E in Nizwa

An advantage of private schools is big, overnight field trips.  At our school, they are referred to as residential trips.  Is this a British phrase?  I don't know.  But I know it isn't just a British thing to go on trips because my sister went to a private school for a few years growing up, and she always went on ever larger end-of-year trips.  To keep me from being sad about this, I went to my Grandma and Pa's house for a week by myself.  Hmmm... I see a Throwback Thursday post I could do with that.  I did go on school trips, but band & orchestra trips and soccer tournaments seem different, to me.

My adventurer

Anyways, year 4 children (third graders) are the first to go on a trip, then the trips get a bit longer each year.  Year 5 children go to Nizwa.  Nizwa, as you may remember from my previous post about our family trip there, is a city in the interior of Oman.  It is 1.5-2 hours by car from Muscat.  The school hired buses to drive the kids to Nizwa, then they had to change to smaller buses to get up the mountains to their camp.  By camp, I mean hotel.  But these are kids, and it's fun to refer to it as a camp.  The school had rented out the entire facility.  It's not overly large, but renting the entire facility allows for better security measures for the kids.  They shared rooms 4 or 5 kids to a room, and the teachers came around to make sure they were settling down for bed.

Bircher Muesli

Bircher Muesli is a Swiss breakfast dish, I believe.  We discovered it on the breakfast buffet line of our hotel in Dubai.  It was a hit with my youngest son, and therefore a recipe that needed to be recreated.

I found a recipe on Pinterest via Alexandra Cooks.  This was my starting point, though I did change it some to fit my morning time constraints and products that I have on hand.  I make this in bulk and store in a sealed container.  It is important to note that this recipe should sit and soak for a bit so that the chia seeds can do their thing and plump up.  I prepare it approximately 15 minutes before the boys get up so that it is ready to eat as soon as they are downstairs.  And by they, I mean just J.  I'm not even sure E has tried it.

Bircher Muesli mixed and plumped.  This version had peanuts.  Side note:  This stuff isn't beautiful to photograph.

Muscat Marathon 2019

January 18 & 19 was the weekend of the Muscat Marathon.  Stephen ran the half marathon on Friday morning, and the boys ran in the 1k and 2k on Saturday morning.  I should have run the 10k, but it was hard to gauge how quickly Stephen and I could have found each other to trade off boys between ending his run and starting my run.  I should have signed up and asked friends to help with the boys.  It takes place, after all, in the Wave which is where many of our friends live.  Next year, I'll be running the half marathon, too.

One of the many photo op signs they brought in for the race.

For the most part, it was a very well organized run.  It was also one of the largest runs Stephen has participated in.  Not sure how it compared in size to the OKC Memorial race, but this race was large.  I believe the 10k had the most runners.  The kids runs had nearly 3000 kids running!  It was also the first time we had true, world-class runners running in the same race.  True, they were running the full marathon.  But they still finished their marathon after Stephen finished his half, and they started at the same time.  The first finisher was 2:13 (according to Stephen) as opposed to the 2:10 from last year.  One of them apparently fell, and ran through the finish line holding his heavily bandaged hand up.  I think he finished around 5th or 6th.