Today we went to St. Joseph's Catholic church, which had services all day in about 17 languages, sometimes two at once. In the morning I stopped by to see when the English services would be and overheard the Arabic mass. Made me smile, somehow, to hear Allah invoked in a mass, to hear the Our Father in Arabic. All the English masses were being held outside to accommodate the thousands of people, literally thousands, at each service. We went at 6pm while the sun set, and a bit of rain came up. During Communion the next-door mosque's azhan sang out, interrupting Catholic prayers with Muslim prayers. Not seamlessly, but not prickly, either.

I've been working on stuff for the newspaper. I wrote about a couple neighborhoods, including ours. I interviewed an expat on his concept of home. (I also interviewed another for next weekend publication.) I wrote a feature on health clubs in Abu Dhabi. I'm still writing my weekly exercise column, though it is sorely flagging in spirits. I wrote about the doula class I took at Kate's house.

We are on day four of attempt number three of sleep training for iola. I am using a two-step approach, taking two weeks for each step. The signs are encouraging already, but it was terribly hard on everyone the first three evenings. Now, suddenly, she can go to sleep with only a couple whimpers. In the first step, she learned to fall asleep in her crib by herself, but I still comfort and nurse her as normal throughout the night, sometimes co-sleeping if she settles (the reason I am doing this is because she started wanting to play in bed with us while we wanted to sleep. And she's getting too big to lift in and out of the crib constantly. I don't mind a couple times a night; I mind every 45 minutes...). In the second step, well, I don't really know how the second step goes. But it may involve me ignoring her during the night while John goes in to comfort her... not sure. I have fallen strongly on both sides of the cry-it-out debate, absolutely convinced 1. it was horrible and then 2. it was fine. Perhaps that's because she's 8 months now, and has a sense of object permanence (we keep the door open so she can see us doing boring things down the hall, just in case she forgets about object permanence). Or perhaps it's because all three of us are sleep-deprived every day lately. I also did a bunch of reading up on it, and saw some studies that showed no psychological damage, and a huge improvement in sleep ability after "intervention." Who knew that sleeping is a skill to be learned? Some people are blessed with natural talent, but others (about 25 percent of babies, according to researchers) struggle with it, sometimes for years. And sleep problems as a three-year-old predict sleep problems as an adult, which is correlated with depression... so I wanted to deal with it now, not in two years. 

I also wanted to write about my huge environmental breakthrough. I was unsure about whether using cloth diapers is better on the environment here, with all this energy-intensive desalinated water. I figured out a way to make sure: I pour iola's bath water into the washing machine after her bath! Voila. I bought an extremely low-tech washing machine with a glorified hose input because I knew I would never forgive myself for being lazy and drying my clothes in a machine when we live in a desert (and I knew I would, if I could). The little things we do to save our humanity. It only took 6 months to figure this out... and the washing machine is right next to the tub. It's not super hygenic, but... she's toughening up against the germs in the world.