Living Life to Its Fullest!

You know the feeling after a vacation... sort of like you need a vacation after your vacation? Well, that describes our family over the past few weeks... When we returned home from our vacation (previous post), we had house guests for a week immediately after, so we took them around the island and showed them some of the unique things about our country... The Pottery being one of our favorite places to go...

After our house guests left, Morgan and I (Liz) were invited to an engagement party... The women were at the party eagerly awaiting the bride-to-be to show up while the men had a special dinner for the groom-to-be. Morgan, being the girly girl that she is had fun dressing in her Arab dress to prance around in at the Women's party.

Here's the Bride-to-Be... What's interesting about engagement parties on this side of the world, the Bride arrives and in front of all her family and friends is presented jewelry (the ring, ear rings, necklaces, bracelets, etc) from the groom. At this particular party, family members threw money at them, covered them in flower petals and then burned incense as a symbol of blessings for their upcoming marriage.

Randall's friend has a brother who owns horses so he took the kids to the farm and the kids got to ride horses (this made their day!!) but of course Morgan thinks we should buy a house now! (the pics are transferred from a cell phone, sorry if the quality is a little blurry)

We then enjoyed a picnic with our friends at a beautiful park overlooking the water... More pics and videos to come from this picnic... (the kids are rolling down a hill... it was pretty amusing to watch the locals watching our kids get all dirty as they rolled down the hill... I can only imagine what was going through their minds!)

And we love spending time with our friends! This is Karis, Eli is her big brother (for those who keep up with our blog and have seen pics of our friends)... We have many play dates these days as we are so blessed to have families with the same aged kids as Morgan and Micah.

Needless to say... our vacation is long over but we always find ways to keep ourselves busy and enjoy our time! Living life to its fullest!

Family Vacation Part 3

Here is an attempt to summarize our trip via pictures... We had a great time, visiting dear friends, relaxing at various beaches, exploring new areas, etc... And throughout our many hours spent in the car, our kids were champs!!! They were content (for the most part) with their movies, snacks, etc.. and of course there was the occasional "cat napping"... possibly just out of boredom...

This is a great interpretation of what a "perfect day at the beach" might look like for The McQueen family...

We then went to a local festival and it was divided part amusement park/cultural Bedouin Village set-up... we spent most of our time in the village part... here are some neat things we saw:

We had received previous advice to attending the festival from friends that we should ride the ferris wheel as a family... and so we did... it was an incredible view of the city at night time, despite that I (Liz) had a sick feeling in my stomach the entire ride as I tend to fear heights and it was my first time to ride one. The kids loved it and it was an overall neat experience for all of us!

We then explored outside the city towards the mountains... We came upon a sink hole, which apparently is a hole in the ground, filled with natural rock and water.. there was a stair-well which lead down into the hole, allowing people to explore...it was beautiful!!!

See what's behind us??? Mountains!!!

This was a cool beach! Water on one side, mountains on the other side.

This is how Morgan spent her time at this beach:

This is how Micah spent his time (a.k.a. my heart (Liz) was pounding the entire time Micah was exploring on the rocks):

We then spent a morning at a local market (souq) in the city; of course our kids had to sit down in the middle of the chaos and eat their snack... the crowds didn't seem to bother them...

And our 3rd and final beach of the trip... just put sand and water in front of Morgan and she's content.. Micah on the other hand is our little explorer... from the previous post, this is the beach where he cut his heel and we took him to a clinic to get cleaned up.

All in all it was a great week and a half of rest and quality family time spent together. Happy to have gone and now happy to be home!

Vacation Part 2

Still posting pics of our vacation away from home...

Here's our view of the awesome beach we went to the other day....

Here's a pic of our little dare devil... Micah was playing at the beach... stepped on some glass or a sharp rock, cut his heel pretty deep and so we found a nearby clinic to clean his foot & bandage him up. Poor Guy!! Like we're discovering everyday...all boy!!!

More pics to come...

The Local Festival

Just a pic from the ferris wheel More to come... Part 1 of our vacation/road trip.....

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