Celebrating a Christian holiday such as Easter in the UAE, where the laws, shopping malls and work schedules are governed by Islam, is a rather different experience.

Of course the supermarkets stock plenty of chocolate eggs, but if you wanted to host an Easter feast, with forbidden holiday sundry such as chunks of ham and champagne, you’d have to put a bit more thought into it.

Our Easter involved nothing as lavish as this. The Little Boy (LB) decorated some hard-boiled eggs at nursery – I didn’t get to see them, as by the time I’d got home from work, the Big Boy (BB) had eaten them.

Since Easter Sunday is a regular work day here and the start of a new school term for many kids, lots of expats pretend it’s Easter on Good Friday (the first day of the weekend). Another difference is that it’s distinctly unspring-like. Being north of the equator, it is technically spring in the Middle East, but the temperature has been rising for the past few weeks, reaching a rather sticky 38°C (90°F) – and it’s only going to get worse. So rather than being full of the joys of spring and life bursting forth, it’s more like life about to get scorched under the hottest sun on earth. The warm weather means outdoor Easter egg hunts are a rather hurried affair, before the eggs melt into chocolate milk puddles and the children might as well go round with straws rather than baskets.

The bunny brought breakfast

We went off in search of the Easter bunny on Friday and found him at an Easter buffet at the golf course (must have been sweating like mad in his bunny suit). To get there, we took the off-road route across the desert and came across a couple of guys trying to dig their car out of the sand. The wheels of their Landcruiser had sunk so deep into the soft sand, there was little we could do to help other than give one of them a lift back to our compound so he could pick up their other car – a Hummer – to attempt to drag the SUV out. Embarrassingly, BB reacted to their misfortune with utter glee – the excitement was probably the highlight of his evening, better than the face painting, bouncy castle and entertainers at our Easter celebration.

Lots of kids were kept home from school today, Easter Sunday – BB, in fact, has another week of holiday anyway. We spent the day keeping cool in the water at one of the local beach clubs, which means tomorrow we’ll probably be nursing sunburn as well as a chocolate hangover. BB is actually a bit confused about Easter and has been busy hiding eggs for the Easter bunny to find. He has, however, decided that the Easter bunny is his favourite animal, above cats, dogs and even snakes.

I’m resurrecting my blog and giving it a makeover! With a new look, fancy new name and shorter, snappier content, it’s practically got bells and whistles on – and I’m hoping this will inspire me to update it more than once a year.

I turn to blogging, it seems, whenever life gets a little crazy. I started this blog back in the US, as we were packing up our lives to move to the Middle East, and kept it going during our extended settling-in phase. So have things gone crazy again? Not really. The truth is it’s school holidays.

It’s during school holidays that life as I know it goes out the window. As lovely as it is to have a break from the school run, the inevitable ‘together time’ that accompanies school holidays has a down side in our household: the boys fight. A lot.

I’ve tried everything: keeping one upstairs, one downstairs; the naughty step (being renamed, I hear, the ‘thinking step’, as though they’re going to give some thought to world peace while on the step); and sending the perpetrator to Coventry (is that still a saying?) I’ve even taken the more drastic step of removing myself from the situation entirely by taking a job.

I do get where their confrontations are coming from. The two-year-old is going through a particularly pesky phase at the moment and seems to really enjoy winding his brother up. His demolition jobs on the Big Boy’s (BB) intricately laid out train sets and roadways would test the patience of a saint, let alone a five-year-old on a short fuse. BB, for his part, thinks he has first dibs on all the toys – even ones that don’t belong to him. LB retaliates by biting his brother in the butt and so the warfare continues.

Take this afternoon, for instance. The plan was that the boys would play nicely, while I caught up on some chores, revamped my blog and made a shepherd’s pie. The reality was, having refused his nap, the only thing that kept LB happy was filling the laundry basket with cars, one by one. BB then came along and maliciously upended the basket, so upstairs we went for a time out. On being let loose, BB’s behaviour was, let’s just say, demented and ended with red crosses being drawn all over the walls (depicting, in his mind, ‘ no mommies allowed’). So my afternoon was spent scrubbing red pen off the walls, while Catherine the Great, our wonderful helper, made the shepherd’s pie and the boys hogged the computer watching train crashes on Youtube.

By the time my DH came home, we were all going a bit stir crazy. DH is in training at the moment, which, as my pilot wife friends know, is another way of saying ‘out-of-the-picture’. I know training involves a stressful job-on-the-line ride in the simulator with engine failures, fires and other nightmare scenarios, but on this particular day, the focus was on water landings and he’d been watching 20-something flight attendants in wet T-shirts jumping in and out of the swimming pool. I mean, really? How hard is that?

I do have on my side the fact that the boys have separate school holidays. An odd Dubai quirk is that LB has already had 2 weeks of ‘spring break’, during which, for the sake of continuity and routine, he did the nursery’s spring camp. But this still means that during BB’s Easter holiday we have a whole afternoon and evening of togetherness to negotiate every day.

Girl mom friends tell me that girls can fight like cat and dog, too, using psychological tactics that probably have a more lasting effect than the blows my boys give each other. But being of the fairer sex myself, it still takes me by surprise every time my duelling duo turn the lounge into a wrestling ring. The answer, I know, is to plan more activities and outings, as when out and about, it’s so much easier to all remain friends – hence our trip to Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi this weekend (a hard act to follow and I fear we may have peaked a little early with that one).

Oh, and enjoy the leisurely mornings – except did I mention? Whereas I have to drag a slumbering BB out of bed on school mornings, now that we don’t have to rush, he’s leaping from his bed even earlier to make the most of the holidays.

One day they'll be best buddies