Tour of our New Home

Our apartment is finally ready for a little tour!  Here is a video of our place, followed by a video that Justin made of campus.  We live in faculty housing directly on campus, off to the side of the school facilities.  Faculty share our own playground common space as well as some smaller grassy areas.  We also have access to the pool just about any time, and the middle school field opens up to our dog park before and after school.

We live in a three bedroom apartment with a small back patio.  We haven't done anything with the patio space yet, and it is in dire need of some gardening, but we'll get there.  Then there is a gate that opens up to the common areas: to the right is a small grassy area that Meeka likes to go to every day, and to the left is our garden area.  The faculty playground is only about 100 meters away, and the pool is about 50 meters away.

Our Apartment

Campus Tour

As you can see from the videos, there are a lot a natural rock formations scattered throughout campus and our home.  A famous Indian architect designed the school and campus and wanted to preserve the natural rock to make it a part of the overall aesthetics.  The girls love this aspect of campus.  They have rocks to play on during recess time among the rest of the playground, and we also have rocks directly outside our apartment that they climb all the time.

Early Halloween Celebrations

This weekend was full of Halloween fun as we celebrated the holiday a week early.  Next weekend is actually Diwali, and our school gets a long weekend where most faculty families travel.  Therefore, we had our on-campus trick-or-treating on Friday of this week.  Then the school-wide Fall Fiesta was on Saturday.

We started the festivities with a potluck dinner on Friday at the faculty playground.  Kids came together for some food and pictures and were then sent off door to door once it was dark outside.  Parents quickly ran to their apartments to prepare for children to stop by.  Justin passed out candy after making our entrance extra spooky, and I ran around and took pictures.  This is the first time I didn't have to walk around with the girls because we they were completely safe on their own on campus.

Kaelia had a wonderful time walking around with her good friend, Simrin, at a slow and steady pace.  They didn't make it to all of the apartments and didn't even get that much candy, but that had an awesome time together.  Taelyn ran around with Sophie and Bella, the vampire twins, and made to all of the apartments three times before stopping.  They got a lot of candy and were eager to count everything and negotiate trades at the playground afterward.

The next day was Fall Fiesta on our main sports turf field.  This is the main fundraiser for all high school clubs, so each year the high school students prepare and run various booths with games.  The entire event consisted of bouncy castles, games, food, live music, a haunted house, and high end raffle drawings.  The girls went around from game to game, winning tickets for prizes at the end.  Their favorite game was "Prison" where they had to run around in a room behind bars and try to escape from the high school students that were in charge.  Taelyn crawled under a table to get out while Kaelia actually slipped through the bars.

After games and dinner, the girls were eager to try out the haunted house.  Unfortunately, it was a little too realistic, and they did not enjoy it.  We will not visit it again next year!  But we did end the evening on a positive note as we hung out on the turf, listening to the music and the raffle drawing.  We didn't win anything, but we did have a great time.

Happy Halloween!

This digital scrapbooking design personalized with Smilebox

First Family Garden

Every year, the on-campus teachers set aside a plot of land for their families to develop their own gardens.  This is something the girls have wanted to do for a couple of years, but there was no way to grow plants in our back yard in Qatar.  Now we have officially started our very first family garden - and really the first garden that Justin and I have ever had outside of childhood.

We first attended a garden kick-off party and begin the planting.  Kaelia chose to plant carrots while Taelyn chose mini pumpkins - both of which are questionable about whether they will successfully grow here.  I then planted numerous items, hoping that something will sprout.  Amongst that group are lettuce, basil, rocket, cilantro, green beans, and eggplant.

To top off the party, we were also given a sign to take home and paint as a representation of our personal plot.  We chose to name our garden the "Walker's Weeds" which seemed fairly fitting for a while.  We certainly have some plants sprouting up, but many of them were weeds.  Unfortunately, I couldn't really tell the different between weed and plant, but after a few tips from other gardening teachers, we are getting on our way!

So far, we have some basil, rocket, green beans, and carrots developing quite nicely.  It also looks like one of Taelyn's mini pumpkins may be growing as well as a few sprouts of cilantro and lettuce that are beginning to form.

Kaelia's Carrots

Taelyn's Pumpkin

Oktoberfest in India

Every year, we get pretty excited about Oktoberfest, and we were pleased to learn that India does not disappoint.  We first celebrated the holiday at the American Embassy who put up a large tent, offered German food and beer, played live music, and led various Oktoberfest games.  Our teachers put together a few teams for some of the games and either came in first or second play each time!

A couple of weeks later, the brewers that live on campus hosted our own faculty Oktoberfest.  Justin included, all of the brewers dressed up in Lederhosen and set up tables with their home brews and labels.  Justin decided to call label his brewing company The Stray Dog because there are a lot of stray dogs around here and his brewing style is a little wild like them.  We also had plenty of sausages on the grill for the evening and lots of variations of potato salad amongst other types of food.  It was a great night!

A free scrapbooking design by Smilebox

10K in India

I had my first racing experience in India today where several of the teachers and members of our running club entered into a 10K.  The race was held about 1.5 miles away from campus, so it was really convenient to jog over there this morning.  The race sponsors also hosted a little dancercise warm-up just before the race which was more entertaining than anything, and then the race was off.  There were not many girls up toward the front of the race, and I caught the only female ahead of me before the halfway point.  Then an Indian man ran with me for the next 5K, and when he started to fall off the pace, he said to me several times, "Madam slow," trying to ask me to slow down so we could finish the race together!  I did not slow down and finished the race shortly after as the first female and third person overall.  My time was not great, but it was a firm effort and a fun event!