Back for a while....but just a while

Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh,

Oki doki....I'm visiting my family in America for a while, so I have access to the internet for at least the next two weeks. I haven't been online in such a long time, subhanAllah except for a few minutes here and there...and it will be surprisingly painful, I think, when I go back home and have nothing to occupy me in the quiet moments of the day.

Jayjay is getting bigger and bigger. Monster baby is almost totally weaned now, alhamdulillah, much to her mama's dismay who misses the cuddles. Alhamdulillah she is actually starting to grow hair on her head now, but it is still so short that she hardly looks like a girl unless I stick a headband on her...and she's so active that her father is seriously worried about all of the bruises she gets running (and falling). She plays on the playground with all of the other kids, kicks soccer balls around the garden and is just generally mischevious. And she likes swinging best of all things, which means Mama has to stand around for an hour and push her almost daily. I wish they had chairs next to the swings...or a bench...or something...then I could bring a good book with me...

Her language skills are improving, but she goes on in three different languages and Mama is always being asked what something means, because she's the only one who can understand the wonder-child's bad pronunciation of whichever word in whichever language the child has chosen to use at that particular moment in time. And Mama doesn't really have any better idea than the others do half the time. Still...the pronunciation will improve and has seemed to learn to differentiate between English and Arabic a little....a very little...with some words.

I like it that she is starting to say please and thank you which come out like "pee" and "tak-y". This is an upward battle for me, though, because she hasn't yet grasped the whole concept that she should say please BEFORE she gets something she asks for...on the other hand, she can't say "yes" very well, so if I ask her if she wants something, yes or no, she has just started answering with "peeeeeeeeeeee". Oh well, at least she's being reasonably polite to her aging, nervous mama.

Who, I might say, has minor heart attacks on a nearly daily basis on the account of her stair-climbing, chair-rocking little daredevil who falls down more often than can be good for her. As I have told everyone else around me, the child will give me a heart attack someday after some big fall and as I lay there dead on the floor, she'll be laughing at the great time she just had.....to which my father tells me that there was some other girl he once knew who did exactly the same thing to her parents.............hmmmmm.....who could he mean?

And my depression is not improved by coming home. To my father who accepts me, but who I feel has a slight dislike for my lifestyle (and whose home I am now in the process of cleaning from top to bottom...and let me tell you, three weeks is not enough time to get it done....I have found things from 1988...on the floor...which hadn't been touched since they first were set (or fell) down there), a mother who never really gave a rip for me anyway although she loves my daughter for some reason or another, to a sister and brother who aren't too much higher than white trash (although the brother has improved himself in the last couple of years and no longer tries to insult me as often as he used to), and having left behind my husband. That husband, who usually keeps me sane, but has just recently put me between a rock and a hard place about some work that looked pretty dubious to me, but he insists is worth it....hmmm...

Yeah. Other than that, I suppose I need to get back to cleaning. The four of five hours of cleaning almost everyday for the past two weeks has made the place look much better...but in the week I have yet before my husband gets here, I have at least three rooms to clean out and three rugs to tear out. I never really knew how big this house was..... Wish me the best. My nerves are at an end. If my daughter weren't so cute, I'd probably go crazy and yell her out, too.....Audhubillah.

Fi aman Allah,

Katherine