Aunt Aaren bought these for Laurence as a birthday present invitation to 8 weeks of skating lessons. He's supposed to practice walking with them on the carpet. The video shows him stumbling around with a big smile on his face.

Don on Ambrose's guitar, the kids joined in, followed by Jason first on kazoo and later on drums. This opened my "Illusion" birthday party. I'm wondering what the illusion was...

The stuffed camel I bought for Laurence in Jenin sings an Arabic song and its eyes light up. It sounds terrible, and cracks me up.

Traditionally, the Arabic wedding celebrations open with a fast dance after the entry into the hall. These are girls-only parties (excepting the groom, and occasionally the bride's brothers/father), and the women cheer with this high-pitched "luh-luh-luh-luh-luh" repetition that you can hear in this video. Because it is a girls' party, several of the women, including Rami's sisters and sisters-in-law, aren't wearing their headscarves, so I had to cut those parts out of the video out of respect. The cross fade cuts out a couple of those parts, but it's all part of the same dance.

Becky and Rami feed each other cake.

Awhile after the cake comes the slow dance. Becky and Rami chose The Dance by Garth Brooks, the only American song - except for the entrance - the whole night. I managed to get a pretty decent video considering tons of people were doing the same thing as me and kept cutting in front of me.

Since Becky and Rami are from two vastly different cultures, they entered with an American song put to Arabic lyrics. My vantage point for viewing this was not too great, but at least you can hear everything.