Circuit Training Holidays

Allow me to re-introduce myself. I am the youngest in the family, the one with the DJ name, who complains every morning in classical arabic before going to school because I don't want to "learn anything". I will be a  four year old narrator  for this entry, although my mom refused to endorse the narrator from the book Room in her post about Child Narrative. Sometimes she can be very contradictory....

There is nothing that I love more than vacations. This means I can wake up at 730 instead of 630, at which time I give my mom a taste of her own medicine by waking her up to get the day started. I am not sure why I do that, given that my mother's vacation days are like circuit training (not unlike school days).



One of my mother's main priorities, if you haven't noticed that already, is to make each of us study every day. She carries activity notebooks for me to the pool and we practice handwriting while my brother swims. The French learn how to write before they learn how to read, so focused are they on cursive handwriting. I am in pre-K, and they make me practice what they call graphics, which is an early stage of cursive writing. I much prefer reading so instead I work on deciphering the complicated words on my siblings books, like "grammaire" and "francais".

My sister who is in first grade only does maths and reading.  My poor brother is stuck with all the subjects you can possibly iamgine, and they repeat the complete program three times until you pass the infamous bac. I am telling you, I live in a constant circuit training.

Then my mom piles in the activities, one after the other: golf, ski (yes we do ski in Dubai!), swimming all in a single day. Then my brother is dropped off for a sleepover at a friend's house, we stop by for a visit to my great-grandmother, my mother fits in a pilates class followed by a circuit training session! Her driving resembles a run on the treadmill, constant! Other days we do karate, ballet, golf competitions, horse riding and violin. Can anybody say "tiger mom"? I participate in some of them, but while I am still too young to try all of them, I sit and watch my big brother and sister perform. We also get to do really fun things on vacations, like attend birthday parties and playdates with cousins too.


I try to stick to her like  Robin does with Batman, accompanying her even to her coffee trips with my dad. Gladly I am the one who wakes her up on vacation days....but perhaps I will soon realize like the other two siblings that its better not to stir the circuit trainer while she sleeps.