ninja Juma

Juma was feeling immensely sad about the prospect of missing Halloween because we'd be in Africa. Random people kept asking him, "And what are you going to be for Halloween?" and he's resentfully say, "I don't get Halloween. They don't have Halloween in Africa." He started to take his anger over this out on Zanzibar, saying he hated Zanzibar and he didn't want to go again.

I thought about it and didn't want our decisions as parents to live in Zanzibar sometimes make him resent it or us. It's our choice to live in Zanzibar, not his; he just has to come along because he's a kid. And adjusting to life in Zanzibar is, frankly, difficult. So I figured that it would be nice to help him adjust to the idea of going to Zanzibar again--by buying him a Halloween costume. Okay, so maybe it was a little bit of a bribe, but I never made it explicit to him that the costume has anything to do with Africa.

Anyway, he found a ninja costume and fell in love with it. He wore it every minute he wasn't at school or in bed for days.



And it turns out, we'll likely be here for Halloween after all.