Hot and cold

It is the second half of July and we cannot rely on fresh nights anymore to get the temperature in the house down.

Tomorrow or the day after Ramadan will start and I do pity the people living around me, but somehow they will get through it. The first 3 days are the hardest. The second week fasting gradually becomes a habit.

At this moment we are moving the cooker outside. It doesn't make sense to do everything possible to lower the heat in the house and then raise the temperature several degrees by preparing dinner.

Zakaria is watching too much television and spending too much time at the PC. I've decided he has to cut down. This means we have to provide more challenging distraction.
Moving the cooker is a challenging distraction, such as is cleaning the bath room.

He has been quite ill the last weeks, his troubles resulting from eating a large ice cream. Tummy ache prevented him from sleeping, throwing up on his bed sheets made him believe he did something terribly wrong and a soar throat made him go without food for a few days.
He is back his old self again. Talking a lot and liking his food.

He is complaining about toothache. It looks like one of the permanent teeth is pushing, but Zakaria blames it on the 'doodies' (little beasts) that are eating his teeth.
At almost 4 years, it is early to have permanent teeth coming through, but Mohamed says a few of his other children changed teeth at a very young age.

Zakaria started learning about letters and figures. He can count from 1 to 10 quite well, but usually does it wrong on purpose, being the 'tease' he is. Yesterday, he surprised me by reading letters from my T-shirt. It was just a few, but he is obviously working on it.

I hope to get him reading and counting in Dutch before he goes off to school in a few years and will learn to do it in Arabic and English.