Life in the hutch

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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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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June

Wordless Wednesday – HAL Aerospace Museum

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June

Relax

Our neighbourhood has a number of amenities that were a big part of the reason why we chose to live here. Sure, the food in the restaurant has gone way downhill, the local corner store has been temporarily closed for about six weeks now, and the pool bar does not have a liquor license, but there are still a number of great features. One of them is located at the end of our street, right beside the lil’s park:

The SPA. They offer a long list of services, mainly massage and facials and have gotten rave reviews from any one that we have talked to, including a few of our house guest. Yet, we have lived here for eight months and I had not yet made use of their services. This is partly because they don’t offer pedicures, my favourite spa treat, and partly because I am afraid that I will like it. Too much.

I was gifted with some Spa bucks from my brother-in-law when he was hear at Christmas, and have tried to use them on a couple of occasions, but had to cancel at the last minute with either sick lils, or travelling Willy, or a better offer (hey, boozy lunch IS important!). Earlier this month I noted that they were only good for six months, so I figured that I should get my butt in gear. The lils were off at day camp last week, so I had five whole days in which to use them. As luck would have it I was under the weather on Friday and had to move the appointment to today.

It was way worse than I thought it would be. My life here has been relatively devoid of pampering, and this was a royal pampering. From the décor in the open air lobby, the flowers that were floating everywhere, to the glass of freshly squeezed pineapple juice, everything said calm and relaxation.

I was escorted to my little hut:

Then my masseuse quickly got to business, showing me the room, letting me get ready then beginning the massage. I had randomly chosen the “Javanese” massage, which was billed as a deep tissue massage that used Balinese techniques. It involved a lot of pressure and rubbing, and not as much manipulation as generally like, but it was good. I had asked her to use medium-hard force, and she didn’t hold back. She even got up on the massage table a couple of times to work on some tense spots! The massage was billed as a 90 minute massage, which should mean a 60 minute massage and 30 minute “relaxation” period in my room. Either she lost track of time, or I was lucky, and she ended up giving me a full 90 minutes of massage. Right before the masseuse let, she started my outdoor rainfall shower and encouraged me to enjoy my calm time.

Now I need to figure out how to keep myself from going there all the time. I also booked Willy in for a 90 minute massage this weekend. I figure he can’t get mad at me if he is doing it too!!!

Just some pot pourri, under the massage table, hidden from view. Yet pretty… it’s the little touches.

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June

Sometimes it forgets

For someone that likes to plan and ~~over~~prepare everything in life, I sort of fly by the seat of my pants with respect to the tales you see here. I write when inspiration hits, and although I have about a thousand post ideas scattered all over my digital and real life, I rarely know what will be posted on any given day until I sit to write it. The exception to this is Wednesday, when I share pictures, generally from the week that was. Last night I broke with tradition and wrote a cute lil tale about Goose, how she looks up to me, and whether or not I have inspired her career aspirations. Thinking that it would make for a cute Friday tale, I decided not to publish it, and hit “save draft” one more time before going to bed.

I had ~~seven hours~~ a few minutes to myself today, and decided that I should start trying to at least find all of the post ideas and at least throw them into one of the several documents that I have started on the subject (all of them called ideas.doc, of course). I was but a few minutes into this thrilling task when I realized that I had a shiny new post all ready to go, so I should publish it. Two seconds later I was at my dashboard and there was no trace of my cute lil tale. It was completely gone, with no actual proof that it existed. I knew I wrote it, and I knew that WordPress had eaten it, as I have had this happen before, and have vowed to never author content in WP again. The rest of the afternoon was spent berating WP for eating something that I wrote and mental self-flagellation for breaking my only rule.

Today you get pictures that amuse me, because I needed a giggle.

From our trip to Ottawa, I went to Mud Lake with the lils and got to play around with my brand new zoom lens. This was just one of the test shots that I took, focussing on the duck on the rock.

Then I got home and zoomed in:

That turtle is in for a rude awakening!

Tonight, as I prepared the lils for bed, I shut down all the windows (they spray for bugs in the evening – and that is nasty stuff). When I got to Goose`s room and looked down on our neighbour`s back door.

There are a number of stray cats in the neighbourhood, but this one seems to have found a pretty cozy spot. She was OUT.

The punchline to Goosie’s tale? She wants to go to clown school and become a clown when she grows up. You can decide whether or not I influenced that path.

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June

Wordless wednesday – sunflowers

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June

They are not even that big!

I spent the better part of Sunday trying to plan our summer vacation. It started out as a fun exercise, looking at all the pretty pictures of hotels and beaches, picking room types that were outrageously expensive and dreaming a little, then crashing to reality and trying to pick places that were in our budget and met our needs. We had simple needs, or so I thought. We wanted a trip that involved one flight, restaurants that could understand and deal with our food allergies, and resorts that were family friendly. There were two basic signs that I looked for in determining if a resort was family friendly; that there was a mention of a “kids club” or play facilities on the website, and that you could actually add children to the room to get a price quote. That narrowed the field considerably, but I still had a list of 20 or so possible places.

At this point I did what I always do when I am researching something. I built a spreadsheet. It listed all of the pertinent details, and might have had pro and con columns. The research was slow, as almost all of the hotels used the same archaic software to generate their room quotes. Every time I changed one variable (like room type or meal options) it required that I re-enter many of the other variables. I was planning a family vacation that involved a beach, so I pushed through. Then I noticed that I had to keep changing the number of lils in my room from two to one to get a quote. When I left it at two, I would get one of two errors; either “there are no rooms available that match your search criteria” or “you must book two rooms for your needs”. It happened so often that I had to keep checking to make sure that I had not messed up and kept looking in the same hotel.

This seemed an odd quirk at first, but when approximately 90% of the family friendly hotels came back with this result, I began to get upset. At first I thought that I might get a better result if I talked to the hotel, but the ones that I reached stuck to the line that the rooms could not accommodate us, so we either upgraded to a larger room, or we got two (sometimes not even adjoining rooms). I could understand if I was trying to book a room for a group that included older children or adults, but mine are little. They don’t take up a lot of space, they can’t stay on their own, and we are going on a family vacation FFS. Even if I thought it was a good idea to leave them alone, it would not have gone well. In reality, we would have either split the family or all slept in one room any way, likely in the same bed!

Perseverance and some great recommendations from friends paid off, and we picked a resort that will allow us all to stay in the same room, without charging a premium. The others, which included both big chains and small independent hotels, won’t get any of our money, especially not the extra money that they were trying to extort from us! I wonder if they would have been more flexible if we weren’t calling in the low season, and they could have filled those two rooms with two families of four.

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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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June

Rock’n’roll

I was a child of the eighties, and as such grew up with a pair of roller skates. They were “the” thing to have, and I was happy to finally get a pair at some point in my teens. They were hand-me-downs from my sister, which meant that I had to covet them for a year or so before I got them, which made me appreciate them all the more. They were the classic white boot/red wheel pair, and were well loved by both of us. They certainly beat the metal wheels that I had been strapping on my sneakers to that point.

As an adult I looked to reintroduce roller skates into my life and failed. I looked all over, but roller blades were the in thing then, and skates were nowhere to be found. I reluctantly settled, but soon grew to love the blades. I would frequently hope on the bike path, near my west end apartment, and head downtown and back. It was a long ride and a good work out, with no cars to deal with.

My blading was curbed a little when I moved in with Willy. We were living in the Market area of downtown, and access to the bike paths meant that I had to face my foe, the car. I was a little bit of an out of control roller blader, and cars meant that the rides were scary, not enjoyable. Then we moved back to the burbs, had two babies, and I forgot all about my blades.

When Santa brought Woo some blades for Christmas, I felt a bit of regret that I had not given in to the urge to bring my blades to India. Woo loves his, and our community is perfect for riding around. Then yesterday, these were posted on the community news group: They are just Goose’s size, so we snapped them up for her. They came with a full set of pads, so she was ready to go instantly. The look on her face when she first tried them was priceless, pure joy. She is so in love with them, even though she can’t actually move on them. She has mastered standing on her toes, standing on the wheels, falling, and getting herself back up again. It’s only a matter of time before she is rocking and rolling around. Now I want to get roller skates again.