Happy Monday!

I'm sorry for the late post! I've had several health problems especially since I arrived in South Africa and just have not been up to writing a whole post, I have had to reserve all the mental energy for home schooling and being able to support my husband. Insha'Allah I will see a new specialist this week.

Life here has been rolling around as per usual with me cleaning, cleaning and more cleaning. I am the only person I know without a housekeeper here actually, I don't know it's just weird to have a stranger in your house cleaning your bathroom, or maybe it's just me to think that way......

I am starting to make a life here for myself, something I wondered if I could possibly ever do. I've made friends and swapped recipes and am somewhat involved with one of the local masjids. I went to one women's Islamic classes but when the women there started treating me like a ghost there because I was a convert I never even glanced back, I left that crap behind behind when I left high school, they are well welcome to their clique.

Speaking of being a convert, if looks here could kill! If I go into a public place (where there are more white people) they give me death stares lol but if I go into a more Muslim populated area and they hear my accent they want to know everything! And try sneaky ways to gain that information. We were in a Bengali restaurant once when the waiter waited until my husband went to the bathroom to come and ask me where I was from, I felt sure they had a bet going on out in the kitchen, but it wasn't appropriate to ask in a restaurant which prides itself on it's Islamic atmosphere and after the chewing out my husband gave him I doubt he'll be making that mistake.My husband tells me they (as in the people inquiring) just can't rest until they know where I am from, how we met, why I converted and quite possibly even my blood type ;)

I think in part it is a cultural thing. When I was in Bangladesh it was AWFUL the way people would just stare. It was like they had no shame at all. I loved the country but hated the staring oh and the asking. It makes you feel awful. Sometimes when I asked them to stop they would, but otherwise no. I read a post on the staring of men today and how she deals with it (these in particular are South Asian men) I don't know if it's more acceptable in those cultures, I haven't quite had the same with Oriental Asian, African, or Arab Muslims, I absolutely love her blog and you can check it out here.

Anyway I had better go now and put pudding to bed.

I WILL try my best to get started on my 'How I converted to Islam' story tomorrow.

Wishing everyone a happy Monday and blessed week ahead.

Lots of love

Bonnie xxx

Our week

Salam alikum!

I am sorry I haven't had the chance to reply to comments this week, I seriously spend about 8-10 hours a day cleaning or cooking and because of a few health problems I have, I get very tired by the time I come to blogging.

I really appreciate the time that those who wrote to me about 'Zain'. I asked my husband nicely that he go and see his friend at a coffee shop or the gym or whatever and if we have to have dinner it can be a picnic at a park or wherever so his father can see his child's behaviour. I really can't talk to his wife about it as I can barely understand a word she says! I feel sorry for the child though, a child of that age with those problems is usually a product of poor parenting.

This morning pudding and I made pancakes, the recipe listed on my other blog so I thought I would share a few pictures from that :)

Ma'ashallah he is so precious

Starting from Monday I will be sharing my first part of three on how and why I converted to Islam

Have a beautiful and blessed weekend

Love Bonnie

xxx

Going private and bratty kids

Salams all and happy Monday! 

You will have to excuse my zombie likeness today, I took some sleeping pills last night that did not agree with me and it has taken most of the day for them to wear off, it's awful actually and no matter how many lattes I have consumed it has made no difference at all! Lesson learned with those ones is all I can say.

I will be opening a private blog and this one will turn more to do with issues to do with converts, a green lifestyle etc you can request me to add you to my new blog if I you know you or you have left comments previously and I recognize your blogger name. You can email me at bismallah at hotmail dot co dot nz. 

This weekend we had some people to dinner whose four year old was so out of control it was scary (let's call him Zain) Zain swore and slapped my daughter across the face, tore up books and destroyed toys and when I took them off him, he bit me so hard that I was bleeding and really bruised. His parents didn't do one thing to stop him except to tell me to 'give him a hiding' which of course I would never do. I know much of it is due to his parents as they feed him only what he wants which of course is sugary stuff (so many of his teeth have already fallen out) they let him beat his baby brother (to teach them to toughen up) and when he tortures animals they do nothing to stop him. It's rather scary......

The father is not bad per se, he just has somewhat of a village mentality I guess. I am not really sure what to do as Zain's father is best friends with my own husband but I seriously do not want that boy around my little one, maybe I am being selfish but after seeing what he did to my arm I can't imagine what he could do to pudding I don't want him coming.

Any suggestions on my dilemma? All welcome :) 

TGIF

Finally it's Friday! This week has seemed to drag on by, I guess in part to my dear husband and I both having a bad stomach virus and our conflicting cultural views on the best treatment, mine being plain food and lots of water and his being food with lots of chile's....Now I am not boasting or anything but I do have to say my opinion turned out to be the clear winner in this case. I was very good though, I only said I told you so about six or seven times. I really think I'm learning the skill of restraint.

Also Friday is our date night! No matter how much work he has we keep this date like it's etched in stone. I have seen too many couples become just a mother and father instead of husband and wife and we are determined that we will not fall into that. I think it's imperative a couple has time to talk together, discuss goals and dreams and requests etc. We usually only go somewhere close by and simple, but even if we just end up sharing fries in the car in the McDonalds parking lot, it's not what we do, it's that we are together.

On Saturday we are going to the drive in! So cool. My husband and daughter both love animated movies whilst I hate them but I think it's more about the experience. Plus I'll be busy wrangling pudding :) Trying to stop him from throwing popcorn everywhere and wriggle his way out of the window.

Our new home school curriculum will arrive insha'Allah next week as well, Afrikaans is mandatory here but I am trying to best to somehow avoid that. I don't even know one word of the language!

I thought I would share some photos from our week, they are not the best quality but iA this week I will get my camera fixed! I miss like it like a dear old friend. My husband does not want any photos of the kids faces on my blog anymore and although I haven't shown any of my daughter since she got older I will have to get more creative with the ones I put up of pudding.

The rain pouring down outside my bedroom

Garlic knots

Pasta salad

A tree as the sunset filters through it

Baba pushing pudding on the swing at dusk

 Pudding watching the rain fall into the pool

Ambrosia for Baba

 Pudding climbing up the slide, instead of going down!

 Pudding's gingerbread man

A reminder on the rubbish bins lol

I seriously need to go and start the housework now, as much as I wish it the windows are not going to wash themselves. I try to do everything on a Friday so the weekends are relatively free. Although we have a large group of my husbands friends and wives coming on Sunday and so he reminded me " Honey, they are Egyptians so remember you have to serve them meat or we will look really rude" LOL

Have a beautiful and blessed weekend

Love Bonnie xxx

The worst housekeeper

This is a prior warning: This post is primarily about housework. If you are a man or have significantly better things to do then I suggest you stop reading now.

I've never been a good housekeeper at all. In my opinion if your house isn't being featured on hoarders or you don't have an order on your front door from the health department claiming you a notifiable health risk then you are pretty much good to go.

My sister is a scary neat freak and when she would tell me I should be like her I would tell her straight "Toni, I'm creative and we all know creative people are somewhat eccentric, it just adds to their charm". 

It's always been one of my biggest fears to live in the suburbs, driving one of those mum cars and cooking a Sunday roast while my husband watches some kind of sporting game. At least by being creatively untidy I was distancing myself from that 

So when I got married I knew what I was getting in for I just didn't realise quite the degree of it.

So welcome to my new life which includes ironing the dishcloths, scrubbing the floors at a minimum of once a day and doing things I consider really really boring. Like taking the fan apart to clean it 'properly' once a week.

I mean who does that?

Well me apparently.......

There are things I have always loved and done. I always make every meal from scratch including bread, yoghurt etc and making all my own cleaning products and soaps. But that stuff is fun. making your own cleaning products is pretty much the same as being a scientist ;) Wonder if I could get away with adding that to my CV....

And now I find myself in a dilemma. How do women married to men equally as fastidious as my husband actually manage to get everything done?

I went onto some homemaking websites and they suggested making a routine like cleaning the bathroom every Tuesday etc

Cleaning the bathroom once a week, I mean like I said I was never Martha Stewart before but that's kind of gross.... Maybe I wasn't as bad as I thought.

My dear husband offered to get a housekeeper for me but having some stranger in the house all day is really something I am not willing to compromise on.

I need to be able to eat ice cream out of the container, in my pjamas whilst watching my big fat gypsy wedding reruns without being judged. 

Anyway if anyone has got any advice on how to become a housekeeping extraordinaire then please let me know by commenting or emailing me. Go on you know you want to!

It's time for me to get pudding ready for bed now, hope you all had a super happy day!

xxxx

Storm clouds

It's pouring with rain here in Africa and as I stared out the window at the increasingly darkening clouds I thought how lately a few friends of mine have been going through hard times.

Today's writing is not going to really offer Islamic advice as a few of my friends suffering are not actually Muslim but of course as always, I always direct anyone first and foremost to our creator, the lord of the worlds.

Some really hard times.

One of them although I have never met her in person has one of the most beautiful souls I have ever had the fortune to meet. She was always there for me when I was at my lowest with some uplifting words, some presents and her prayers. Her friendship has meant more to me than you can ever know. You could not ask to meet a kinder and more special woman, although she is not technically Muslim, in many ways she is more Muslim than many other Muslims I know if that makes sense. Please pray for her as she prepares to have her baby next month. She has had the most awful time in the last few months.

Two years ago when I was crippled by my circumstances, people would say stuff to me like 'Just be grateful you are not starving in Africa or whatever' I wanted to hug those people. In the face.With a chair. Instead I just cried and held on even tighter to the few friends I did have.

You see at that time I couldn't see past my circumstances, the pain was slowly suffocating me and that was all I knew. I hoped against hope for a better future but it seemed that all that was coming my way was trials and tribulations. I begged Allah for it to just stop because I couldn't take it anymore.

My friend told me "You know whenever I am having an awful time or I met someone who is going through utter hell I just tell them, just be grateful you haven't had Bonnie's life........

Errrrr thanks??

Today as the storm raged on outside, I was more than annoyed because I really needed to go out but couldn't take pudding out in the rain of course. But an hour later my daughter came running in to tell me "Mummy, look out the window" and as I did I saw not one but two rainbows! If the storm had never come I never would have been able to experience my once in a lifetime experience of seeing two rainbows. And I was grateful for it even though an hour ago I was cursing the weather, we never know just what a storm will bring.

But storms take away the old and bring in the new. The rain washes away the debris and rubbish and brings with it a new start. When the storm rages around us we want to hide and sometimes we do but when all is over and the air is clean and the ground washed clear. Sometimes though storms leave devastation in their wake but in that instance sometimes the only way to fix something is to tear it down and start again.

If you know me in person you will know just what storms I myself went through and how for everything bad thing that happened, Allah brought me so much more than I could have ever even asked for.

So for all my dearest friends suffering through your own storm may our creator bring you better what you had before and bless you with your own double rainbows.

Reflections on love

I went into a store and saw this today, when I showed it to my husband and told him I was buying it for him to hang over our bed and he got that look on his face that he gets whenever he is exceptionally happy or proud of me. He ended up paying for it anyway so I am not sure who got it for who. Maybe we got it for each other.

I didn't blog that much in 2012. I had a lot to say but did not really want to put every little detail of my life on here for everyone to know, it still irks me to wonder who is reading my blog and my innermost thoughts.

The beginning of 2012 I fell in love. This love consumed me for a better part of the year to the degree that I felt like I didn't need anyone else in my life. I prayed and waited for the moment when I would be his wife. I gave up my own self respect and self worth almost in the quest for our marriage. This man was forever sending me flowers and gifts and he even made a website for me. If someone goes to that much trouble they must surely love you. Right?

Right??

Wrong. It was never real. And I should have known better. You know sometimes when you want something SO badly you can force yourself to believe something that it is not. You believe the lies and swallow the poison, believing that it will make you better.

It only leads to your destruction.

So 2012 taught me a lot in this regard. I learnt to never compromise who I am for the sake of someone else. And I learnt that sometimes true love is not actually what you think it is at all.

My husband now doesn't buy me flowers, he certainly doesn't write me love letters or buy me jewelry. He wouldn't ever think of bringing me breakfast in bed or telling me how beautiful I am.

However after working fourteen hours he will drive well out of his way to get me a coke zero because he knows how much I love it (even though he loathes me drinking it) he missed an important work meeting so he could sit next to me at the dentist when I got my teeth cleaned because he knows dentists freak me out, he will get up with pudding no matter how exhausted he is, when I have had an awful day with the kids he will take me to the McDonalds or whatever is open at 10 pm! Buy me french fries and a drink and tell me jokes to make me laugh.

And this is real love.

It is not perfect by any means. We fight and I cry. We disagree on a lot and life is not perfect but it is real.

Alhamdulliah for the bad times too, they help me get over my paralysing fears of being left again. I have big time issues..... But the more we fight almost the more I get it that he is not going anywhere. We are in it for life.

And so for better or worse this really is love.....

Catching up

Assalam alikum

I have wanted to write for the longest time but have about five minutes internet time a day if I was lucky! Now today lying in my bed with the internet is akin to spending the day at a luxury spa ;) Never mind the fact that I am surrounded by five billion boxes that need to be unpacked. A girl has gotta have her priorities.

We finally moved apartment yesterday alhamdulillah. For the last six weeks I have been in a one bedroom apartment with the two kids and it seriously put me on the verge of feeling like I was going to have a nervous breakdown. It was fine for my husband as he got to escape to work for 14 hours a day, I asked him if we could swap and he just patted my head and smiled.

But now we have moved to a much bigger place and the difference is amazing. I finally have my own bathroom and most importantly I could kick pudding out of my room, I love that little boy to pieces but being woken about twelve hours a night is not really conductive to a happy momma, I mean c'mon I had to deal with that for the first year of his life, I didn't sign up for the two year deal. So yesterday for the first time in six weeks he slept all night. Alhamdulillah.

We will be living in three different countries this year and so I guess I have to get used to the moving, such is the life of my husbands job. But I seriously just want to settle so badly, I want to buy actual furniture (my husbands idea of actual furniture is a green plastic garden table) but don't worry that was the first thing to go, along with the polyester sheets and faux leather couch.

I am going to get my camera fixed this weekend insha'Allah and then I will have some beautiful photos to share with you. I didn't want to live in this country by any means but I am finding the beauty where I can. I have so many stories and experiences to share with you all but it will have to wait until Sunday as there are boxes and bags on every surface possible.

Love and blessings to you all