The transition from work to mummydom

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I’ve come to the conclusion that never mind massages and spa treatments, what I really need after work and before going head first into a long weekend with two small boys is a decompression chamber.

It was nice and quiet down there! Anyone else feel like they get the bends when they transition from work to home?

Maybe it’s just me, but after being in an office where everyone sits still, the computer more or less does what it’s told and the noise levels are fairly muted, suddenly being reintroduced to the demands of two energetic boys is like surfacing too fast from relatively tranquil depths.

The decibels, the goading, the speed at which the boys fly round the house, the way they ricochet off the walls (summer temps mean we can’t exercise them outside), their neediness after my absence – whilst I’m overjoyed to be back home, it makes me feel quite giddy.

So, now it’s the weekend – and it’s a long one because Sunday, when we usually all go back to work and school, is a holiday for the ascension of Prophet Mohammad. And DH is out of the picture because he’s ‘in the Sim’ – airline lingo for training in the simulator, during which they practice fires, engine failures and other such scenarios.

My mind is thinking about something less terrifying but which has left me scratching my head nevertheless – BB’s homework.

It’s that time of term again when instead of doing the usual spellings and reading for homework, he has to complete a project – and present it – for his end-of term summative assessment. All very well, but he’s six. Some of his classmates are five. They’re in kindergarten!

Last week he had to design a ‘mode of transport’, this week he has to create it. There was the option of using Lego, but that would have been too easy. He’s opted to junk model a train, and so I’ve spent much of the week collecting boxes, buying art supplies and wondering how to turn cereal packets and toilet rolls into an express train.

As my working friend put it, there’s no way such young children can do these projects on their own. So when little Johnny comes home from school and says he has to create a solar system, it’s mum who ends up printing off stuff at work, coming up with ideas (styrofoam balls on sticks? genius!), and cajoling a child who can’t sit still for two minutes (heaven knows how mine gets through six hours of school) into completing the project. On time.

And, with all the tiger-mothering that goes on in Dubai (including presentations by seven-year-olds on iPads!), you really need to make sure your child takes it seriously. BB’s told me some of his classmates have brought their projects in early. On display already, there’s a rocket made out of bottles, a flying car and a train with wooden wheels.

By the end of this week, I’m fully expecting there to be 4by4s made from matchsticks, robotic trucks and remote-controlled airplanes.

I’d better get back to those loo rolls…

Where I appeared Wednesday

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No, not on TV or anything like that, but I was quite excited today because a guest post I wrote called Circles in the Sky was published this morning on a website in America and I thought I’d link to it here because it’s my first guest column, plus it actually makes me sound quite experienced at something!

Not experienced in anything useful or lucrative, but in flying with little hellions – something many expat mums will be thinking about as we prepare to head home to reintroduce our children to grass, grandparents and wellies.

Apologies to those who’ve read parts of this before – it’s adapted from a blog in my archives, and, yes, you might notice that I don’t mention I’m married to a pilot. I figured a more competent, all-round more together pilot’s wife wouldn’t lose a child on board, or nearly cause the take-off to be halted, so I decided to gloss over this piece of information while regaling some of my travel tales.

Without much further ado … here’s a teaser. Just click on the link for Airports Made Simple below to read more:

“Please…help….me….”


Waiting at the gate for a flight from Dubai to London last year, Son #1 came out with: “We’re going to go up, up, up and then we’re going to C.R.A.S.H!” – announced loudly, repeatedly, and with suitable sound effects. No amount of shushing would stop him and nearby passengers started looking really scared. Read more at Airports Made Simple

I like to be in America

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It’s lunchtime. Everyone’s hungry and we decide to head to a Subway we haven’t been to before.

“A 12-inch roast chicken on Italian, please,” I ask the man behind the counter.

“Yes, Maam,” he says, nodding in agreement and loading the wrong bread with turkey ham.

I ask again: “Sorry … roast chicken not ham, please?”

“No problem, Maam. No problem,” he assures me, throwing some chicken on top of the ham. (Several minutes later, charging me extra for his mistake.)

We negotiate the veggies, then get to the dressings. I pick Caesar. He starts pouring, but it runs out, mid-squirt.

“Maam, no problem. I give you ketchup,” he says, directing the nozzle at the sub.

“No, no, really, that’s fine. No sauce,” I say, raising an eyebrow in protestation at the salad being covered in ketchup.

I try to get the meal deal, the one we always have. “Could we have the crisps and drink, too, please?”

“Meal deal?” he enquires. Blank smile. (Ringing it all up separately on the till.)

A cut above the rest

After the bill has been debated, the boys tuck into their sandwich. I say ‘tuck in’ – BB eats his half quite happily, while LB pushes his around the table.

Our sandwich man looks over, beaming away at me and the boys. I smile back. Then he starts walking over, brandishing a gleaming, 6-inch kitchen knife!

“You want cut,” he grins, pointing at LB’s still uneaten half of the sub.

“NO! Thank you,” I respond, perhaps a little sharply and with two eyebrows raised, but stopping him in his tracks before my three-year-old gets his hands on the knife.

A little later, as we’re leaving, he motions me over with a cheery wave. “Maam,” he asks. “I want to come to your country.”

He means the US, as I’d already told him the boys were American. My heart sinks, because I genuinely feel terrible for migrant workers who’ve left their families behind, but also know there’s nothing I can do to make the ‘American dream’ a reality for him.

“You can help,” he asks, beseechingly. “Your husband help? When you come next, you tell me how you help. Okay.”

I nod. I offer sympathy. I mutter something about visas. Then agree I’ll ask my husband what to do (DH is already meant to be helping the man in the Indian at a foodcourt we visit to get a job with the airline, after all).

He won’t let me go, though, so we talk some more about a transfer within Subway, and although I can’t quite understand what he’s saying and you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s his first day on the job, I think he says, “I have 10 months’ experience here. And a diploma in sandwich-making.”

An amiable chap – but a diploma, really?

Never a dull moment in Dubai, not even ordering lunch.

Silent Sunday: The Tardis

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If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that temperatures in the UAE spike in summer, and it gets seriously hot. So imagine my amusement when I saw this egg-shaped walk-in human drying machine on a visit to our neighbouring emirate of Sharjah. For children who get wet playing in the Al Qasba fountain, it lights up with eerie red lights and blasts hot air at you – like the climate doesn’t already do that!

Looks like an alien space capsule, or a sci-fi teleporter, don’t you think?

A man with a van on a hot afternoon

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Sitting indoors after school today, we heard the tinny strains of Greensleeves – just about audible over the noise coming from the TV (yes, it’s summer, we’re stuck inside and the TV is all that stands between me and the kids climbing the walls with boredom).

As the tinkling notes got louder, so did the boys’ excitement. “Mummeee, it’s the ice cream van. QUICK!!”

The boys ran outside to buy brightly coloured lollies and I couldn’t help but smile at the sight of the van, which comes round our neighbourhood bringing a welcome chill to our desert compound. On long, sultry afternoons, it not only brings back childhood memories, but also provides good old-fashioned entertainment as you watch the vehicle being mobbed by kids.

It might be 41 degrees in the shade, with 75 per cent humidity today (yes, you sweat from pores you didn’t even know existed, and don’t get me started about humidity hair), so the ice cream man’s arrival doesn’t exactly mean we all get a breath of fresh air. But as my boys and BB’s girlfriend from next-door sat on the porch step licking the drips from their lollies before they melted into gloopy puddles, I enjoyed a few blissful moments of peace and quiet in the air-conditioning inside.

Results all round! The next time we hear the van’s chimes ringing out across our compound, I’ll have the money ready.

Set up by two British brothers in 2009, the entrepreneurial young pair spotted a gap in the market and filled it with an imaginative small business that left everyone else wondering why it hadn’t been done before – obvious really!

What superjumbo pilots really do

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Within the flying community in which we live, we’re used to our menfolk being around at odd hours, or leaving with a suitcase in the middle of the night. We see men in uniform climbing into chauffeur-driven airport cars, having kissed their wives and children goodbye, and returning home several days later, sometimes more.

But, over the past few months, a new trend has emerged that’s actually taking some getting used to. Every day, I see pilots at the gym, pounding the treadmill, pumping the weights. I’m seeing pilots traipsing after toddlers when it’s cool enough outside, and taking gangs of kids to the pool. They’re at school, too, watching little Johnnie perform in puppet shows and plays; at the supermarket in the yogurt aisle; and at DIY stores, sent there by wives who are either clapping their hands with glee that odd jobs are getting done, or [whispers] engineered the whole trip to get him out the house.

Each week, these men try their best to keep up with their wife and children’s jam-packed schedules. I see them removing their Ray-Bans to wipe the sweat from their brow and fiddling with their aviator watches, realising they’ve been on the same time zone for days and that the gentle hum of the kids doesn’t stop.

It’s been lovely having DH around so much while his airplane is fixed, but I think all the wives of the A380 pilots currently working reduced hours would agree there’s a reason why our husbands do what they do. Pilots don’t like being grounded. They’re not the kind of men who can happily sit round the house picking the fluff from their toenails, while any notion that ‘size matters’ is whittled away.

Quite honestly, I’d say our menfolk don’t quite know what’s hit them. And spare a thought for them: Plucked from a life of world travel, luxury hotels, far-flung cities, restaurant meals and telly in bed, they’re suddenly faced with a whirl of six-year-old playdates, 80-kilometre school runs, to-do lists the length of a runway, mindless errands and dental appointments.

You can imagine the shock.

Circles wins the garden contest!

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My 24-year-old self thought that entering neighbourhood garden contests was the preserve of bored, frustrated, curtain-twitching housewives with competitive tendencies.

It never crossed my mind that, 15 years later – in the desert of all places – I’d pick up a leaflet advertising a community garden competition that had been pushed under the door and put it in a safe place. That, a week later, I’d spend 20 minutes looking for the by-now-lost leaflet, and then, late one night, email a photo of our garden, taken when it was in bloom, to the organisers.

I didn’t even tell DH. I might have told my mum, who has such green fingers she could probably grow roses on the moon, and I mentioned it to Catherine the Great, who laughed. But I didn’t think anymore of it.

I blogged about our garden before. Previously just a giant sandpit, it now has real grass, brightly coloured bougainvillea and a selection of exceedingly hardy, heat-resistant desert plants. Like most families in Dubai, we have gardeners who come by twice a week, but compared to the lush oases that more horticulturally minded neighbours have created, our patch of desert is more Jungle Book than Kew Gardens. If I’m honest, I really don’t know one end of the garden shears from the other.

Inspired, I’ll be out there with the shears to do some pruning as soon as it’s cool enough

So I forgot all about it, until the email arrived to say we’d won. I’ve no idea how, but we’d won! My fate as a reluctant housewife with a garden to manicure was sealed.

And they wanted to come round with a prize!

Twenty minutes before their visit, I was rueing the fact I hadn’t high tailed it to the plant souk to do some repair work. I took the picture shortly after my mum had worked her magic on a visit. Since then, the plants in the photo had either grown to Jack-And-The-Beanstalk proportions, or died in the scorching sun.

At 4pm on the dot, three people arrived from Dubai Properties, one of them a photographer with a long-lens camera, the other two from marketing. Oh no, I cringed, they want photos for their brochure and they’re going to be horribly disappointed!

I didn’t let DH leave. I accepted the prize (a solar-powered lamp) apologetically and we all walked around the garden while the photographer took hundreds of pictures, and I made excuses for the fact that a) it didn’t look nearly as clipped and alive as in the photo (but, look, the grass is still green!) and b) I didn’t know the names of any of the plants.

I have to admit, I did rather enjoy feeling like we were on a shoot for House & Garden magazine, but when their marketing brochure is printed, I won’t be holding my breath.

I can’t show you the photo I entered, unfortunately, as it gives away where we live, but I can leave you with a feast for sore eyes – before and after shots of my mum’s English garden in Surrey. As you can see, I’ve got a lot to live up to!

What my mum and dad’s English garden looks like now

And how it looked before my Mum got her green fingers on it

Silent Sunday: Skyline

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Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest tower in the world, is a sight to behold on any day, but nothing beats seeing it standing tall among its architecturally impressive peers. Each building twists and turns in its own unique way, glinting in the golden sunshine and creating a modern skyline that rises from the desert like a mirage.

Taken with an iPhone from behind the window of our seaplane – through the haze!

Doha’s darkest day

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There was a sombre mood among Dubai mums today. A sense of loss. As though the world had tipped on its axis.

Shockwaves were ricocheting through the Middle East as we learnt more about the Villaggio tragedy in the Qatari capital of Doha, in which 13 toddlers, four teachers and two brave firefighters lost their lives as a popular shopping centre was engulfed in flames.

We might not have been directly affected, but with the three degrees of separation that is expat life, nearly everyone in Dubai has connections with Doha. Most of us have searched for childcare in a country that is not our own and every Dubai mum knows exactly what it’s like to rely on malls during the hot months.

What is unimaginable is the pain that the families must be going through. When the little ones were dropped at the mall’s Gympanzee nursery, and the teachers went to work that morning, the idea that a couple of hours later the daycare centre would be ablaze – with firemen unable to access it because the staircase had collapsed – was unthinkable.

The firefighters reportedly had to break through the roof to get to the trapped children, but it was too late. They died from asphyxiation. One family, from New Zealand, lost their triplets, aged just two.

Here in Dubai, we also watched the tragedy unfolding on social media sites, hours before the news was officially reported. On Twitter, we witnessed the panic spreading among Doha mums who didn’t know if their children were safe. On Facebook, there were photos. It was indescribably awful. We prayed it was all rumours and scaremongering. It wasn’t. Nearly 12 hours after the fire broke out, the devastating news was finally released to the world’s media.

And today, as stories of a chaotic evacuation, defunct sprinklers, floor plans that didn’t have emergency exits correctly marked and inaudible fire alarms emerge, we’re asking our children’s nurseries and schools about their evacuation plans and fire drills.

Words simply aren’t enough. My thoughts are with all the families who lost loved ones in this tragedy – and with Doha’s expat mums, a small community, who are still in shock.

Surely they don’t keep cows in the desert?

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And other Dubai myths debunked

At the weekend, we visited a hotel we haven’t swum at before and discovered a little Britain. Full of holidaymakers from the UK, there were accents from every part of the motherland and suntans in numerous different shades (ranging from English Rose to mahogany).

DH and the boys jumped into the pool, and I was taking a few extra minutes to get lotioned up (I don’t mess with the sun here), when a sweet lady started talking to me – ostensibly to tell me that there was a bird’s nest in our parasol, but partly because I think she fancied a chat.

She must have been in her late 50s and was on her honeymoon. After I congratulated her and enquired where her new husband was (chatting to a buxom bikinied lady at the swim-up bar!), she asked me when we’d arrived.

“Oh, we live here,” I replied, realising she’d assumed we were also on holiday. “My husband’s job brought us out here,” I said, by way of explanation, as she shifted her bikini straps around so she wouldn’t get tan lines.

“Really? You live here?”

“Well, not here, in this hotel, but in Dubai,” I continued, glancing over to check the boys were settling into the pool OK, as I had a feeling the lady – lovely as she was – didn’t know much about living in the United Arab Emirates and would have some questions.

Before we moved here, we came across a few surprised reactions from people who’d never been to the Middle East and were, most likely, fearful of the region. “Will you have to wear a veil?” “Are you allowed to drive?” “Can you drink alcohol?”, “Is it true they cut your hand off for stealing?” they’d ask.

She didn’t roll out any of these myths, but immediately honed in on the heat.

“But it’s so hot – and the driving!”

“Yes, it takes a bit of getting used to,” I assured her, smiling as her husband swam away from the big-breasted woman and gave us a cheery wave.

“And what about that sandstorm the other day? It was terrible,” she remarked, referring to a Mission Impossible-style blowy day that must have appeared to herald the start of the apocalypse, but which I couldn’t quite remember given that there are so many sandstorms here.

After 20 more minutes of chat, I’d persuaded her that we actually have a really nice life here – the kids are happy; the schools are great; I can and do work out here; I don’t speak Arabic but the kids learn it at school; and yes, I do get homesick and miss family (a lot) but we have plenty of visitors.

There are more than 10,000 cows in the UAE on farms scattered around the country. They’re kept in open, air-conditioned sheds that allow the animals to wander outside and they eat imported alfalfa. Cornflakes are added to their feed, with compost under foot rather than grass.

And, then, she got me. Square on. I was blindsided by a question that came out of left field and for which I had no answer.

“But where are all the cows?”

“There’s no shortage of milk,” she correctly stated, “But where do they keep the cows?”

With the searing temperatures and lack of grass to graze on, there are, of course, no fields of lowing cattle here, but I knew there were dairy cows somewhere (Al Ain?) I just didn’t know where, or how.

(I’ve since asked Google – see right – as the answer is really interesting).

Moving swiftly on, the only thing I was able to tell her, with any certainty, was that milk – and indeed water – is more expensive than petrol in the UAE.

As much as I was enjoying our chat, I was just about to say I should join DH and the boys in the pool when she brought up one more topic – that people probably want to ask about, but don’t dare to.

“You must all be very rich out here, what with not paying taxes and all,” she quipped, audibly tutting as she pondered the amount of money she’d paid into the British government’s coffers.

I think I snorted – for the first couple of years, we were honestly living from pay check to pay check. Politely, I replied, “No, not everyone! The cost of living in Dubai is astonishingly high. Have you been to a supermarket here? It’s about £5 a fish finger, you know!”

How about you? Do you find yourself debunking myths about the country you live in?