Days of Summer

Yesterday was Amira’s first swim party, which was a school field trip. The little school she attends three days a week has been a blessing for both of us, alhamdullilah. Her teachers are so incredibly gifted a taking care of children. These kids are being educated with actual curriculum, daily activities of life, and all the while allowing them to keep their individual personalities as well as develop their creative side. When I first decided to enroll Amira………well, I don’t know if I should use the word “decided” as I was fighting the process of change because it went against my grain to put her into school before she was 5 years old, but the struggles to survive were out weighing these options and therefore I finally yielded to enrolling her. Moreover, I realized that if I wanted to keep my same flexible work schedule of being self-employed in order to stay with her maximally I needed to do this. Otherwise the alternative would have been to get a Corporate job which would have me working a minimum of 45 hours a week, which would result in me only seeing Amira on the weekends as the week days would be shot after working all day. This was not an option for us. Moreover, I can remember being so angry at this situation because my goal in life or at least as long as I could remember was to be married and have a family. To raise my children and not put them in day care for someone else to raise. However, funny how life works out. We never truly know what’s going to happen from any given moment in our lives. I think we like to convince ourselves we are in control, but in reality only God is in control of everything. It’s our goal to learn, grow and even be bendable through lives experiences in the hopes of feeling we are always yielding to God’s will for us.

Anyway, sorry big digression there. Amira’s school is small, maybe 10-12 children maximum and it’s in an intimate setting of someone’s home. From the very first moment I entered Susie’s home I felt so wonderfully peaceful there and the energy that filled the space was unbelievable. Amira has been attending there for now a good year and a half and her school has had a number of field trips, alhamdullilah.

We received a couple of weeks ago a little flyer from one of the parents of Amira’s classmates that had extended an invitation for the entire school to come to their home for a swim party field trip. Well you can only imagine the excitement of the kids.

We all gathered at the school Friday morning at 9 with the kids already dressed and their swimsuits on under their clothes and their energy was so incredibly high I almost couldn’t sit in the house waiting because it was so grand.

We loaded the kids and headed over to Matthew’s house. Well let me tell you something, Matthew and his sister should never have to leave their home for anything. Oh my goodness! This house was huge. At first glance walking to the front door they had a beautiful little English style courtyard with a running fountain and scads of beautiful blooming flowers. Walked through the front door (didn’t pay much attention to the house), through what I believed was the living room area and on out to the backyard. Oh my gracious! I could not believe this backyard. It was a genuine park. It was enormous in size, beautifully landscaped around the perimeter of the property with flowers, and had manicured lawns with cement walkways throughout the yard. Aside from being unbelievably beautiful and large it had every kid’s toy you can possibly imagine. They had a little pool just for toddlers with a slide built into it; a swing set that had a teeter-tauter, swings, another little swing/chair thingy that held 4 and a slide; a sandbox table with tools; a kitchen set; water guns; bicycles and best of all they had a motorized Hummer car and motorized Kawasaki quad. All of these items mentioned were for toddlers. You can only imagine their overwhelmed excitement of seeing all these items. You could see they didn’t know where to start first or what to do as there was so much. However, they managed to get into their groove and play for hours. At one point I somehow placed myself in the position of being the “bus operator” on the swing set contraption and was pushing all the kids (8) on this one swing/chair thingy (which is only suppose to hold 4....hehehehe) and they all kept chanting “faster, faster, faster” which was fun until I felt the swing set start to pull out of the ground. LOL Apparently the family didn’t cement the swing set legs in the ground, which would make it dangerous if the kids really got going on it as it could tip over. Anyway, we were having a good time and the swing set managed to cooperate and not tip over, alhamdullilah.

Lunch time came and the kids barely ate their half of hot dog and fresh fruit salad, except for Amira. That tiny little girl takes mealtime seriously. :-) Although I think the other kids normally eat well but because of their excitement their appetites seemed to have escaped them.

The only conflicting part of the day was getting my head to shift from being on the field trip and wanting to relax to then switching it to work mode as I still had clients to take care of and tend too. Thankfully though it was a relatively slow day and there didn’t seem to be any major fires to put out, just calls to return. At one point I received a voicemail message from one of my boss’s asking me to go by the office and check the mail; I nearly felt like crying because I was really trying hard to just enjoy the whole day and not have to work at all, but just like life, things don’t always work out the way we want them too, so we must be grateful for every moment we do have, alhamdullilah.

The field trip started to wind down around 2:30 as some of the kids were starting to get cranky and all of us parents nearly at the same time thought, “ahhhhh a nap would be nice about now”. :-D

Well all cleaned up, gathered our things and Amira and I headed to the office to check the mail. After doing such, we headed home which was now nearly 5 and hung out at home. It was fun to listen to her recap about her day. The last thing I remember doing before going to sleep is thanking Amira for a nice day and for sharing her field trip with me, giving thanks to God for wonderful day, and finally praying.

What a great day!