A Day in the Life of a Working Mom

Early evening and I was still at work.

Well, I was working, but I wasn't, technically speaking, at work.

There were six of us hanging around in an underground garage, waiting. Not really talking much. Just standing there, staring at the entrance.

My cell phone vibrated in my pocket, but before I could check on it, I heard a noise coming from the entrance. Sirens. Engines roaring. And around the corner came the motorcade: car after car pulled into the garage, right in front of where I stood.

From one of the vehicles, just a few feet away from me, a DS special agent leapt out and pulled open a car door, stepping back to allow the Secretary of State to exit the vehicle. He walked right past me and into the building, followed by an entourage of agents and foreign service officers and all sorts of hangers-on.

No, he didn't notice me. And I didn't follow him in. My job was to escort the travelling press into the building and into the press filing center after the Secretary had gone in and gotten settled.

I did just that: I walked them in and got them set up in the filing center, where they had just a few minutes to work on their stories before we had to dash back to the motorcade, which was leaving for the Palace shortly.

Back in the underground garage, I could feel my phone buzzing again, but it was my personal phone, not my work phone, so I decided to ignore it for awhile longer. I stood and watched the hive of activity, trying not to pass out from the exhaust fumes all around. With the reporters back in the press vehicles, I had nothing to do but stand around and wait for Secretary Kerry to rejoin the motorcade.

He eventually returned and hopped back in his car. The entire motorcade peeled off for the palace in a blur of flashing lights and squealing tires and blowing exhaust.

It was 7pm, but I wasn't going to be finished working for hours: I had to staff the filing center until well after dark.

I finally had time to check my phone though, and I found a message from the nanny:

"What's for dinner?"

I should tell you that my nanny is great, and the kids love her, but she cannot cook. This wasn't a problem when I hired her, because I had no intention of working full time and cooking is one part of parenting that I take great pride in. I love to do it, and I do it well. When I make dinner, my kids eat healthy food and mostly enjoy it. So I didn't want a nanny who could cook. My plan was to take care of that myself.

But now? Here it was 7pm, an hour past dinnertime, and there was no food in the house that she knew how to cook (read: no mac n cheese or rice). I scrambled to think of something I could order that would get there quickly, and I finally settled on a chicken kebab place. I texted her what to order (from memory - do you think I'm ordering take out too often these days?) and trudged back to my now-empty filing center to wait for my reporters to return.

The kids mutinied.

My husband texted to tell me they did NOT want the chicken. They did not want the leftover pizza from the night before, either. They did not want anything at all in the fridge. And by the way, he texted again: we're out of peanut butter.

Sigh. This working mom gig is really not easy, is it? I spent the night in my filing center, feeling like a total failure, chewing on tootsie rolls and wondering how to find a better balance between being a decent mom and being a good-enough employee.

I never did think of a way to do it right. Does anybody really know how? But this morning, the first morning of the weekend, I holed up in the kitchen and got to cooking frantically, trying to catch up, to build some food equity so that next week goes better. I made a batch of black bean soup, a double batch of chicken stock, and a triple batch of Turkish lentil soup before it was time to leave for the baseball field.

I'm still not quite sure how to balance it all. And what little balance I have now will fly right out the window in four weeks, when Bart leaves for Baghdad. But for now, tonight, I'm feeling better, knowing as I do that those containers of soup are stacked neatly in the freezer, awaiting the next time my work becomes all-consuming and my kids rebel against the idea of soggy cheese pizza or boxed mac n cheese. My own Tupperware talisman, keeping disaster at bay...

Crocodile Temple! And some other stuff.

Where were we? That's right, more crocodiles.

We sailed to Edfu after touring Philae Temple in Aswan, and the next morning, we got off the boat to tour Kom Ombo Temple. The guide told more stories about falcon-headed-god-people, but Ainsley mostly just wanted to look into the deep pit that was used to hold crocodiles or water or something, I can't remember what, I was too busy making sure she didn't fall into the pit.

There was a museum at the temple that housed a collection of crocodile mummies. Ainsley was highly dissatisfied with the museum: she had apparently assumed that the crocodile mummies would all be staggering about on their hind legs, holding their stumpy little arms out zombie-style and trailing mummy wrappers in their wake, a la Scooby Doo. But these crocodile mummies were just, for lack of a more exciting word, dead.

(Aside: When Shay was about the age that Ainsley is now, I took him to the "Dinosaur Museum" in D.C. He was sooo excited to go! But when we got there, he took one look around and sadly said "awww, there're no dinosaurs here. It's just a bunch of bones.")

After touring the site and dodging packs of super-aggressive vendors, we grabbed some lunch and then headed out for a horse-and-buggy ride to Edfu Temple. Somehow my horse-and-buggy got split from the rest of the group and I had a scary few minutes there when I was pretty sure the boys and I were about to get robbed-or-worse. Short version of the story: we survived. Slightly longer version: never tell your buggy driver you're from America. Fortunately I told him we were from Jordan, and the mean-looking guys who surrounded our buggy just minutes later seemed less interested in us once the driver told them dejectedly that we weren't American.

All in all, a good day. We docked that night in Esna and stayed up late, sitting on the roof of the boat, slapping away mosquitoes and mortifying the children with our off-color jokes and spot-on imitations of the tour guide. 'Twas a nice evening.

That paint is, like, a squazillion years old. Yet it still looks better than the walls in my living room.

Gritting my teeth: "Take the picture before I drop her..."

Very deep pit. With not much to stop a kid from falling in. Unless you count the vigilant mom clinging to the kid's  shirt.

The happy family. Errr, families. 

Just plain ole dead. Not spooky at all.

Also not spooky. Kind of cute, actually.

Ainsley's horse-n-buggy driver didn't try to have her killed. For the win.

Temple of Edfu

"What was so wrong with our idea of hanging out at the pool all day, exactly?"

Sunset. Lovely.

Turns out I have smart friends. They don't all look smart, mind you. But some of them are.

I'm back on iPhoto, apparently, thanks to all of y'all. So here's another set of photos for the grandparents. These are of Philae Temple in Aswan. Frankly, after wrestling with iPhoto all afternoon, I'm not much in the mood to tell any stories about Philae. Be thankful I linked you to wikipedia, at least, and go read up if you want to know what it is.

Best part? The guide was telling us stories about all of the ancient Egyptian gods, and I swear he thought the gods were really real. So he'd tell us, for example, about how Isis flew all over looking for pieces of her husband's body, and she found a piece right here on this very spot. Not an imaginary piece. A real piece. As if her falcon-headed self was real. Or he'd tell stories about how the gods were fighting, or shouting, or turning their heads into crocodile heads with cow ears and suns on top. It was funny how very real he managed to make them seem, despite their unfortunate overuse of animal body parts. Funny, that is, until someone-who-shall-remain-unnamed in our group (*cough stj cough*) also started referring to them as real people. So of course we all made endless fun of her for that.

Read on, grandparents. For the rest of you: I'll be back with a real post eventually. But first I'm going to post a few sets of photos. So maybe come back next week if you're already tired of looking at photos of someone else's adorable grandkids?

Apparently there was some sort of a uniform requirement?

Head of a falcon. Horns of a cow. And is that a basket full of turkey drumsticks balancing on her head, there on the right? Yup. Totally real.

Sweating buckets. Yet still so adorable!

Not sure what she's doing. Walking like an Egyptian, maybe?

My little reader.

On the boat at last after a long day of temples and High Dams and overpriced perfume shops.

View from the boat.

Because nothing says cute like posing in front of a hot tub with your dress stuck down the front of your pants.

Yes. We packed swim suits. Why do you ask?

Adventures of Yesteryear

Kazakhstan, 2002-2004.

Lisa was the wheels and I was the mouth. That is to say: she had a car to spare, and I spoke the language. So between the two of us, we could go pretty much anywhere in the country and have big adventures.

Lisa was definitely the adventurous one. She was forever calling me and telling me to get my shoes on because we were going to find some weird outdoor market, or some hidden backcountry hiking trail. She and I went to the banya together and got totally naked, letting some large Russian woman beat us with steaming birch branches and then dump ice water over our heads. I thought I was going to die of heart failure. She just laughed. She and I decided to go hiking one winter morning - "just up to find the frozen waterfall; don't worry, I have extra snowshoes" - and we almost got the car stuck in a frozen creekbed. I thought we were going to die. She just laughed. She invited us over for a Fourth of July bash, at which her guards set off industrial strength fireworks just meters away from where we were all standing. I thought we were going to be blown to bits and die. She just laughed.

We went shopping at the green market together, bartering over the vegetables and sampling the pickles. She bought some wild mushrooms from an old babushka one day. We both thought the mushrooms were probably fine. As it turns out, her husband almost died after he ate one. Bygones.

We didn't buy any more mushrooms after that. But we went to the Korean restaurant and the Hare Krishna restaurant together. We went to the grocery store. We went to the car wash, and we went up Medeo, and we got lost on some hiking trails.

It was only my third post, but it was her 300th, or so it seemed. She taught me so much about how to live properly in the foreign service. (I have a teacher at every post: In Moscow, Paula taught me to serve the community; in Yerevan, Laura taught me to be myself, with joy and without embarrassment; in Beijing, Jen taught me to laugh until it hurt. Here, too, I have many teachers, reminding me to laugh and love and dream and be kind. I'm still working on that last one - story for another day.) In Kazakhstan, Lisa taught me to have big adventures Every Single Day. No matter how bad the weather, or how scary the Embassy alert messages, have fun. No matter how icy the roads, or how annoying the traffic, go somewhere. No matter how big the vicious barking dog in the middle of the road: keep walking. She was brave and adventurous and I loved tagging along anywhere she wanted to go, just trying to keep up.

But then, you know, Aidan got sick and we curtailed out of Kazakhstan. She and her husband moved back to the States not long after we did, but we didn't see each other all that often. We were both busy with kids, after all, and life in the States just isn't conducive to dropping everything in search of a big adventure: there are bathtubs to scrub and groceries to buy and dinners to cook and the adventures somehow fall by the wayside.

We keep in touch occasionally, Lisa and I, and I still like looking back at those photos from our Kazakhstan days.

What a surprise when her (now ex-) husband called us up this week to let us know he was in Amman for the evening. We met him for dinner last night, and we picked up exactly where we left off, reminiscing, telling stories and comparing notes about where the last nine years have taken us. It was a really nice evening, despite - or perhaps thanks to? - the freak thunderstorm that rolled through Amman as we were enjoying dinner outside.

And now today, I find myself thinking back on those crazy adventures we had all those years ago, and trying to think of a way to have some new big adventures here. Every Single Day.

Me, in front of the frozen waterfall. (Just please don't laugh at the haircut. It was a language issue.  I said, in Russian, that I wanted my hair "shorter." She heard "short." It was an ugly few months there, waiting for my hair to grow back...)

I Hate iPhoto. And iPhoto Hates Me.

When I first got a Mac with iPhoto loaded on it, I fell instantly in love. Face recognition! Album sorting and naming! Editing right in the program!

But I swear, that program thwarts me at every turn. It mocks me openly. I despise it. It loses photos. It randomly duplicates albums. It changes the dates on my albums, placing photos from a year ago in the year 2036. Stuff like that.

It reached a new low two days ago, however, when it suddenly decided not to let me drag-and-drop photos into folders on my desktop, from whence I could upload them into blogger.

I have so many photos of our trip sitting there in iPhoto, and four grandparents impatiently waiting to see them. Yet iPhoto refuses to allow me to send those photos to blogger. I hate iPhoto, and it apparently hates me right back.

Anyone out there in the blog world have any ideas how to fix this new problem of mine? If so, please shoot me an email, or comment right here. The grandparents thank you in advance.

Nubian Village on the Nile

Cairo was crazy: huge and dirty and trafficky. Within about 10 minutes of leaving the airport, Bart was already relieved that he'd decided NOT to bid on it for our next post. After all, we have Beijing under our belts already - I loved our tour in Beijing, but it definitely taught me that I am not a big city girl.

Our first day there, we hit the Khan al Khalili Souk to do some shopping and then let the kids swim in the hotel pool into the evening. On our second day, we went to the pyramids and the Egyptian Museum, then had dinner outside with STJ and CL while the kids ordered room service together. Driving along the river next to our hotel, we pointed at the burnt-out shell of a building across the way, surrounded by the fancy hotels that line the road near Tahrir Square.

"What's that building?" we asked our guide.

"Oh," she waved vaguely, "those are all hotels."

Riiiight, we responded, but how about that burnt-out building next to them?

Clearly, she did not want to answer, but after continued questioning, she finally allowed that it was the party headquarters building, destroyed during the revolution.

Cairo highlights, you ask? Well, Ainsley was not impressed with the mummies in the Museum. She thought they would be wrapped in toilet paper, staggering around with their arms aloft, but "they're all just dead," she said, visibly disappointed. Clearly the girl watches too much Scooby Doo. And none of us were impressed with the traffic. At one point we were driving around under the highway, across bumpy, trash-strewn paths, dodging squatters and old tires, in an effort to evade traffic. But it was all too much for Bart and CL, who kept making "get off the X" jokes that really weren't all that funny.

So that was Cairo.

After a day-and-a-half, we all boarded a plane for Aswan, where we planned to hop on a little cruise ship and make our way to Luxor along the Nile. But before we boarded the ship, we took a big motor boat to an island in the middle of the Nile. On the island was a small Nubian village - our guide took us there because Ainsley was desperate to see a crocodile, and they supposedly had a few crocs in the village. Also, he said, we could sample some Nubian food and tea while we were there.

Yes, there were crocodiles in the village. It was sad, really. They had one big crocodile in a small cement cage with a wire grate for a lid, and when we peered in, one of the villagers started poking him with a stick - to prove he was real, I guess. Poor guy started snapping and trying to jump at her. In a smaller glass tank nearby, there were two baby crocodiles. They pulled one out of the tank and handed it first to Shay, then to his friend Scott, to hold for photos. Its tiny snout was tied shut so it couldn't bite them. Again: sort of sad. But Ainsley was enthralled.

Next we went up on the roof of the house and sat while one of the women brought us mint and hibiscus tea, along with bowls of bread, "black honey" (molasses), some kind of crumbly sesame paste and something our guide simply called "very old cheese." The cheese floated murkily in the bowl, looking less than tempting, but hey, I figured, when in Rome. I tried it - several of us did - and it wasn't bad, but it wasn't exactly good, either. We asked the guide about the cheese, but he just said "oh, I've never tried that stuff. It's just for the tourists." Nice. I stuck with the bread and molasses after that.

As the sun was setting, we hopped back in the motorboat and headed to another island, where our hotel for the night was located. And that was our first night in Aswan.

Pictures below are in no particular order, but hey: it's almost time for bed over here. No time to re-arrange.

View of the Nile from our hotel room in Aswan.

This kid latched onto our boat and hitched a ride.

The kids on the roof of our motor boat.

Our driver.

Very old cheese in the middle bowl.