يوم ميلاد سعيد, روبرت

I think that says Happy Birthday, Robert in arabic. The country we studied this month was Dubai. It is funny how different countries inspire Robert and myself in different ways. Iceland and Greenland, for me,were all about Vikings and Inuit, for Robert it was about fish. He became interested in Dubai when we were looking into the tallest building in the world and this came up:




Searching on google maps he was fascinated with this:

For those who are interested there is a very documentary on the making of this island here. I wonder what the Sheik thinks is going to happen when the oil does run out in 2016 and he can no longer afford to run the air conditioning and the power for all these luxury resorts, shopping malls and amusement parks?

The architecture is what intrigued Robert about Dubai. For me it was more reading about Islam, and the food. I love Middle Eastern food and it is dairy free! So for Robert's Birthday, we decided to do a Middle Eastern theme. On the menu was hummous with pita, tabouli, falafel (which didn't turn out very well - too much onion or garlic made them bitter) and warak enab (stuffed grape leaves - these were ok, but not really a kid friendly food), olives, figs, grapes and dates.















For a cake, he wanted a skateboard cake. I think the cake turned out pretty good and it was quite tasty.

Finally, inspired by this post I tried my hand at making some beards as party favors for the boys and the party guests. The beards were not nearly as finely crafted as Annie's, but the kids got a kick out of them and I think they all look very handsome in their beards!