The Twins Travel

I never, in a million years, had any intention of homeschooling my kids. Ever.  For one, I didn’t really understand what homeschool IS - I thought homeschool was either regular school at home for eight hours a day, or ultra religious families who wanted to teach flat-eartherism and creationism.  For another, I’m a single parent and it just wan’t an option when I worked full-time. My kids had to be in school or day-care when they were younger.  But then I retired from the Air Force. And then COVID-19 happened and schools shut down in March 2020. Of course, we all know what happened then... NO ONE DID WHAT THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO DO  ...so schools went to virtual learning. When the county we were in announced they were going to virtual learning for the first nine weeks of the 20/21 school year, I knew it was not going to work for Declan and Harper. The end of 2nd grade was honestly horrible for everyone. It wasn’t the teachers - let's be clear about that. They were both fantastic and

This post is a little late, but here's my (our) take on Messila Water Village. It's located just down from the Jumeriah Hotel and Messila Beach. It has four water slides - one where you take an inflatable tube for either two or three people; and three others that you slide down without a tube. There's a lazy river, a toddler pool and play area, a pool and play area for older small kids, a wave pool, a plunge pool (where the slide dumps you out above the water), and one of those almost vertical slides that you slide down on a mat. My first impression is that it's a little run down and could use some updating. The tiles in the lazy river were painted over at one time and the paint is chipping, along with some of the tiles. There aren't a lot of inner tubes available for the lazy river, so everyone kind of just swims/floats along. The fiber glass of the slides is faded (understandable given how hot the sun is) and could probably use some patching. But...the kid

We've been in Kuwait for almost two months (I know this, because I've started getting notifications that it's time to change my password at work) and we're settling in nicely. Declan and Harper have made friends with a little boy their age who lives two doors down from us. The great thing about living on the compound is they can run back and forth between the two houses and I don't think anything of it (unless I know the baby is sleeping at the little boy's house, then I don't let them do that). There are a lot of kids close to their age and Declan and Harper usually have someone to play with when we go to the park. We spent the day at the pool this afternoon and a lot of other families had the same idea. There's usually something planned for at least one day of the weekend, even if it's just having the jumping castle out for happy hour on Thursday. Harper has it in her head that she wants to do a pajama party, so I'm going to send ou