The Wart

Hana’s brother has a wart on the palm of his hand. He’s tried to get rid of the thing by extracting pieces of it with his compass during math class, but that did not work, and so we’ve been trying to get rid of the thing with the medical kit at home. This has had Hana mesmerized for quite some time. How did it get there? How are we going to get rid of it? What is it? And most important of it all; does it hurt?
And so she’s made a series of ‘Adrian has a wart’ drawings.

Number 1: Hana draws, and dictates to her mom: “Write ‘Adrian has a wart’.” Adrian is visibly unhappy. Number 2: Adrian is very unhappy, and is even crying. Hana has added herself: ‘Adrian has a wart’. The scotch tape in itself is almost a work of art. I go through a role of Scotch tape on an almost weekly basis here. Number 3: The empathy is oozing out of this one. Not only Adrian is crying, his sister is joining him. The arrows indicate the place of the wart (in case you might not have noticed). She’s wearing a T-shirt decorated with a flower.
And some work from Easter that came out of her book bag.

A Mouse

Some weekend Work

An old building in Beirut.

The windows are all broken, the wooden shutters falling down, pieces of woods are stuck over a window. A spider web and a spider hanging from a silk thread indicate how old it is. On the roof (right) Is “something for TV’s”, and on the left there are pieces of iron that are not attached to something. A bird flies over. On the left is a mountain, with the sun peeping up behind it.

An alien space ship in space.

The sun is on the top left. The black dotted circles look to me like a model of the rotations of the planets around the sun. The red one is a space ship. I am not sure about the blue object. Planet Earth maybe? Or another space ship?

Planet Earth in the center,

with the sun above (rocket taking off from the earth and going into space), and below there is another object. A volcano? I’m not sure.

A day on the beach.

There are people waving on the boardwalk (or maybe a pier, although we don’t really have those in Lebanon. There’s a beach (red) with a palm tree on it. The construction is a house on the beach, with TV antennas on top.

Poor Sucker

This dog must – on a daily basis – regret the day he jumped the car of this little girl. The abuse he is getting from Hana is just beyond imagination. He’s being dressed up in doll clothes, must sleep in the doll’s bed, and is being dragged wherever Hana goes. He’s being inspected on a ten-minute basis for lice, fleas and ticks, and washed, combed and perfume-sprayed constantly.
We hear him growl persistently; the signs of a not-so-happy dog. But she knows now exactly how far she can go before he snaps. He bit her only once, and now she knows the routine; when the growling reaches a higher pitch, she gives him a 30 second respite, after which she continues her routines. Poor dog. He must feel like such a sucker.

The dining table, with the candle holder on top, a chair with my handbag hanging from it, and the dog under it. He looks like a dachshund here, but he's grown quite fat since he moved in, due to the fact that that he is appropriating the catfood as well.

I like the was she drew out three-legged dining room table; very accurate.

Egyptians

We watched a program on National Geographic about the Egyptian pharaohs. They built pyramids and wore wigs, at least that is what Hana remembered.

Easter 2009

Hana decorated Easter Eggs today.

Love

A Valentine's Card that recently emerged. The heart is actually on the inside of the card, but she made a cut-out in the front.

Last week Hana told me a secret; she had a boyfriend and she even kissed him on the lips. His name was Karim, a classmate.
Today I asked how things were going between Karim and her.
“Oh, I broke up with him. I didn’t like his attitude.”
What on earth could be wrong with the attitude of a 6-year old boy, I wondered.
“He never listens to the teacher.”
Good reason. There you go. Bad boy, Karim.

Nanny Cecile

Hana’s old nanny passed by today. Hana is very excited about her, and hope she is coming back. In anticipation, she drew her a picture.

The First Tooth

Hana has been hanging on to her tooth for weeks now. The very first tooth. It was dangling by a threat, but she was displaying ‘patience’, as she called it, and the tooth was not to be touched. The thing was hanging on to dear life; she already had her tooth box ready, and the tooth fairy was all informed on this one. And so, when this afternoon she was watching TV, and she suddenly realized that the tooth was gone, without her noticing it, the house was too small.

An upset (and not so pretty) Hana

She cried her heart out. The tooth fairy was not going to give her money, and the school nurse was not ever going to give her a tooth box anymore, because although she had already pried the tooth box from the clutches of the school nurse, she now had no tooth to show for.

Hana's teeth; all happy except for that little one that got lost.
Lost! I tell you, what a drama. It is crying it's eyes out, and so is Hana.

Out of sheer desperation, she wrote herself little notes showing her misery. She cannot write yet, or refuses to write, according to her teacher, but she can draw pictures. And so she drew these two notes showing her love for her missing tooth. All happy faces, except for the missing one; gone forever.

Ah! Poor little lost tooth, with little hearts drawn around them to indicate her passionate love for this tooth, that got lost.

Does this story have a happy ending?

Yes.

Happy Hana! Tooth has been found.

She remembered that while eating her lunch, she bit something hard and she spit it out on the carpet. Thank you very much Hana, for spitting your lunch onto the shaggy rug. We turned the rug upside down, and indeed, together with left-over lunch, came the tooth.

The relief was immense, on all sides.