ten minutes to myself

how i spent my summer vacation: a study in awesomeness

At the beginning of August, my family loaded itself onto a Qatar Airways 777 and flew across the Atlantic. We spent a lot of our summer vacation in transit - it's a long flight between HCMC and Doha, and an even longer flight from Doha to Washington DC. 

The DC-area is where we experienced the first awesome things about our summer vacation. Starbucks! Iced chai lattes are one of my favourite things in the world, and I have to travel to other countries to find them, so yes, that was a big deal. I had my first iced chai latte of the trip the day that we landed. Another awesome thing: TLC - a channel we don't get here! I totally indulged in garbage tv on our holiday. Whenever we were staying in hotels, I watched a lot of Say Yes to the Dress and Toddlers & Tiaras. I threw in a little HGTV on the side when I was feeling more adventurous. Another awesome thing: I went to an actual Athleta store (yay Tyson's Corner!) and tried on the Nectar dress that I've been admiring for about two years. Turns out it looks absolutely horrible on me, so it's a good thing that I waited and didn't spend a crazy amount of money shipping one to Vietnam. I bought a pair of Dipper shorts instead, and they are pretty terrific. Tyson's Corner also had a store where my children spent their birthday money buying their un-Canadian dolls outfits that cost more than the ones that they were wearing on their very own bodies. But that's what birthday money is for, right?

Part of the attraction of heading back to North America over the summer is the opportunity to fill up on some of things that we miss while we're living overseas, like family and wide open spaces. We stayed with Chris's sister in Maryland for a few days, and it was just lovely to watch my kids play in a fenced backyard, take them to a playground, and even just eat a picnic lunch outside on benches. (The part of this visit where Madeline conspired to play with her five year-old cousin to the near-exclusion of the other three kids was unplanned, though).

Wegmans! We stepped into a Wegmans somewhere in Maryland and Virginia, and it was crazy to be in a regular grocery store again! Gosh, it was spacious and well-stocked in comparison to the types of places that I get to buy groceries here in Saigon. Despite accusing me of going overboard in Target (where I re-stocked our medicine cabinet for the next year), he went a little crazy in the snack-and-drink aisle at Wegmans. The drink where pellets dropped down into the bottle for mixing was kind of neat, but I passed on his super-sized bag of crystallized ginger. 

Part of heading back to an English-speaking county during the summer is about shopping, but the longer that we live overseas, the more content I am to live without a lot of the consumer items that I used to haul back to SE Asia in my suitcase. This trip, we mainly brought home pharmaceuticals, birthday/Christmas gifts for the kids, and a few odd things that I can't locate in Saigon, like duct tape, cork sealer for my Birkenstocks, and sport laundry detergent because my regular clothes were beginning to smell too much like my gym clothes. 

On this vacation, I learned that my kids are generally cooperative enough that I can take them swimming by myself without being way out of my supervisory-and-water-skill league. The first time I took them solo was in Pinehurst, NC when Chris was off golfing. I did get a little nervous when the water they were playing in got deeper than I was comfortable in. This was an awesome development, especially since the alternative would have been hanging out in the hotel room for the entire day instead. This also paid off again when I hung out with my kids at the beach and hotel pool when we were in Hilton Head Island and Chris was off elsewhere in South Carolina watching a professional golf event of some sort. No one drowned, my kids monopolized the water slide at our resort as much as they could, and we came home with new pool noodles and sea shells. 

I also have to mention here that the cleanliness of the public HHI beach was awesome. I certainly wasn't imagining that we'd find an un-ending stretch of sandy shore with no litter or rocks or general ocean sludge. I'm not making this up - it honestly looked like this:

My eleven year-old self (who used to watch Space Camp on a near-daily basis) would have thought that our vacation was totally awesome because we visited the National Air & Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center and saw this:

 

Awesome is the only appropriate word.

One aspect of this holiday that I was day-dreaming about before we even left Vietnam was the food. There is a distinct lack of southern BBQ here. However, it wasn't hard to find in the Carolinas. Our first stop after crossing into North Carolina was at some dive in Raleigh where we enjoyed chopped BBQ pork sandwiches and collard greens and stuff. In Charleston, we polished off a helping of boiled peanuts:

And learned exactly why peanuts are a legume instead of a nut. 

The final awesome thing to say about our road-trip holiday is that Madeline and Sadie were good little passengers. They didn't complain much at all about how we strapped them into the back of our rental vehicle for some very long hauls. Madeline usually read or was content to stare out of the window, and Sadie napped or watched Doc McStuffins over and over again on Chris's iPad.  I remembered how I felt about road trips when I was a little kid, and was expecting a lot more tears and tirades. But they didn't happen, so ... Awesome. 

 

best laid plans

See this green thing? I thought that it was the main weapon in my arsenal for fighting Second-Child Syndrome (TM). 

I was going to write down all of the cute and/or important moments in Sadie's first year in this calendar, and then it was going to become my cheat-sheet for eventually producing her a baby book equal to Madeline's. 

(Let's skip over the fact that Sadie is nearly 3.5 years old).

(Let's skip over the fact that Madeline's scrapbook was the first and only one that I've ever made, abandoned for the expedience of photobooks and the challenge of finding scrapbook supplies here in SE Asia). 

So, I'm a couple of months into Sadie's book (making it in My Publisher, of course - keep those coupon codes coming), and I'm realizing a few flaws with my "Baby's First Year" calendar plan. One of them is point form. The boxes for the days are small - it's a calendar, naturally - so I was restricted to scrawling down things like

• "really bad baby acne"
• "more head control"
• "screamed at the Canadian Embassy"

which don't really tell the story behind why I was motived to jot those comments down for November 2008. Why were those things once worthy of recording? I'm obviously missing something!

The second thing with my calendar cheat-sheet is that it's boringly generic. I should have thought things through more before buying it, or thought about just writing down Sadie stories in a notebook (which is what I did for Madeline's scrapbook). There isn't much space for recording notes in the calendar, and the space that is provided is divided up under run-off-the-mill headings like "Your sleeping pattern is" and "Your favourite toys are". 

I'm not abandoning my project, and despite it's limitations, the calendar is useful. I just wish that my memory of Sadie's first year was a little less limited, and maybe that I'd blogged more to supplement. 

Remind me to never put Madeline's and Sadie's books side-by-side, though, okay?

those kids that I write about sometimes are still around

There is something sort of backwards about parent-teacher conferences here; I had a twenty-minute chat with my three year-olds preschool teacher (memorable comment: "Sadie applies yellow to all colours indiscriminately") yet had a mere ten minutes to cover four months of progress with Madeline's second grade teacher. 

Regardless of the brevity of the latter conference, everyone is doing fairly well. Even if I don't like how much of an informational black box Madeline's school is, she's happy to participate and her teacher has really been encouraging her reading skills. Madeline's entire grade - so, about 115 students - put on a play last week; Neverland had an astoundingly large population of pirates and Lost Boys, but Madeline sang and danced and spoke her one line in the play with enthusiasm.

Sadie is moving up from the Caterpillar Room to the Butterfly Room. Her preschool supports the multi-age classroom concept, and I think that she's the oldest kid in her current class. I am a little sad that she won't be finishing off the year with her current teacher and friends, but I also think that it will be nice that she'll be familiar with the new room and teacher before the summer break. In theory, this should make the transition back to school in August easier, right? 

 

drama queen

For many months, I'd been thinking that the film Tangled was near perfect, as far as Disney movies featuring princesses go. This is largely because I adore Donna Murphy and she rocks her scary-manipulative-mom song, but also because I love the spirit of adventure in the movie and that Rapunzel and Eugene are flawed and multi-dimensional characters. My three year-old loves Tangled as well, so much that she's taken to offering me her own dramatic rendition of the film as she follows the action on our small tv screen. 

This development started off rather sweetly; Sadie would run off to find a comb so that she could groom her (rather short-ish) hair at the same time that she watches Rapunzel do the same. She even shuffled over to me, holding a handful of her hair out for me to grab, and indicated that I could use it to speed up my entering and exiting of the tv room similar to Mother Gothel with Rapunzel's hair in the movie. I should have predicted that she'd want to hold my hands and stare into my eyes while the lanterns were floating around Rapunzel and Eugene in their rowboat on-screen. Her intensity was a bit unexpected, but Sadie's pretend play still struck me as charming.

Sadie's dramatics took a more daring turn this weekend, as the "I've Got a Dream" musical number in the Snuggly Duckling prompted her to jump up on our coffee table and dance sing along, complete with jazz hands and arm flourishes. Apparently, she's got dreams, too. And needs to sing about them.

Next, I saw that one of the windows in our family room was wide open. Those windows start at the floor and reach up to nearly the ceiling, and thus are covered by security bars. Everyone can easily reach through the bars to turn the lever and push the windows open, which Sadie apparently started doing, having noticed that no one uses a door in Rapunzel's tower - they climb in through the window, of course. The problem with this - well, one of many problems with Sadie playing with the windows - is that it's not manipulative parental figures that will come in through our open family room windows. It's going to be potentially tropical-disease-carrying mosquitos and other insects and small reptiles (and probaby not as friendly as Rapunzel's chameleon friend). The petty thieves around here who would love an open window are not as harmless as Eugene, so it's probably a good thing that those security bars are narrowly-spaced. Safety-wise, opening these windows could lead to curiosity about other windows in our house, and I don't want to go there.

This G-rated film is seriously starting to wreck some havoc on my home! I think that I need to put our pair of cast-iron frying pans into a locked cabinet before Sadie gets any ideas about arming herself like Rapunzel :)

 

well, we Canadians do like multiculturalism

This morning, after sweating through a yoga class that I was 95% certain was going to be air-conditioned (it wasn't - gah!), making an unplanned trip to the grocery store to buy a carton of eggs, and then having to shower again (see: sweaty yoga), I found myself standing before my second-hand waffle iron. I was madly trying to churn out waffles for a preschool class of twelve. 

You see, this week my three year-old's preschool decided that it would be fun to celebrate "Internationalism". Apparently, the wee little kids talked about how their families are all from different countries, they looked at maps, and scribbled on flags. I'm not entirely sure what Sadie had to say about Canada. She's only been there for about nine weeks in total! In fact, I'm not sure that she really even understands what Canada is. But I digress ... 

Back to the waffles. Sadie's teacher asked if I could come for lunch on Friday and bring a Canadian food item to share with the class. My first thought was to make Kraft Dinner, but then I realized that every single one of my Kraft Dinner cartons in my pantry were mis-labeled as Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. I absolutely could not bring American-pedigreed mac 'n artificial-cheese to Sadie's international luncheon! My second thought was to bring in a pan of Rice Krispie squares because they're easy, delicious, and I doubted that any of her classmates or their parents would even suspect that Rice Krispie squares aren't particularly a Canadian thing, being from other parts of the world themselves. This plan was too sneaky for my dear husband's comfort level, though, and it was he who first suggested maple syrup. (Maple syrup is apparently the gold standard for culinary proof of Canadian-ness at interational schools, by the way. There isn't one my kids have attended where this Lexus of condiments hasn't been brought out by the Canadians). It wouldn't have been proper just to serve a class of preschoolers cups of maple syrup, though. I needed something for it go on, hence the waffles. 

As I ascended the steps of Sadie's little school this morning at a quarter past eleven, a plate of waffles in my hands and a heroic bottle of maple syrup (with "product of Canada" emblazoned on it's label) ensconced in a bag on my shoulder, I suddenly realized that the waffles might have been a big mistake, or at the very least, misleading. 

Aren't they the national food of Belgium?

 

 

"pink" is a misnomer

In the wee hours of Sunday morning, I studied Sadie's crusty eye, mentally thought "Ew!" and determined that she must have sneezed sometime in the night, wiped her nose with her hand, and then rubbed her right eye, thus depositing the now-dried green mucous over her eye lid. About three hours later, her eye started looking a little swollen, too, and I figured that maybe a mosquito had dealt her one further indignity and bitten her eyelid. Another three hours passed, and curiosity got the better of me, and I thought I'd have a little chat with Dr. Google on the topic of the search terms "toddler eye mucous". 

I can't say that I've had a lot of "parenting firsts" with my second child. Madeline has covered a lot of bases for us, particularly in areas like "potty training woes" and "sleep deprivation". But today at the office of a pediatrician at the Family Medial Practice in Ho Chi Minh City, Dr. Google was largely proven correct and I landed my first little patient with conjuntivitis! (No matter that her eyes are not pink). 

It was time for another mental "Ew!". Sadie and I dashed home, had lunch, had a success with the antibiotic drops for her snotty eyes, and when she was napping, I started laundering lots of towels and linens. 

lucky dip

"Every child admission ticket gets a Lucky Dip" read a line part-way down the brochure for this past Sunday's "Family Fun Fair" at Madeline's school. Since bringing home the saffron yellow leaflet on Friday afternoon,  I had been taking every opportunity to talk about the mysterious "lucky dip", expressing my hope that her ticket got her a little container of hummus or white bean dip. My first grader, of course, was not particularly enthused by this prospect. 

We were all pleasantly surprised on the morning of the Fun Fair when my little ones were invited to stick their hand inside a the stomach cavity of a large hippotamus made of our cardboard. They each clutched at a little plastic capsule from inside the hippo and went over to the adjacent table of prizes, which was divided into colour-coded sections. Some sections had colourful pencils, erasers, and notebooks, others had plastic alarm clocks or backpacks from corporate sponsors. 

Madeline's capsule opened up to reveal a green pom-pom, and she selected her prize from the green section - a new spiral notebook, and she was quite happy.

Sadie's capsule cracked open and a red pom-pom emerged; the helpful parent volunteers at the table directed her to the red section, which happened to be the section with the highest-value lucky dip prizes. Amid a fair amount of chuckles from the adults around her, my two year-old toddled away from the lucky dip prize tables with a 4GB USB flash drive.

The biggest irony is that Sadie's prize will probably be technologically obsolete by the time that she's old enough to use it, followed closely behind with the fact that she probably would have been more excited by a tub of hummus of her very own

same same, except sometimes she speaks!

Lest anyone think that I haven't posted lately because I've been far too busy doing millions of exciting things here in Ho Chi Minh City, I'll share what was the highlight of my week. After dinner on Friday, Sadie (who is about six weeks shy of 2.5 years), spoke to me in a full sentence. "Mama, are you all done?" and then she took my plate to the kitchen. That was the most exciting thing for the entire week. No exotic shopping finds, coffee dates, day trips to the Mekong delta. It was a completely boring and average week, except for when my child-of-few-words surprised me by showing off that she actually can talk when she decided to! 

The four of us tried hard to think of something interesting and/or fun to do on Saturday afternoon. After Sadie's nap, we sat around for what was probably forty minutes before concluding the the option that we could think of was hitting the Snap Cafe. Chris had a pot of iced green tea, I drank fresh lime juice, and the kids ran around on the sand and play structure. It's a nice place to take a break, but it's hardly original! 

parenting classes i missed out on: locksmithing 101

I couldn't exactly put my finger on *what it was about my six-and-a-half year-old playing around with closing the door of her bedroom and locking it that really bothered me. On the surface, it was just annoying and exlusionary, with an angry toddler on the other side of the wooden door. Sighing, I insisted that Madeline open the door immediately and keep it open, using the logic that she most certainly wouldn't like the door of her room closed at nighttime, so why would daytime be any different?

There was a bit of reluctance in the sound of the lock turning in it's socket, but the door swung open, and Sadie zoomed in, and immediately decided that she needed to play the door-closing-door-opening-game herself. I sighed again, decided that I needed to take a minute to myself before dealing with my crazy offspring, and went across the hall to put away some folded towels from the laundry basket.s

It seemed like only thirty seconds might have passed, and then there was a panicky Madeline beside me. "Sadie's locked herself in her bedroom!" 

I have heard that it's common for all bedrooms, closets, and cupboards in Vietnamese homes to have key locks as a theft-prevention measure; families can lock-up themselves and whatever their items of value are (cameras, jewels, children)  before retiring to bed at night. Our rental home is no exception; there was a plastic take-away container with about four dozen neatly-labeled keys sitting atop our refridgerator. After verifying 

1. That Sadie was indeed in her room behind a locked door and
2. She had no idea what the instruction "turn the knob the other way" actually required her to do

I raced down the stairs to find the key to her bedroom in the big container of keys. Upstairs, the level of anxiety was escalating as both children were scared and crying. I was getting panicky myself as I could find keys labeled "Master Bedroom" and "Right Bedroom", but none labeled "Left Bedroom" (or Mysterious Third Bedroom, or anything that might allude to the bedroom situated across from Madeline's). If I stood facing the bedrooms, Madeline's was on the right and Sadie's on the left, which was sort of unfortunate given the key situation, and I wasn't really sure how I would go about explaining that I needed a locksmith ASAP to the Vietnamese-speaking security people outside when my Vietnamese largely relies on charades. 

I raced upstairs with the two little keys on the chain labeled "Right Bedroom". I stuck the first little key in the lock, trying to focus and ignore my hysterical little people. The key wouldn't turn. 

I tried the other key, and after a jiggle, it slowly turned, and I set my sobbing baby free. 

* of course, I now know that what I was afraid of was that Sadie would discover that our doors actually had locks on them from watching her older sister - a day that I wasn't looking forward to :)

welcome to jupiter, little girl

Freed of her sneakers and penguin backpack, Sadie ran right inside this morning, and discovered the book corner, the mat with the duplo blocks, the clay station, and the table with water wheels and yellow smocks on the chairs. She stuck a laminated hot air balloon (upside down) with her name on it onto the wall where a blue sky and fluffly white clouds were painted. She didn't understand that she was supposed to leave it there, and by the same token, not un-stick the handful of other laminated balloons with other names and redistribute them around the room. The frustration had started. 

She sat on the carpet with the others, briefly, and accepted the offer to put the orange "Tuesday" card on the rectangle space on the wall where someone had already affixed a gray "Cloudy" tag. She danced a little to the songs, but didn't clap. She observed the bathroom break with great curiosity.

Like a little lemming, she followed the others into the corrider. They started emptying the shelves, and she too started to grab shoes and hats. "Let's put those back, Sadie," an adult gently told her. She looked confused. Then, "Your cubby is over here. See your shoes?"

Green sneakers upon her feet and her brand-new sunhat velcroed under her chin, she seemed to be thinking that she was going to be set free at least. No matter how much she struggled to open the door leading to outside, she was met with the resistence of an adult hand on the door handle and a "Today it is Hugo's turn to open the door". A few frustrated and confused tears were shed here in the corridor.

Outside, she had a turn on the swing, scooped some sand and rinsed off her feet afterward, was excluded from the playhouse by some of the others, tried to ask for a drink of water (successful), and pushed herself around in a big purple car.

And then she was done. She stood firmly in the corrider again, as the others filed past her, through the door, to wash their hands and sit down for a snack. "Shall we get your penguin-pack?" I asked. She nodded, looking tired, confused, and overwhelmed all at the same time. "Okay, we'll come back tomorrow."