22
June

The wrong goodbye

We live in an ex-pat community, so we often see a tonne of people moving in and out.  It isn’t a huge community, but is older* and established, so most of the 300 or so houses are rarely vacant for long and moving trucks ae pretty common sight. Our street is a short and quiet street, with only six houses on it, and has been fully occupied for the last six months.

We were really happy to meet our across the street neighbours and their two children, aged three and five, shortly after we moved in.  It took a few weeks, but the four lils began to play together often.  Whenever one duo heard the other outside, they raced out to join in play, be it road hockey, biking, football, tennis, cricket, or various combinations of those games. They were a good fit, and enjoyed countless hours playing together.  This little group was joined by two little girls in January, who moved beside us.  While they didn’t play together with the lils as often, they always enjoyed their time together, especially when they were passing treasures to each other through the fence.  Both of those families were planning to be in Bangalore for a long time, so we were both happy to know that the friends would be here for the rest of our stay, and sad to know that we would be breaking up these friendships in the fall.

As it goes with ex-pat life, things change.  All of a sudden one family is moving home for a new job, and the other is moving because their assignment was cut short.  Both of these moves happened this week.  The lils knew that they were coming, but that doesn’t make it easy.  Thankfully, the girls next door spent their last morning in India here, and they had a great last play date.  They had fun together, took many pictures, and were ready to say goodbye when the time came.

Our across the street neighbours left without saying goodbye.  The children flew to their grandparents house late Tuesday night, and did not return during the packing.  The house is now empty, and their driver confirmed for us that they are not coming back.  I suspected this might happen when I heard the children leaving after bedtime on Monday, and began to prepare Woo and Goose, yet I am left with the questions. “Why would they leave without saying goodbye”, and “Are you sure that they aren’t going to come back?” are the most common ones.  They are left hanging, and it upsets us all.

I know that things get forgotten, and that you can’t think of everything, but I wish their parents had thought to let us know that they were leaving as the lils stopped playing together on Monday. It was obviously the last chance that they would have to play together, and saying goodbye would have been a natural thing. Instead the lils are left hanging.

*older is really a relative term, given that the community is six years old*

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21
June

What goes around…

Sometimes the nicest things happen when you least expect it. It might shock some to know that beneath my tough and unpolished exterior lies a really soft and mushy heart. I like to do nice things for people, and I especially like to do them when they don’t ask me.

Last fall I finally decided that it was time to clear our spare bedroom of all of the baby things we were storing.  I went through the mountains of clothes and quickly found homes for all of the little boy clothes.  It seemed that several of my friends had little boys that were just the right size for what I had, and they were happy to have them.  The girl clothes were another story.  I had mountains of them, thanks in large part to my friend Heidi who has gifted me with her daughter’s entire wardrobe from birth. The clothes were stinking adorable too.  I really wanted to pass these, plus all the clothes that I had added, on to a new lil girl! Unfortunately, all of the ones I thought of were Goose`s size or bigger, so I was a little stumped.

Then I thought of Amy, someone who I had met once or twice, but had connected with online and through my love of her photography.  She had just given birth to a little girl, and had moved her family back from a year in Bogotá, Columbia. Given that she has three boys at home, I knew that she would be short on girlie clothes, so I dropped her a line and let her know that she was welcome to all that I had if she wanted it!  Want it she did, and the week before we left for India, she arrived at my house and took it all away.

I didn’t think of the clothes again, except when I would see the pictures that Amy would post of cute lil E rockin’ the outfits. It brought a smile to my face each time, to see another happy wee girl getting good use out of the clothes.

Then a few weeks before we came to visit, Amy dropped me a line to express how much she appreciated the clothes, and how much she wanted to shoot our family as a thank you gift. She didn’t want any payment for her time and efforts, or purchases of prints from us, she just wanted to say thank you.  We were flabbergasted, and I was excited, as I admire all of Amy’s work. We giddily agreed, and this is but one of the photos she took, one of my favs!

The rest can be seen on the Muddy Boots Photography facebook page*, but suffice to say that we love them.  Love them. To say that they are a “nice thing” that happened to us when we least expected it really doesn’t do them justice!   It’s nice to know that Amy is also someone who likes to do nice things for people, especially when they don’t ask.

*you can also find Amy’s contact info here… 🙂*

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11
June

Expelled from day camp

We have very limited experience with day camps for the lils, and although the first experience was not entirely positive , I was willing to try again.  A large part of this is that I am at a loss for cool excursions for the lils to do that don’t involve long car rides, that Willy is travelling a bunch this month, and that many of their friends are gone on extended trips for the summer.  While we all love each other, we need to see other people every once in a while!

As luck would have it, there is a series of camps that are running in the community hall in our neighbourhood, so I enrolled both lils this week.  The camps started this morning, and we arrived at the appointed time to be greeted by a room that was not quite ready, and a leader that had not arrived.  She arrived and met each parent, but things had not gotten started when I left twenty minutes later.  I was leery about how things would go, so popped in at lunch time, and it appeared that all was well.

When I picked the lils up, they were happy, but both spoke of a little boy who was bugging them.  They were excited about their day, but there were little things, like Goose’s butterfly was crumpled thrown out by this boy, he threw sand on Woo… I took most of this with a grain of salt, until Woo told me that he was punched a few times, including the face.  Sure enough, he had a lump under his eye and possibly the starts of a shiner.  He said he told the leader and that she told the boy to stop it, but I wasn’t happy… so I went back over to talk to her.

The leader was aware of the problems, and let me know that she had tried to talk to me as I was leaving, but I took the lils out early and intercepted the group as they were returning from the park, so she didn’t have a chance.  She realized that the boy in question, who was only three was a problem; disruptive, hitting, not listening. She was always having to discipline him, so she called his mom and asked that she remove him from the class, so he won’t be back tomorrow.  While I would normally like to see the boy be given a chance to change his behaviour – it is a one week camp so that wasn’t going to happen. So he was asked to leave, and the selfish mama in me is glad that my lils won’t be bothered by him any more.

 

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15
May

I don’t wanna

I  had this nagging little fear when we booked our trip home, a fear that it would disrupt the happy balance that we had finally achieved with the lils in India.  It took them a long time to settle in, much longer than I thought it would at the outset, so it took Willy and me a long time to settle in. Mostly, they were homesick and resistant to so much that was new to them.

This has changed in the last two months or so, and we both feel that they are really happy.  I no longer have Woo telling me, daily, that he wants to go home, nor do I have Goose declaring that she doesn’t like this or that, or pretty much everything new that we find in India. It’s been really nice.  Then we came home for a visit.

Things have been so simple for the lils here.  They’ll see their extended family and all of their friends.  There have been long visits and extended play dates, with more to come.  We are doing all of their favourite things, because it makes us all happy.  They just picked up where they left off.  They are content to play independently, given much more freedom, and they don’t fight.  Not with each other, and not with their friends.  We are four days into the visit and they are loving it.

They are loving it, until we talk about going back ‘home’ to India.  “I don’t like India”, says Goose.  “I’ll just stay here until you move back from India”, says Woo.  It’s tough to hear.  We know they are happy in India, but they are much happier here.    I worry that we reset, and start from scratch when we return, but we’re better equipped to work through it.

I hope I am wrong about this.  Today is dentist day.  Maybe that will convince them that India is not so bad after all?!

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14
May

Best in class

 

Allow me a moment to indulge in some shameless bragging about my lils.  Yes, I know that every parent knows that their child is the best and that is how it should be, but in this case, I have independent verification of the lils status. They are simply fabulous. 

When Willy first started talking about going to Las Vegas at the end of April, we both realized that it was really close to our trip to Canada.  So close that it would have meant he would have flown home to India and essentially  hopped back on a plane two days later to return to North America.  It would have been painful, and I could not ask him to try.  I told him to go to the conference in Vegas, then hang around, work where work wanted him, and meet us at home when we got there.  I told him this even though I knew it meant I would be home alone with the lils for two weeks, and that I would have to fly home alone with them when we returned to Canada.

As luck would have it, Goose came down with a cold the day that Willy left. This surprised me in no way, as the lils ALWAYS get sick when Willy goes away.  When Woo started sniffling two days later, I was somewhat relieved, thinking they were getting it over with long before our flights.  The sniffles persisted, and got slightly worse each day.  Then two nights before we were due to leave Woo casually mentioned that he could not hear. 

We headed off to the doctor, and were given Benadryl to help clear his congestion.  When he still could not hear the morning of our flight, we headed back to the doc and learned that he had an ear infection.  To this point I had been mildly worried about the almost thirty hour trip we were about to embark on, but this news ramped it up to plain scared.  Two sick lils, one with an ear infection?  I expected the worst. 

The opposite happened.  My best case scenario of having them maybe sleep on one of the flights, possibly fight just a little bit, and only have to repeat things two or three times completely underestimated how good they were.  They listened, they had fun, slept a lot, got along perfectly and were really quiet.  We had two minor meltdowns, one when Goose’s juice cup exploded all over her jammies and the other when Woo was being forced by the crowds down the ramp to customs in Ottawa.  

I was pretty convinced that they were great at this point, but was a little tickled by the number of people who came up to us following both flights and complimented the lils on how well behaved they were.  There was a steady stream of kudos coming from other passengers, and I got a wee bit prouder with each one!  While I don’t ever plan on making such a long trip with them solo, I’d gladly do it after this experience!!  

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7
May

Rules of engagement

We started when they were itty bitty. There were rules about when they went to the doctor, when they are supposed to sleep, when to wake them to feed them, how much to feed, what to feed them. We quickly tossed a bunch of those “rules” (hello, my doc told us to wake Woo to feed him every three hours! He was already gaining a pound a week, he was good). Out went the old, and we started a few of our own. Most of them were arbitrary and told in jest to infants that could not understand them.

As both lils got older, they did start to ask about things that are governed by rules; when you can drink, when can drive, when you are allowed to vote. We gave them the correct ages for all of these, and started making up a few of our own. Rules about how old you must be to ride your bike down the slide (eight), which is the highest stair that you can jump off of (the third), and when you can become a vegetarian (twelve). Lots of these values change to suit the situation that they arise from, and the lils like to review them regularly.

Moving to India has meant that there were a large number of new rules thrust upon the lils. They have adopted many of them, but still fight and question a few. We knew it was only a matter of time before the started coming up with their own rules. Surprisingly, it was Goose that came out with a rule for us all.

Each bedroom in our house has its own attached bath, and the lils love to use any toilet other their own when they need to go. This often means that they use each other’s. A few weeks ago Goose reached her breaking point and adamantly decreed that anyone who used her bathroom had to sit down. She was apparently tired of her brother messing up her toilet, and had figured out that this was the only solution. It’s worked too. Woo follows the rule, she is happy and we have peace again when it comes to the toilet. Well, we did have peace. Tonight Woo instituted his own rule… Everyone who uses his toilet has to stand when they pee.

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23
April

Drawing

Neither Willy nor I are great artists, so it never surprised us that Woo showed very little inclination to draw anything at all. Although he produced coherent stuff at daycare with the fabulous N, most of the artwork that we received from him for the first four and a half years of his life was pretty much scribbling on paper, with little effort to create forms or tell a story. Goose followed much in his footsteps, but we never really put too much emphasis on it for either lil. They were happy with their art, so we were happy.

We started to see significant change when they started school here. There was obviously some emphasis on colouring and drawing at school, and they seemed to produce colouring pages where the lines were mostly identified, and free art where there were some forms with eyes and mouths that generally fell into the categories of family members or dinosaurs. Something has changed in the last few weeks, however, and both lils are (mass) producing art that has clearly identified subjects and covers pretty much anything imaginable. We were stumped as to why both lils all of a sudden figured out how to draw things. People, buildings, mountains, dragons, a variety of scenes were all of a sudden popping up in their drawings.

The mystery was solved last week when I asked the lils what they were doing at the art table. “Playing Draw Something”, was the response I got. Draw Something is a game that is similar to pictionary, available on Android and iOS devices. You play against friends (or strangers), and draw pictures that your opponent has to guess. It’s addictive and a time waster, and I completely underestimated the impact it would have on the lils, that their fascination with watching me play would teach them both how to draw so quickly. This clearly isn’t the only thing that they are learning from, but the influence is very apparent to both Willy and I. Maybe there is something to this technology thing… although this really makes me want to start playing pictionary with them.

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9
April

The value of a life

We got a call late at night last Wednesday. It was from our driver, who was distraught, and let Willy know that his neighbour had died, that he may need some time off. Willy told him to take the time that he needed, and hung up, concerned. We were surprised when Subbu arrived the following morning to take Willy to work. He explained it simply by saying that it helped to stay with routine. He was clearly shaken, and on the way to Willy’s office explained that it was his neighbour’s seventeen year old son who had died, and that he had committed suicide because his grades were poor. We were both shocked and saddened to hear this. Almost a week later I am still troubled. How could this happen, how could he think that this was his only choice?

My first instinct was to blame the parents. I’ve never met them, nor do I know anything about them or their family; I made some big assumptions. I do know that there is tremendous pressure in India for a child to improve their standing, to do better than their parents. I have read several articles that allude to parental pressure for success, including one that told not of a suicide, but of a twelve year old girl whose father forced her to beg on the streets when her grades were not to his expectation. I have also observed parental expectation first hand throughout our community. Success is not enough; the children are expected to excel, to surpass their peers too. That being said, I am wrong to solely blame the parents. While they may have had some expectation that their son do well, I am certain that they did not want to see him take his life.

It is widely reported that suicide rates in India, especially among youth and female youth in particular are extremely high. There are numerous media reports of children as young as eleven taking their own lives, often because they feel they have done poorly in school, they have actually failed or received a low grade, or that they worry that their parents cannot afford to send them to the post-secondary schooling that they will need to complete to better themselves. It saddens me to think that so much emphasis can be placed on schooling and marks for these children.

In the recent past, the Indian government has put into place measures that help families send their children to schools, and to help those in the lowest class improve their standing. What they haven’t done is help to teach those who hold positions of power the value of a human life. We frequently see labourers performing their tasks in very unsafe conditions. It happens in the community we live in, for example the man who sprays to protect us from the mosquitoes. We know that he is using a toxic chemical, and close up the house the minute that we hear his fogging machine start up in the distance. He rides by, and is not wearing any sort of protection from the harmful chemicals that he is breathing and coming into contact with. There is no way that he cannot be harmed by the chemicals, yet he has nothing to offer any protection. He may have chosen not to, but in all likelihood he either doesn’t know the risks, or hasn’t ever been given anything to wear. His employers need to ensure that he is protected, that his health has value, and they haven’t.

I am fortunate in that I am not poor, and I live in a country with ample opportunity for both of my children to follow their dreams and be successful, on their own terms. This has been a sobering reminder to me that I need to not only teach the lils to want to do well and succeed in life, but that success must also be defined in terms of their happiness; and that a life has value that cannot be diminished by a failure to achieve a milestone, or a belief that they may not meet anyone’s expectations.

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6
April

The white flag

Today I had to do something that I never do willingly. I gave up, threw in the towel, surrendered, waved the white flag… It wasn’t the end of two long weeks with the lils at home that did me in, because they have actually been pretty great. It wasn’t the weather, though it has been pretty hot, even for Bangalore. It wasn’t even the fact that neither our oven nor our water purifier have been fixed, despite daily calls and promises of the imminent arrival of a technician or two. We aren’t doing much baking, but that safe, clean water thing? It’s pretty important to me. The thing that did me in was a cold. A really bad, miserable cold.

I rarely used to get sick, and when I did it was not that bad. This has changed since we had the lils, I get sick more often, but I generally don’t wallow. I am usually chasing after the lils, so I play the martyr and push through. This has made be become somewhat unsympathetic when those around me are feeling ill. By somewhat unsympathetic I mean to say that the phrase “suck it up, buttercup” is often uttered when Willy is sick. He was sick this week, and I was my typical supportive and loving self. I am sure he appreciated it. Now I feel that I should have been a little more concerned, and maybe cut him some slack.

This morning basically saw me moping around the house, doing the bare minimum required to keep the lils safe and watered. Willy basically dropped everything and came home when I made vague references to my inability to care for our children in an email I sent. He blew off work, sent me to bed, took care of the lils, fed me when I whined and never once complained or pointed out what a wuss I was. As a result I am feeling much better, and a wee bit guilty. I hope that I will remember this guilt the next time that he is sick with a mancold, but the reality is I’m just as likely to blame him for making me sick, and hold that against him!

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3
April

You teach them to read…

I didn’t quite think through some of the ramifications of teaching Woo to read when we started out. Actually we didn’t exactly teach him, we supported as he pretty much taught himself how to read.  We did help him, as did N at day care, but he lead the process and progressed at a much faster rate than we anticipated.  He amazed us by reading his first words by his third birthday, and chapter books by his fifth.  He is rather advanced in his reading as a result, and we try to keep up with him.

He doesn’t just read books, he devours them. There aren’t really libraries like we have at home, so we have developed a pattern of visiting the closest bookstore about once a week.  He sits and methodically goes through the books, selecting all that strike his fancy, and letting us filter down until there is a pile of three to five new books.  Thankfully books here are reasonable, or we would be broke!

We had a dry spell recently, when we didn’t get to the bookstore for a few weeks.  During this time he read and re-read many of his books, but also turned to the kitchen, and started to read my cookbooks.  They now sport many a bookmark on recipes that he would like for us to make together, which actually helps with meal planning.  A couple are still missing, but I am sure they are tucked away in his room.  This also led to some fun experimenting in the kitchen, with only one real failure, the apple milkshake, and one jar of oddly matched spices that he mixed up for me to use in recipes that call for curry powder*.

My sister and brother-in-law gifted him with the entire Roald Dahl collection for Christmas this year, a completely awesome gift.  He was intimidated at first, and decided that he didn’t want them.  We quickly realized that he was a little lot overwhelmed by the size of the collection and the sheer number of words, so we tucked them away in our room.  He still knew where they were, and would come to flip through them most mornings, so I offered to read one to him in early January.  I chose The Giraffe and the Pelly and me because it was the thinnest, and looked silly enough. He was hooked right away, and read ahead in the book after I left him, then finished it on his own a day or so later.  He now comes to our room every week or so to select a new Dahl treasure to read. He asks us to read parts of them, some of the time, but he tends to burn through them quickly on his own.

The book that he chose most recently was George’s Marvellous Medicine.  He read it with much glee, and then asked that I read several chapters with him one night at bed time. We started with George’s creation of this magical medicine, the chapter where he basically throw everything, the good, the bad, and the poisonous, into a pot to serve as medicine for his evil grandma.  He is enjoying this a little too much, and warning bells go off in my head. We spend a long time discussing why that would be a dangerous thing to do, and how Woo should never consider touching half of that stuff, let alone feeding it to anyone, before moving on to the moment when Grandma gets the meds. He seems to understand that the book is silly fun, and should not translate to real life.

This morning I woke to an eerie silence in the house.  I knew that the lils were up, as I had already been shown the marker manicures that they gave each other.  When my queries as to what they were doing were met with silence, I headed down stairs to the kitchen.  There were spices everywhere, a pile of wet tea towels, a bottle filled with murky liquid, and two lils, looking both guilty and pleased with themselves.  I looked at the bottle closely, and it appeared to be mostly water and chillies, with dashes of oregano, nutmeg, and rosemary for good measure. As we cleaned and talked this through, Woo repeatedly assured me that this was not a medicine like George had made, it was merely a potion. I shudder to think how close Goose was to getting a dose of that spicy potion!

He has now moved on to The Twits, where Mr. and Mrs. Twit play horrible practical jokes on each other.  Tonight Willy discovered that in chapter four, she serves him worm spaghetti for dinner. I can see where this is going… Maybe there is something to be said about selecting age appropriate reading for your lils.  It’s not about the difficulty of the words or that the content is too mature for them, it’s so that parents can be prepared for all the naughty things that they learn!

*Curry powder seems to be a pretty North American thing, so I have a mixture of spices that includes coriander, cumin, turmeric, chillies, cinnamon, sugar, ground ginger…. That I use in some recipes.  Guess he thought my mixture was lacking!

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