts in the shape of a mosque at big building sites so that the workers don’t have to go far to pray the 5 required times a day. You can hear the Call to Pray from any location here.
Caitlin’s favorite by far is the Grand Mosque which even I admit is spectacular. It is a huge ornate white building which is lit up each night with blue lights. She has become convinced that it is the castle in which Aladdin and Jasmine live and wants to go visit them and have some tea. It does bear a striking resemblance to Jasmine’s childhood home in the Disney movie.
To a degree a lot of the buildings here are something out of a fantasy. It seems all the builders have a little competition going on. Each one is trying to outdo the other with their amazing creations. They are building a large structure to be the headquarters for a local builder very near our house that is shaped like a very large glass Frisbee. Caitlin loves it and calls it the crystal ball and knows that we are getting close to home when she sees it. Maybe she can make a wish into it and have Aladdin invite her to tea?