ten minutes to myself

do real gingerbread men wear dresses?

This past weekend, I was sitting at the little table with the girls with the playdough out. I was rolling out a large piece of purple for no real reason other than to keep my hands busy, when Madeline passed me a smallish green plastic gingerbread person cookie cutter. "Could you make me a gingerbread girl, Mom?" she asked. 

"Why do think this one makes a girl?" I asked, absentmindedly. 

Madeline rolled her eyes and sighed. "She's wearing a dress."

"Ah," I said, pressing the cookie cutter into a flattened blob of purple dough."Well, sometimes men wear dresses, too." Now Madeline's eyes are wide. "Especially in Thailand,"  I continued. "Many of the pretty ladies we saw there were really Ladyboys." 

I passed her a purple playdough figure. "Here's your Gingerbread Ladyboy!" I'm not sure if she believed me, but isn't playdough more fun when it comes with lessons in cultural awareness?

moving on

Slowly, over the last week, I've been moving all of Madeline's personal effects from her bedroom into the room that she prefers to sleep in. I have just one more framed photograph to hang up. I feel rather sad about doing all of this.

When our container of furniture arrived in BKK after making it's journey from Canada, the first thing that I wanted to do was set up a cute little bedroom for Madeline. It really bothered me, when we were living in our rental house in St. John's, that Madeline's room was so lifeless. All beige and dark furniture. Her room in Calgary was very cheery, and I wanted to have as happy a space here in Bangkok to play and sleep in. I was mentally decorating Madeline's room here even before we arrived. Our container arrived with the colourful sheets for her new bed, the fun pictures for hanging on her bedroom walls, and a menagerie of furniture and toys.  We were able to give her a large and bright room, with lots of wall space for artwork and a huge bathroom - so roomy that we could fit in there together!

All was good for about two months, until Madeline started to talk about scary noises that she heard in her bedroom. I don't know ... The only weird noise I ever heard was something that sounds like a washing machine that our upstairs neighbours seem to like to use at 6 am.  It didn't matter, though. When Madeline realized that her old crib was sitting in the room next door to hers, she couldn't move in fast enough.

I was convinced that it was merely a phase, and she'd be back in her bed and her bedroom in a week or so, after the novelty had worn off. After all, that room was smaller, and it's bathroom was not very conveniently laid-out for the newly potty-trained.  I thought these things were important.

It's been four months now, and last week, when I asked Madeline if she wanted to move back into her bedroom, she told me "No, it's too scary!" So, I've been moving her clothes between the closets and hanging up her pictures on the walls of her new room. And yes, I'm sad to starting over again, but I know that it's right thing to do as Madeline deserves to have somewhere to sleep and play where she feels safe. On the plus side, her new room is the coolest in the house - it only has one outside wall. We'll just keep her things in the roomy bathroom next-door, though :)

go figure/go fish

I was going to post about something entirely different today, but nothing  was more remarkable than Madeline's performance at her swimming lesson today.

As we approached the pool, I heard one of her classmates ask, "Is she going to cry again?" I grinned, remembering last week, and replied, "Well, lets keep our fingers crossed that she won't!"

And Madeline didn't. She started class by jumping into the deep end and grabbing onto the side of the pool, just like the other two girls in her class. Unbelievable! As the minutes passed, Madeline blew bubbles while kicking with a pool noodle, she put her head underwater to reach for plastic alligators, and she paddled a couple of feet out to her instructor without any swim aids! I could not believe what I was seeing! She must be getting as comfortable in her lessons as she is with Chris and I at the pool back at our apartment, because she participated fully in the lesson.

At the end of the class, Madeline waved goodbye to her coach, and told me, "Mom, I wasn't shy today!"  No kidding.

you can lead a horse to water

I think it was fifteen minutes. I was trying not to look too concerned, sending encouraging smiles in Madeline's general direction. At Madeline's latest swimming lesson, she sat at the edge of the pool, sobbing, for the first fifteen minutes of her thirty minute class.

Madeline loves going to the pool at our apartment, and is quite happy to try to paddle her way into the deep end, so I'm not entirely sure why her swim lessons have been on the traumatic side. Is it because it's in a different pool? Because neither Chris nor I are in the water with her? I thought that she was mature enough for "real", un-parented lessons.

Nonetheless, the other day she sat on the edge, nose running and puffy-eyed, until halfway through the class her instructor decided that it was time to jump into the pool through hoops of imaginary ice cream. Ice cream. That's something that Madeline definitely approves of. She was off of her bottom in no time, and repeatedly jumped into the pool, into the center of the pool noodle that was standing in for a circular ice cream sundae. And then she was fine for the rest of the lesson.

As we were leaving the pool after the lesson, her instructor asked us parents to remind him to start off the class with jumps next week :)