Great Day!

Well, today was absolutely beautiful! The temperature was 78F! It was wonderful, especially since the last week and a half has been rainy and cold. Naturally, I took the kids out for a while.

As you know by now, Yanal works all day as I stay home with the kiddos. However, you may not know that he takes the car, so we are home...car-less. This means that when I take the kids out I have to stick around our neighborhood. It's a really nice neighborhood; safe, quiet, many of young families. However, there is no good place for the kids to play. The streets are fairly busy, the drivers are not paying attention and there are no sidewalks; so, I worry about taking them for a walk--remember they are 2 1/2 years and 9 months. I could take them in the double stroller....but we are near the top of a huge hill, so the options are literally straight up or straight down and then straight up again. Not an easy, relaxing push in the stroller for this Mamma. I usually do end up taking them for a short walk and wishing that we could go further. But it is what it is and that's what we have and that's okay.

Due to the difficult walking and no nearby parks, we usually just hang out in the front of our apartment. There is no lawn or grass to play on. No parking lot to hang out in. Just a small sidewalk-like area between the apartment and the street. It's not the ideal place, but it works. The kids really don't know the difference, they are just excited to get out of the apartment for a while! We bring out with us Aisha's bubbles and sidewalk chalks. So there we sat today, basically on the side of the road blowing bubbles and drawing on the tiles with sidewalk chalk! It was warm, sunny and simply wonderful! We spent about an hour and a half on the sidewalk and then went up the hill for a short walk.

The view is really beautiful from the top of our hill. We can see nearly all of Amman! It's a huge city (2.5 million people live here), built on many hills, buildings of stone and rock. We have a straight view of the newer addition to the city where they are building their first of many to come skyscrapers. Way off in the distance you can see rolling hills of stone buildings that eventually disappear into the desert. It's really a neat place to be located. I plan to post some pictures of the city someday.

Another beautiful thing about today is that it's probable that I met my first Jordanian friend! I have family friends of course, but it would be nice to meet some more gals to hang out with, especially ones that live near our home. This lady has said hello to me on another occasion as we sat on the sidewalk playing; however, this time she said hello, came up to me and we talked for a while. She started the conversation with "My mom is American". She moved to Jordan from the US when she was 2 years old and she was raised here. She then married and moved back to California and lived there until 6 years ago. She is probably a few years older than me. I have seen many kids in her 'yard' (she has a personal 'yard' space where kids play throughout the day). I often wondered if there was a daycare there, but no, she has NINE (9) kids! Wow, Mashallah (May God Bless Them)! Anyways, the great things about her 1-she lives in my building 2-she lived in the USA 3-She speaks fluent English 4-She has a 2 year old son that she has invited us to play with!! Yeah, a playmate for Aisha AND a friend for me!

Lastly today, another independant move for me....I was able to look up a doctor under our insurance plan, call them and make an appointment (Yanal helped me some....but mostly I did it myself)! Funny how life is. This makes me feel so normal, when before it just was normal! LOL!