There's no place like home...

Thomas and a young date palm.

Time to say good-bye to the Middle East, for now.

Our first visit to home, to the Pacific Northwest, to our families, in almost a year.

Goodbye to the sultry heat that has morphed into something downright vicious at times. Today I really could have used a potholder to enable manually changing gears using the stickshift in Snorkel Car. No seriously, I burned myself. Thomas had sweat rolling down his face in the backseat. It was an ugly scene.

Bethy had a good-bye to say as well: good-bye to her first tooth. The amazing Tooth Fairy gave her US dollars to spend. That is one smart tooth fairy, I tell you. Bethy was very, very brave at the dentist and the tooth fairy heard about that too. Well connected apparently.

The next day Bethy took in the money and the note from the fairy to school to show-and-tell and on the bus another child told her that there was no such thing as the Tooth Fairy, that it was really Mommy who puts the money under her pillow. Bethy asked me if this was true. Grasping at straws, trying to play it cool, I asked her what she thought. She grinned her adorable tooth gap grin. "No!" she said, "no way could you stay up late and sneak something under my pillow like that."

Ha! So there, bus kid!

Bethy had her last day of kindergarten, and somehow accidently brought home another child named Rijk's kindergarten journal they've kept all year long as well as her own, along with some of his papers. I fretted about how to get the papers to his family: we are flying out tonight!

Don't worry, this story has a happy ending.

After numerous phone calls I got ahold of his Mom, who said they too are flying out tonight. Looking at their very Dutch sounding names, it seemed like it would be too much of a coincidence, but I asked anyway. Sure enough, they are flying out on the exact same flight to Amsterdam as we are.

Convenient.

End of the year party in Bethy's KG1 class.

I fortunately found and gently dug up Eba the turtle in time to pass her on to the turtle sitter. I was not looking forward to trying to explain in Urdu "please feed our turtle vegetables and fruit now and then, I shall pay you extra" to our gardener.

Pretty sure Google's translator tools couldn't have helped much with that one.

So, goodbye Dubai until August. There are many things and people here I shall miss, but home is calling, and there's no place like home.

Bethy says the first thing she wants to do when we get to Seattle is go get a Slurpee.



My "must-do" list has an alarming number of food things on it as well. Very much the expat experience. Mostly, though, I want to see our families and friends back home, to go running in the rain, and to see the whiteness of beautiful Mt Rainier soaring above it all.

Then I'll be home.