Black Monday

Nature is playing an unusually cruel joke on me.

I've been going to the gym now for about five weeks. I have not been going every day, BUT I have been going regularly. Five weeks into it, do you want to know what I have to show for it? Really?

2 more kilos - almost five pounds! are you kidding me?!

I appreciate all your advice in advance about sticking with it, being persistent, and all that jazz, but (as amy discovered when she similarly encouraged me) my going to the gym means I am making a choice to give up using my time in different ways. I'm giving up the peaceful nap times where I can actually accomplish things. Things is a very abstract word, but "things" are important to me!

So I decided that if I'm making the effort to go the gym, I ought to be making the effort to stop all the reckless eating that I so easily engage in. It begins today. Black Monday.

From now until saturday, here's the rundown:

-no soda
-no snacks
-no food after 6:30 (we've always finished dinner by that point)
-no food entering my mouth except at appointed meal times.

Several times today, my old friends coke and chocolate have whispered their sweet nothings in my ear, and somehow every ounce of willpower in my entire being was summoned and resisted the urge. Even when there was a large peice of Hello Dolly left in the pan from last night - which I threw away? Can you believe that willpower?!

Anyway. We'll see how it goes.

strawberries, and now mangoes!

Yesterday my family ate our first mangoes this season, and it was nice - that smooth, tartness that makes mangoes so good! Emma, the off-again-on-again fruit eater liked them; of course samantha did, that's sort of a given.

As we were eating dinner last night, samantha kept uttering an untelligible phrase. I had her repeat it over and over and over again, until I finally realized that she was confusing two words. She kept asking me, "Mommy, can I have flamangoes please?"

Flamingo + mango = flamangoes.

thanks, samantha. you make my heart happy.

a reason to have a party

I'm not a bad mom. Honestly. I really intended for Emma to have a little birthday party, with all five of her friends present. But this year, the timing just sort of worked out weirdly, with us getting back from thailand just a few days before her big three year old day...and then, after we had done out little family celebration, it seemed even weirder to bring up the birthday concept to emma a week or so later. So, aside from the very fun bday she had with her family, she had no BIG birthday party.

That fact, however, did not halt my intenal drive to find a reason to have a party. I confess, it's true. I like parties. I like having everyone over. I like setting my table with pretty tablecloths and fun napkins. I even sort of like all the chaos (maybe that comes from being in a big family!). So it didn't take me long to find an excuse to make up for the missing party.

Spring was on its way, though you might not know it by the confused Old Man Winter in our city. I thought it would be the perfect time to have a spring party and hunt easter eggs, since we already had a lot planned when Easter rolls around this year. It was decided. A spring party.

Step #1: Can I locate easter baskets? I was assuming I probably wouldn't find any cute easter-ish baskets, but if I even found baskets that were close, I was prepared to decorate them. I scored a serious jackpot! My trusty basket store down the street had perfect baskets that were begging to be easterfied. Bought: 8 baskets. Cost: $12. Next stop, the sells-everything-you-can-imagine market, where I was on the hunt for ribbon. Another big payday. I bought tons of ribbon, from polka-dotted pink to manly blue and khaki. Then it was time to see if I could pull off a real-looking easter basket. After a few nights of work, I produced 8 easter baskets that I was quite proud of. (only six are pictured here due to technical diffficulties.)

I enjoyed making them and the kids enjoyed choosing them, and later on, hunting with them.

Step #2: Dig up the plastic eggs that we had received from packages last year. [Thank you, grandparents, for sending plastic eggs!] Total count: 28. Total kids: 8. That worked out to 3.5 eggs per child, and so we filled those to the max with jelly beans, jolly ranchers and m&m's and tried to calculate how many eggs we would need to make in order for the kids to have plentiful-looking easter baskets. Plentiful was my goal.

Step #3: Make eggs. Or maybe, decorate eggs. I have never undertaken this task before and I honestly can't even remember any time in my childhood when we used anything other than plastic eggs. Perhaps I remember wrongly, but anyway, time has erased all traces of things other than candy. Rachel donated to the cause an easter egg dye kit she had received in a package a few years ago. I received it gladly (reference easter egg inferiority complex mentioned above). I initially thought the eggs turned out disastrous, but as they dried the prettied up a lot! They turned out to be too sticky for use in the Mass Egg Hunt (hereafter referred to as MEH), but they made a great centerpeice.

I then dusted off my trusty Joy of Cooking cookbook (which never actually collects much dust because it I use it much too frequently for that!) and of course, they did not let me down. Specific and easy instructions left me with 80 dyed eggs just a few hours later.

Step #4: Pull this thing off without looking like it was a seat-of-your-pants operation.

Everyone showed up for the big hunt around 10:15am - well, except for the daddies who arrived early to hide the eggs. I debated for a while about which media device I should take with me to record the grand event, and initially decided on my way-fab camera. But then, right as I heard the elevator "ding" to announce its arrival to take us downstairs, I changed my mind and rushed back inside to grab the video camera. My reasoning was that sometimes I will wait forever, camera in hand, for the perfect picture and end up not enjoying myself. But with a video camera, you can get our token 5 minutes of video and enjoy the rest of the time.

Good in theory, except MY STINKIN BATTERY RAN OUT AFTER 5 SECONDS! I was not happy with my video camera, or my decision to change my mind at the last minute. But anyway, rachel got some cute picutres of the actual MEH:

After everyone had collected most of the eggs (5 were still missing, if all our calculations were correct) we headed back to our house to check out the loot and eat lunch.

All the kiddos in a quiet moment before they were allowed to start digging in their baskets:

But it didn't last long! Candy and children everywhere...Samantha figured out that the eggs opened...

...and Emma figured out that jelly beans stick to your teeth!The last activity on the agenda was singing an easterfied version of the Hokey Pokey, about it being a bunny hop. The crazy lady in the blue shirt led the singing time; here is a picture of everyone "putting their cotton tail in". Fun times.

So the moral of the story is that we had a super-fun spring party. There was so much laughter and wide-eyed childlike delight that I felt like a smile was glued on my face most of the morning. If we'd had a big party for emma, I still likely would have done something like this, but not on quite such a big scale...but I'm so glad it worked out this way! The event made special memories for our girls, and even today emma mentioned to me, "Momma, I like having easter egg hunts!" I feel so glad and so thankful that we are able to do these fun, american cultural events with our kids. So, if you've ever wanted to send us things but didn't know what to send, at the end of your favorite holiday, buy up the clearance aisle and send us what you find!

it's strawberry season!

We are deep in the throes of strawberry season here, where about 60 cents will get you about a pound of strawberries! Samantha is the family's official strawberry eater, and can eat a sinful amount of berries at each meal. It's the time where I scour my cookbooks trying to find fun ways to serve them up, though the are at the peak of sweetness right now and don't need much help to be tasty!

BUT...

Last week at Clara and Chloe's house, Rachel had a surprise for us! We were going to make strawberry jam! I have never made jam, never even thought about making jam...but now I know what I have missed out on all these years! Here's how it goes:

First, start with the raw materials (assuming you don't lose any to little hands, start with 4 cups of strawberries...)

...so that you end up with 2 cups mashed strawberries. Recruit yourself some good mashers and mash away!

Then pour your mashed berries into a big bowl...

Then add 4 cups of sugar (yes, you read that correctly...FOUR CUPS!) and stir well.

Then, I think you add one packet of pectin (this is the part where the other rachel took over and I entertained the kids...by feeding them more strawberries...so I'm a little fuzzy on exactly what the one packet of pectin means, but it sure made it firm up!) After one day of resting, the result was indeed fabulous! Strawberry jam for all!

another sunday, another monday.

So tomorrow, Monday morning, marks the beginning of Emma's third week in preschool!!! YIKES! It's been good, although it has taken some adjustment for all of us.

We don't have many pictures yet of her at school, but this one was on the first day after I picked her up:

And this is the little playground/courtyard area inside the school:

Our morning routine works something like this: Josh wakes up the earliest and gets all ready. I wake Emma up abot 7:15 and start getting her ready, and the three of us eat a simple breakfast like granola or a muffin together. Josh then takes Emma the one stop on bus 31 or bus 79. Emma gets to use the bus pass to swipe their fare. She gets to preschool about 8:10 or so and "eats" a quick breakfast with the other kids.

I say "eats" because if there have been any issues so far, they have all been food-related. I think it's kind of funny because she eats asian food actually better than she eats western food. But, then again, asianese are sometimes a little overboard when it comes to how much food kids actually need to eat. The history of it goes way back, to times when people honestly couldn't be picky or they would die. But honestly, we're not in that situation now. They get a little frenzied when emma doesnt' eat all of her veggies (I mean, I'm not crazy about seaweed soup either, so it's hard to blame her) and their mouths drop in astonishment when emma polishes off bowl after bowl of rice (remember her birthday request? The girl loves rice!)

Each day, they give us little progress reports on how she ate, if she obeyed the teachers, if she played with the other kids. We are very pleased with her progress so far. Last week's goal was for her to try one bite of everything on her plate. Here is one of the conversations I had with her:

Me: Emma, what did you eat at school today?

Em: Ummmm, rice.

Me: What else?

Em: Rice. I mean, more rice.

Me: Did you eat anything else?

Em: No.

Me: Ok, what did you not eat?

Em: Eggplant. And soup. And meat.

Me: Oh. Ok.

They get to play outside, and they do little calesthenics, and they play games and sing songs. Then, after "lunch", or by 11:45 I go to pick emma up and she gets to swipe the bus pass for us to go home and eat again.

This weekend while josh and the girls were coloring, he was surprised to hear her singing "head and shoulders, knees and toes" in asianese -we had not taught her that, so it was something she picked up there. Her progress reports to us usually include her telling us who took her toy, or who was crying for her mommy.

On Fridays, we've started a new tradition of having a picnic at a little courtyard in the apartment complex where her school is located. The weather has still been chilly, but it's great to be outside and enjoying the sunshine! Last friday the sun was shining exceptionally brightly, so we called up all our friends and had a group picnic - the first of its kind! We totally maxed out the blanket, don't you think?

If there's one person who is not sad about emma's new class, it's samantha. She secretly loves all the mommy time she's been getting, and we do have fun. No one takes her toys. No one bosses her around. And she doesn't have to share her momma with anyone!

One day, after we finished playing puzzles together, we decied to pr for emma. Here is the transcript of mantha's pryer:

God? Thank you [for] Emma, Emma's [preschool]. Emma, have fun. Amen. Mommy, play more puzzles?

I have been surprised that mantha hasn't missed emma more, but her squeals still reach high on the decibel chart when emma comes home.

Here's a quick video I took of mantha as she was giving one of her concerts at the piano in Emma's absence. (I'm not very familiar with editing my video for putting it on blogs, so please pardon the previous scene at the beginning!) Sorry, the video took a little too long, and now it's bedtime. I'll try it again tomorrow.

eat your veggies. or play with them. whichever.

One of our activities two weeks ago was something I read about in a toddler book - painting with carrots. How crazy is that? You just lop off the end of a carrot, and it immediately becomes a stamper. Stamp, stamp, stamp. If you got really creative and wanted to put the time into it, you could even carve your carrot into shapes and have more than just a circle to stamp with.

So a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about george washington and his cherry tree. We colored pictures of cherry trees and then use carrots to stamp little "cherries" on them. The girls really enjoyed the activity, and I had to tell them both (more than once), "Don't eat that carrot!!" Who would have thought?!

seatbelts. so we can be safe.

In the past, traveling by taxi in our city was a very messy affair. Messy as in, dirty. As in, pant legs brush against muddy, smoggy sides of tires and your hands have to push past a layer of dust to reach the handle to open the doors. I wish I was kidding.

In recent years, however, the lovely bureaucrats in our city have made some new taxi laws. Most notably, every driver has to buy a new taxi when their permit comes up for renewal. This puts 80% of the city's taxis needing to be renewed by this fall. That means that when the leaves turn red, 80% of the taxis in our city will be brand spankin new. (Not necessairly clean, but new anyway).

Anytime I'm about to hail a cab, if there's a choice between an old one and a shiny new one, it takes about a millisecond for me to make the decision to bypass the nasty old white ones. Sometimes I even get flutters in my stomach and want to do a Tiger Woods fist pump when I see a brand new taxi pull by right when I need a taxi. It's happy times, I tell you.

Ok, so mom is a big fan of the taxis. The girls were too until the new rule.

Seatbelts.

In the old taxis, there were no seatbelts. Seriously. They just weren't there. That usually meant that even though the girls weren't allowed to stand, climb, or clamor about, there was still a great range of movement.

On the way to rachel's house last week, I made the decision and notified the girls: If we get in a taxi that has seatbelts, you must wear them. (It's never to early to turn them into responsible citizens, right?! Besides, if they lived in america, their fate would be much, much worse with car seats and straps and all.)

Samatha was delighted at the novelty of the seat belt, and emma too...until she tried to reach for something begged me to remove her seatbelt. You can see how quickly her attitude soured when she realized I wouldn't be changing my minds.

big. astonishingly big.

It's sunday night here, and we're gearing up for another week here in asia land. Another week where Emma goes to preschool. Yes, you heard me correctly. Last week was her first week trying out the preschool down the street, and though we have yet to pay our money (haha!) she is officially a Little Dolphin (the name of the preschool).

It's been a big step for me. I feel thankful that our days in thailand helped me do the "letting go" thing in baby steps, with people who were very trustworthy, in a very restricted and controlled environment. I cried the first day in thailand I put both girls in childcare; ok, cried is a bit much. But definetly teared up. But by the end of thd time, we were casually saying goodbyes each morning.

That experience has made this new part of letting go a bit easier. Granted, she only goes three hours a day, for three days a week, but it still counts as letting go in my book.

I've been proud of her. She has already had a marked difference in her willingness to speak asianese, but also a noticeable difference in her willingness to befriend locals when we are out. In the past, she has given people the cold shoulder in a serious way when they want to talk to her or touch her. This weekend while we were out doing things, she would initiate things with strangers. I was so surprised, but glad that her time at preschool as given her positive interactions with locals.

We had an unexpected trip to Pizza Hut this weekend (always welcome, even if unexpected!) and while we were there, emma had to go potty. We waited and waited and waited in the bathroom for the western potty to open up (apparantly, someone was taking care of business), but the door to the eastern-style squatty was wide open. Emma looked at me and said, "Mommy, I can do it. I can use that one by myself." Her preschool has potties similar to that one, and had gotten lots of practice last week. She was pleased to show me the extent that she really could do it herself - even though I tried to help, it was very unneeded! I never thought I'd see the day when she would not only volunteer to use a squatty, but do it all by herself!

Anyway, so I've been proud of her. She has already made some friends. She's excited about going tomorrow. She has a good time. And she's very, very close to home (it's just down the street). We had a little picnic last friday for lunch, celebrating her first week at preschool, and as I watched her and mantha play beneath the crisp blue sky, I could hardly believe what a difference a year made.

No tears on my part this time. (Of course, there are seperate boys-and-girls potties this time around, too!) No tears on her part. I'm sure there will be struggles and harder times ahead, but for now I'm just marveling at how well it has all worked out.

Interestingly enough, I have also started working at her preschool two days a week. I'm the new English teacher (I feel so tied down, now that I have a "job"!) for the three and four year olds! It has worked out nicely that now I can have that extra involvement in her school and friends and such like that.

So, anyway, I'm off to take a bath before our next big week. With our very big girls.

**Emma's first day of preschool pic to come. **

life as a musical

If you’re looking for music to spice up your workout, I would recommend against the Doxology. I’ve discovered this week (as I’ve been going to the gym; five times now, even! Go on, tell me I look skinny even though I know you can’t see me!) that even with the Passion remake, that Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow is just not going to be the high intensity part of your workout. I’ve also found that working out with music has helped me a lot. I don’t look down in disgust every 15 seconds that it’s only been 15 seconds. Thank you ipod, thank you passion, thank you shanes, thank you one and all.

The only danger in walking around with my ipod (at least to the gym and back) is that life starts to feel a little like a musical. Or at least a soundtrack. I get on the bus and, even though I am surrounded by what feels like half of the city’s population crammed inside that moving tin box, I feel strangely like I’m marching to the beat of my own drummer.

I had an incident this week. As I was on the way to said gym, I got on the bus. The bus was already very, very full. In fact, I was standing on the step to get on the bus and the doors were closing just inches behind me. That fact, however, was lost on the ten people who got on the bus after me.

With such crowded space, I was diligently guarding the ipod stashed in my jacket pocket. Crammed spaces are havens for pickpockets, even in a closed area like a bus. My stop finally came, and ipod and I both exited safely. I did my workout (while watching a lady practice her salsa dancing in between the weight machines and the treadmills…she must have an ipod with her, too) and as I walked out to the bus stop to catch the bus home, I reached into my pocket. That’s when I realized my bus pass (the rechargeable card you can swipe to get on buses) unfortunately did not make it out too.

The music playing in my mental musical was not happy music. I was reminded of the time several years ago in countryside asia, where 100 local dollars was swiped out of my purse, right under my nose. The veggie seller peddling her red bell peppers saw the whole thing happen, and told me about it in meticulous detail once the thief was safely out of reach. My anger at the time seethed, that she wouldn’t have stopped him, warned me, done something to help. I remember feeling so violated. Grrrrr. Right from out of my purse!

And so all that came back to me as I angrily trotted back to the bus station. No matter that old man winter was loosening his grip on our city and the blue sky was back and the sun was shining brightly. Someone was raining on my parade, an unidentified thief, willing to be audacious enough to snatch my bus pass while we were packed in on bus 56 like sardines.

I grumbled under my breath all the way to the bus stop. Words like dishonest, crooked, sneaky kept coming to my mind as I angrily generalized the entire continent. Behind me, I heard quick footsteps and instinctively reached into my jacket to secure my ipod. I jerked as I felt a hand on my shoulder.

The bright orange gym suits of the Fitness club surprised me. An employee had found my bus pass under one of the weight machines. He saw me walk out and sprinted half the block to catch me.

The few remaining steps to the bus stop were me kicking myself for being so willing to generalize, even in my anger. The music to that day’s musical changed quickly from tense and melancholy to an upbeat fanfare, heralding the dude in the orange sweatsuit.