Hi there! Some of you might know that me and Bella followed my husband to Riyadh and managed to perform umrah during our stay in Saudi last month. Its was almost a week stay in Riyadh, followed by 3 days stay in Mecca. Short.. too short in fact but alhamdullilah we managed to make full use of our time there, insyaAllah..

The reason we had to go to Riyadh was because my husband had to attend the Association of Space Explorers XXV Planetary Congress. It was my third time meeting all the astronauts from all over the world!! Most of them attended our wedding when the Congress was held in Malaysia in 2010.

And this is Bella’s first time, of course ;) We all had to wear a name tag, and Bella got hers too!! Haha.. cute or not!!

Check out her name tag.. So full of bitemarks and kelepet2 coz that’s what she did to her name tag!! Haha..

Anyway, we had fun there. While the astronauts attending their conferences, forums and interviews, we (spouse and children) will go around pusing2 Riyadh :) Quite a challenge for me as Bella still needs her short nap at noon and susu every 3-4hourly and at the same time I wanna see the city too. Bella probably the youngest kid attending the conference. Lucky me, a lot of makcik2 wanna play can carry her around. Heheh..

One of the most beautiful scenery I’d seen in Saudi is their desert. MasyaAllah.. Unbelievable. We were brought to see the sunset at the desert in suburb Riyadh.. and it’s breath taking. But to my surprise, it’s actually not easy to walk on the desert sand.. No wonder camels have such a lean leg!! Hahaha.. We had fun riding the camels.. OK, not me.. just Bella and daddy. I don’t think riding a camel would be a good idea for a 7 month pregnant lady, either I will fall or the camel will break their back!! :D

But Bella had a lot of fun!! She looks like she wants to conquer the world!! Woohoooo!!! You go girl!! Check out the cloud! It’s so thin because of the geographic location of Saudi Arabia, that explains the weather and minimal rain there. Yup, their rain only twice a year!! In KL, it can go up to twice a day!!

And that’s Bella trying to make friend with the falcon, little that she knows that the falcon can bite her fingers. We almost got a mini heart attack she she genuinely wanna manja2 poke the falcon’s head and the bird was already turning its head to wards her wanna bite her back!! Hahah.. OK, that’s it. I took her away from that bird!!

After about a week in Riyadh, we travelled back to Jeddah before entring Mecca. I remember looking at Kaabah for the first time when we perform Hajj after we got married.. my heart skipped, probably 3 beats!! Hahha..

This time, we come back again with Little Bella. How I wish she understood what was she seeing..

But I’m sure she had fun, from all our three days stay there, never even once she cried or buat perangai. She behaved very well. During prayers time, we brought her down for prayers despite thousand of people in Masjidil Haram. Since Bella can walk on her own, we just let her walk on her own, the only thing that we needed was patience to wait for her to reach her destinations! Haha.. too small steps lar.. But she was good. Really!

This was just ‘trial’ before we brought her into the tawaf crowd. We wanted to see how she reacted to wards big crowd of people before joining the tawaf crowd. We performed our umrah twice and one tawaf for tawaf wida’. Everytime we went into the tawaf crowd, Bella will fall asleep even before we finished our first round and she will only wakes up after we finished our saie’. Subhanallah! She didnt disturb us at all during our tawaf and saie. Unbelievable isn’t it?! Even during our tawaf wida’ which was performed after asar and temperature outside was 38′C, she still fell asleep..

And this is Bella, performing her saie when she woke up after we finished ours :)

Little Bella was so amazed with this gentleman’s janggut, she went and pulled it and played with his tasbih!! Hahah..