ten minutes to myself

let them eat cake (and plastic and artificial dye and excessive sugar and …)

Despite the fact that I am regularly reminded that I haven't baked a loaf of banana bread in forever*, I really do like baking. That's well-documented in my blogging, too.

I look forward to birthday baking in particular, but I think that for Sadie's sixth birthday, the right thing to do is leave my cake pans in the cupboard. You see, she loves accompanying me on grocery-shopping trips to the Co-op. Her singular purpose is to run to the bakery section and gaze longingly at all of the decorated cakes in their display window. There are princess cakes, of course. There's a cake with cars. A cake with Dora the Explorer.

I remember the attraction of bakery display cases. I loved it when I was staying with my grandparents when I was little and we'd walk over to the B&A Bakery in Edmonton. The bakery smelled like sugar and yeast, and they'd always have a gigantic sheet cake with piped icing in the case to celebration one occasion or other, and multi-tiered wedding cake or two, usually with a fabulous (and now, heteronormative) topper. If you had asked six-year-old-me, I am sure that I would have said those cakes were more special than anything homemade. 

So Sadie's been picking out prospective birthday cakes for the last nine months, and I guess that her birthday is the day to make one of her wishes to come true.

I will admit that I have thought of baking and frosting a cake from scratch and popping a bunch of little figurines on top, it's not the right thing to do Firstly, the little sets of Frozen figurines are going for $40 in these parts, and secondly, I spent many a birthday celebrating with my mom's favourite kind of cake (World Class Chocolate ice cream cake from Baskin Robins) instead of my favourite kind of cake (I think that it was flan when I was a dairy-sensitive adolescent), and I still think that wasn't very cool.  Having the birthday person pick their cake is the way to go in the twenty-first century, yes?

* My husband ought to be thanking me for that five pounds of banana bread-weight that he isn't sporting, right?

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."

the tale of the snack-table smackdown

Sadie, now a vetern of our Saigon toddler group, bounded into the classroom after fifteen minutes of running around chasing balls outside and headed straight for the small little snack table with it's eight tiny chairs. She started to to slide her little bottom into an empty seat, only to find her progress impeded when a full-grown woman threw herself over the chair first. I am not kidding!

"No!" the other mother exclaimed, and then she indicated the EMPTY chair at the snack table and  added, "This is for my son!"

But there wasn't a child there. The child she indicated was cruising around the (really large) classroom in one of those large Little Tykes cars, and when he zoomed closer to the vicinity of the snack table, I realised that he's the Cute Little Korean Boy. We've met before. 

Luckily, Sadie got over her confusion and diplomatically picked a different EMPTY chair at the snack table and went on to have cornflakes and orange wedges. But if she had instead chosen to throw one of those fabulous tantrums that I know her two-year-old self specialises in, I would have let her carry on for a few minutes, staring at Cute Little Korean Boy's mom the entire time. Grr.

 

doesn't everyone's date nights end with bugs?

Is is that just us? On Friday, Chris and I came home from dinner at one of those fabulous restaurants that Saigon has so many of, and delightedly found our children both dressed for bedtime and smelling of freshly-brushed teeth. All looked good, until we heard about how about twenty tiny insects had been pulled out of the curly fluff on Sadie's head. Now, if you have a child, or perhaps have been a child at some point, you understand where my bug-related thoughts immediately went and how much I probably shuddered and inwardly sighed at the imagined hours I had ahead of me, combing and nit-picking and laundering sheets and pillows and all that.

Over in a small Rubbermaid container sitting on our sideboard, one of the accused bugs was trapped, awaiting our inspection. I don't think that either of us really wanted to look, but we did. The tiny critter had wings. Wings!

Hurrah! I have no idea exactly how a family of small winged bugs ended up in Sadie's hair, but they sure were better than the alternative. 

year of the ... kitten

As the lunar new year approaches, other countries in Asia will usher in the Year of the Rabbit, but Vietnam does things a little different. Felines are more in style, I guess, as the Year of the Cat is upon us. The lunar new year, otherwise known as Tet, has been on my mind a lot this week. Ever since we moved here, I've heard other foreigners recommend that we leave HCMC for the holiday, as "the city shuts down!" - whatever that means, exactly. Lately, I've been hearing more about how all the beach and mountain resorts here are booked up already and stories of families who decided to stay in the city running out of food! I'm not sure if we're going to be able to go anywhere, so I feel that I should start nuturing my hoarding instincts (Side-note: I knew that there were some benefits to buying the shelf-stable milk here!). 

The other thing about Tet is that theft also ramps up in the weeks before the holiday.  A friend explained to me that the locals who have come into Saigon from the country to work are under a lot of pressure to bring expensive gifts back to their families, so muggings have been on the upswing, as well as reports of home-invasions. We don't live in particularly nice neighbourhood, so we've upgraded the lighting in our yard such that it's now bright enough to play baseball at midnight (not that our yard is bigger than a postage stamp) in the hopes that no one is going to come after our laptop computer and iPods at night. I think that the night that I discover someone with a flashlight rummaging through my kids' bedrooms will be the swan song for Saigon for me - could you even imagine how freaky that would be?

On a lighter note, today Sadie and I happily skipped Gymboree - we're never going back, thank you very much. We've found a lovely regular toddler playgroup for Wednesdays that actually encourages them to be individuals. And my little individual seems to have made a New Years resolution to mature some - communicating with actual words, sitting to play quietly with lacing beads, cutting food, looking at books, doing "crafts" - it's so not like her, but it's a lovely change for sure.

 

blizzards, airplanes, and a certain little toddler

This winter (such as it is, here in Vietnam), we'd been feeling that there wasn't enough challenge or excitement in our lives. So, the obvious remedy  was to take our two children, one of them a twenty-six month-old, on a eighteen hour flight. 

I remember how anxious I was when I first started flying with Madeline, usually between St. John's and Edmonton. She happened to be two year old at the time. Four years later, she could probably fly herself. Okay, maybe she still needs some assistance navigating the airports, but honestly, she is such an easy child to travel with. She packs and carries her own carry-on backpack, and is pretty happy to write in a journal, occupy herself with an activity sticker books (like these), or watch inflight programming. That's largely why I haven't posted much at all in the last couple of years about flying with her. It's very nearly like traveling with my husband, only she carries much less in her pockets  so I'm not waiting while she takes a really long time to get through airport security screening :)

But then, there is Sadie. She isn't really interested in stickers, colouring, or books, which is what her older sister occupied herself with on long flights at the same age. Sadie likes running, climbing, bubbles, playdough, and making things out of blocks - none of which really lend themselves well to air travel. I was either an optimist or an idiot, as I was carrying around about ten pounds of stickers, crayons, markers, and snacks in a large backpack. The great majority of those items never saw the light of day during our twelve-day trip. The keys to surving a long-haul flight with the toddler seem to come down to two things:

1. Taking a night-time flight, so that 6-10 hours of the flights are absorbed by sleeping and do not require entertaining (or restraining) her.
2. Having the Toy Story films on the inflight entertainment system. She could watch Buzz Lightyear and Woody all day long, I think.

 This actually worked out well on our out-going flight, leaving Hong Kong in the early evening. Our return flight was scheduled to leave NYC at 9:15 in the morning, which was quite a concern as there was a distinct possibility that she'd be awake for sixteen of those eighteen hours back to Saigon.

But hurrah - NYC received a dump of snow on Boxing Day!!!!! Our flight back on New Years Eve was delayed by something like six hours; we probably were the only passengers on flight CX841 who considered this to be the best news ever! And yes, the toddler slept for most of the flight. Thank goodness. 

favourite things

One of my favourite things  in this whole wide world happened today. 

After a lunch of Saigon's best fish tacos, after squeezing (and I mean that literally) through the masses at the Consular Charity Bazaar, and after the slow ride home, I'd pulled my sleeping little toddler from her carseat in our van, and settled down on the sofa with her head resting against my chest.  

She stayed asleep for half an hour, and it was just lovely to hold her like that again. 

completely random tuesdayness

What sort of brain pills is my toddler taking and where can I get some for myself? I'm joking, of course, but I never cease to be amazed at how almost overnight, Sadie seems to have gained thirty IQ points.  Over the last three days, she's started to talk a bit more, and understand an awful lot more. I discovered her new-found brilliance during her midnight-to-half-past-three party that she held on the wee hours of Sunday morning. Hurrah ... and yawn.

How on earth did I ever get my own homework done when I was in first grade? I also had a younger sister, but I don't remember having to fight her off from scribbling in my homework book. Madeline, however, does. Whenever she brings out a worksheet that she needs to complete, Sadie is right there, trying to elbow her way in with a marker in hand. I have no idea how to get Sadie to lay off and leave Madeline to do her work in peace unless I lead her away somewhere else, which isn't often possible as I usually have to stay with Madeline to keep her on task. Ugh. 

I've somehow found myself going on a decorating/organizing binge over the last few days. It started with me hanging up the rest of the pictures and framed photos in the girls' rooms (vain of me, but it makes me happy inside if my kids have nicely decorated bedrooms), but by Sunday, I was re-arranging furniture in our guest bedroom and computer room, displaying knicknacks, and marking the walls where I need holes drilled to hang up more decorations. It's carried over to today; this afternoon I was assembling some IKEA stuff, shuffling the dollhouse from one corner to the other, hauling stuff up to the storage room, and doing more measuring for our artwork. I spent much of our first few months in this house lamenting over how much this house didn't feel like our home and how I missed our apartment in Nichada, but I have to say that hanging up a handful of our family photos in our bedroom really helps me to feel settled here. (But I would go back to a single-storey home in a minute - the stairs here are just inconvenient!)

 

Did I ask your opinion? (and other things I am grumpy about)

Today, I must have had a wardrobe malfuntion and left the house with my "please tell me about my child because you know her better than I do!" sign accidentally taped to the back of my shirt. I say this because Sadie and I had another weird incident at Gymboree early this morning. We arrived only three minutes early (and were the first pair there, naturally). Shortly before the class began, ten minutes late, another little toddler was sitting outside the classroom, chugging back a bottle of milk, and Sadie wandered out the open classroom door to sit beside her. The instructor saw Sadie leave, saw where she was, and then said to me in all seriousness, "You should make sure that she has breakfast before she comes here!" 

Maybe I'm alone in thinking that this was a weird comment, but it came across as some sort of unsolicited parenting advice that is outside the realm of someone who is paid to dance around with a creepy clown doll. Sadie's instuctor is wonderful with the kids, but really, does she have x-ray vision and could see into Sadie's stomach? It's not like Sadie was wrestling the bottle of milk from the other kid. Have I been labeled a negligent parent by the Gymboree folks because of our arriving-in-time-for-class ways? Maybe Sadie just wanted to sit on the bench beside the other little girl today, you know. 

After doing our weekly penance at Gymboree, we headed to Sadie's two-year well-baby check-up. The pediatrician proclaimed her to be a completely normal toddler, but also told me that she'd be talking more if she wasn't still "confused by all of the Thai that she's heard" but to give her more time before worrying. That comment also seemed sort of strange to me, but maybe it isn't. It actually makes me more worried, though, because I imagine us moving on to our next assignment somewhere else, with Sadie still having very simple language skills, and hearing, "Well, it's because of all of the Vietnamese she'd heard!". Gah.

Am I allowed to whine about just one more thing here? It's my gas stovetop. It hates me. It has two burners, and for the last two weeks, they have pretty much refused to ignite. They go "poof" and then when I turn the dial back to the set the flame level, they extinguish completely. My husband, however, has no problem using the stove. It's really too bad that he wasn't around when I wanted to steam some broccoli for dinner tonight ...

faux-deedoh: what happens when i try to be creative

Be assured that I have no ambitions to enter the realm of design blogging, but I thought that a wee little makeover that I did in one of my daughters' rooms this past weekend was really cute. See, both Madeline and Sadie's rooms have a wall that is completely full of built-ins - a wardrobe, a few cupboards and drawers, and this large space:

To me, it looks like that space was designed to contain a large screen television, but somehow it just seems improbable to me that a typical Vietnamese home would have large screen tvs in all of the bedrooms. Maybe I'm missing something? Anyway, these big brown spaces that really only held a clutter of toys kind of bothered me, being wasted, brown, and boring. But this weekend, I transformed Sadie's  big boring brown space thusly:

The photo may be too small to really see, but I stuck regular boring wooden clothes pegs (going for either a shabby-chic or minimalist look, depending on one's decorating sensibility) to the back of the big brown space using one of my favourite decorating aids, 3M Command Strips. And then I hung a small colourful quilt in the space, and now there is something pretty to look at there. Much better.

I could actually write a whole post on my love of the 3M Command products; I've relied on them profusely in my life overseas with it's concrete walls that I can't hammer a nail into. Why, this past weekend, I also used the velcro version of the Command Strips to put up a pair of pictures on the big brown doors to Sadie's wardrobe. Love them. 

 

 

twice as nice

scooting
Originally uploaded by goingdomestic.

We didn't make a huge fuss over Sadie's birthday on Friday, but I hope that she still had a great day. Her new scooter was waiting for her downstairs when she woke up, and she was terrifically eager to hop on and tool around on it for most of the day. Chris managed to duck out of the office a little earlier than usual so we had a nice dinner together, followed by Sadie's cupcakes, and then we let her tear into her gifts. Which she actually did this year; I think that Madeline might have been a little disappointed that she didn't get to help unwrap as much as she has for Christmases past and Sadie's first birthday. 

The cupcakes were yummy; I can make cream cheese frosting (which we all like) in my sleep now, and I used a recipe for banana cake for the actual cupcakes. I have no natural talent with a piping bag, so I really should have practiced the eyes and mouths on my clownfish before I started piping the melted chocolate directly onto the orange sugar cookies, they were a lot more Nemo-ish in the example I was inspired by. I had the scale all wrong, sadly. I was really hoping that Sadie would see her cupcakes and happily shout, "Mum-O!!!" which is her current wordfor Nemo (the only licensed character she admits to recognizing), but I only got a "Fish!" from her. 

We took her out for a slightly-belated birthday lunch on Saturday, too, and I think that she had fun at the Snap Cafe here in HCMC. They have a fairly shaded playground with a lots of opportunities for swinging, and their blueberry pancakes are quite good. 

The one thing that I'd hoped to do for her birthday but wasn't able to was buy a bunch of balloons. Every Friday, there is a man standing opposite Madeline's school selling balloons (Hello Kitty and Transformers figure heavily) and live goldfish from the back of his motorbike; I figured that I'd go over and buy half a dozen helium-filled balloons and totally surprise the kids. Except that the balloon-and-goldfish man wasn't there after school! The students are on vacation this week, so maybe the balloon man was taking one as well???

lost and found: a tale of a ball and a voice

Earlier this morning, Transpo (our relocation company, currently in the top three on my Companies I Loathe list) dropped off the contents of our shipment from Canada. We are now rich in correctly-fitting bedsheets, laundry stain remover (hurrah!), and Rock Band for PS3.

One unexpected item in the shipment was the bouncy ball that my mom bought for Sadie this past summer. It's sort of a special ball - it's filled with glycerin or some higher viscosity liquid with pink glitter suspended in it. Enthralled does not adequately describe the magnitude of Sadie's interest in this ball today.

After lunch, she was acting all weird and frantic and chattering urgently to herself. When I got a little closer, I actually heard, "Where my ball go? My ball? Where my ball?" and I almost went into shock right then and there, because my little one year, three hundred and sixty-four days old Sadie does not speak in sentences! I swear it's been two months since she put two words together to tell us anything.

Wanting to encourage further comprehensible discord, I joined her little search party. We looked downstairs in the dining room and kitchen, and then headed upstairs to the bedrooms. She peeked under Madeline's bed with me, down on all fours with her little bum in the air. "I don't see it!" she declared, toddling up and out to check out the hall.

Finally, "Here my ball!" echoes through the room and I see her wiggle out from behind a triangle cushion on the floor, glittery pink ball back in her hands, where it belongs. 

My fingers are crossed that when Sadie wakes up tomorrow morning, she won't have lost her voice. 

 

 

t is for tuesday, tired, toddler, tantrum, and transpo

I am secretly hoping that my little Sadie is under the impression that when she reaches the august age of two later this week, the fun is over and she has to start acting all proper. I have no other explanation for why she pulled out every possible poor behaviour today (my child actually tried to flush two faceclothes down the toilet), tested every limit, and spread crumbs wherever she went, as if she and her imaginary brother Hansel were heading out into the forest alone. She's a one year-old for four more days, and one is currently going out with a storm. 

But on the bright side, my husband arrived home, looking all fresh-from-the-office in contrast to my harried-I-just-put-two-kids-to-bed appearance, with some happy news. Transpo is supposed to be delivering the last of our shipment - the one from Canada - on the 14th! This is timely news, folks! This means that Sadie will actually have her birthday gifts around ON HER BIRTHDAY! Chris and I will be having a marathon wrapping session on Thursday night. There is nothing that brings a couple closer together than a roll of scotch tape, you know. 

no ordinary sunday

So, are you wondering just what the heck I took a picture of there?

I'm sort of wondering what the heck I was doing, adulterating a perfectly good batch of sugar cookie dough with a combination of Wilton gel dye in red and a couple of  bizarre miniature unlabeled bottles of Vietnamese food dye in yellow. I was hoping to achieve a perfect shade of Clownfish Orange to make a certain toddler's birthday treats a little more special.

I'm a bit laid up with a sinus infection, so I stayed back with Chris and the kids went out to run a few errands later this morning, and I spent that time doing prep work for my very-neglected photobook projects. I'm working on photos from April 2010 at the moment, having skipped Sept-Dec 2009 outright. I love making these books, but the amount of adjustments that MyPublisher requires (adjusting the image size and resolution) just sucks too much time for me. I'm tempted to migrate my business to Blurb or Shutterfly (ugh, the backgrounds!) or another photobook publisher that can deal with high-res images.

Next, we had our neighbour and her family over for turkey to celebrate Thanksgiving (except for the getting Monday off - that's only if we were all still living in Canada). After we'd all cleaned up the kitchen after diner and dessert, my neighbour asked me if Madeline had her Mountie suit ready for International Week at her school. Mountie suit? "No way," I replied, "I'm just going to slap a patriotic t-shirt from Roots on her!" ... and then I was let in on the tradtional at the school for the Canadian kids to dress in formal RCMP attire for the parade.  Oh my. Will the crazy stuff ever stop?

 

 

what is this second-child syndrome that you speak of?

So, according to the calendar, my baby isn't so much of a baby anymore. Next week! Next week she takes the final step into full toddler-hood and becomes a two year-old. I haven't written much about Sadie lately, and I've been feeling sort of bad about it - how on earth am I ever going to make her a scrapbook of her first two years sometime in the next decade if I don't record her milestones here? 

Sadie has been wearing the Miss Cranky crown for the last couple of weeks; one of her lower two-year molars is through and both of the upper ones have a corner peeking above the gumline.   What I thought was an ample stash of infant pain meds when I was shopping in Canada this past summer has been depleted at an alarming rate. 

She's talking more, but she's still a one-word-at-a-time kind of girl, and a lot of her speech is still indecipherable. I've been kind of wondering if this still considered normal for a two year-old; I was sort of expecting that she'd be using more two word sentences. But she's still cute to listen to - she calls her sister "Naddy!" and tells us to "sit" if she wants to cuddle, and she was really excited to learn that her favourite little clownfish and her sister's classmate are both called "Mum-o". 

Sadie's favourite thing to do appears to be climbing stuff, which has opened my eyes to a plethora of safety hazards in our new home. So many places that she could climb up to and fall from ... She's been able to climb out of her crib for quite a few months now, and she's quite quick  about it, so re-introducing her to sleeping in her crib for naps and at nighttime since unpacking here hasn't gone well. She'd been sleeping in a bed for six weeks this summer, remember. This past weekend I dismantled the cute little crib and set up her cute little farmhouse bed. Her mattress could be arriving shortly, and then we're all set for a whole new of variety of bedtime stalling and toddler defiance.  

Before we knew that we were moving this past summer, we were going to enroll Sadie at the same preschool that Madeline attended in Thailand, just for a couple of mornings a week. I put preschool for Sadie aside when we learned that we were leaving, but I think that I'll do a little research into what our options are for the next school year, when she'll be almost three. We go to a drop-in program at one of the international schools here on Mondays, and it's really fun to watch as things like circle time and music time click in her brain, and it's good for her be around kids her own age, even if some of them still haven't figured out the scoop on sharing (this time: a tub containing about a zillion little translucent chips for the light table).

I am in love with Sadie's hair. I think that the waves are enchanting, and will be very sad if we move back to Alberta and waves vanish with the lack of humidity. If I look deep into her eyes, they are still blue, but I think that there are some brown undertones (just like Madeline's). Shoe are one of Sadie's great loves ("Soos!!!"), and the feet that she wiggles into them seem enormous. She's currently wearing the same pair of shoes that her sister did, except that Madeline was an entire year older. But her big feet are also hugely delicious to tickle :) 

 

do-over day

Thursday was one of those days that I really wished we could have a do-over for. While Madeline was safety sequestered away at school, away from the combat zone:

1. Sadie climbed up onto our easel (why? what is the attraction?) and it broke and fell to the ground. So did she.
2. She got into the tub of funky-smelling lavender-and-vanilla lotion and moisturized her arms, shirt, face, and hair. Perhaps it was her way to requesting a morning trip to the bathtub?
3. Tossed the pencil crayon tub on the floor. Twice. Brought out the broom to sweep up the broken bits.
4. Dumped bowl of goldfish crackers onto the ground, and compounded the mess by marching on top of the crackers. The broom made an encore appearance.
5. Arrived at the Embassy of Canada to re-new her passport fifteen minutes after it closed. This was at 10:45 in the morning, in case anyone reading this is Canadian and should know how unconvenient is it to deal with the gov'ts office abroad ... 

Then, in the afternoon, after naptime and such, Sadie sailed a laundry basket containing herself off of the sofa and into the coffee table.  I was right beside her, folding laundry, but man, she's quick. I think that's somewhat ironic that I used to describe her sister as "very energetic" because I obviously didn't really know the definition of the word.

sadie sneaks one by ...

This evening after dinner, Sadie was pushing herself around the dining room/kitchen in her little red car. We weren't surprised - it's been one of her favourite toys since she was about five months old. I was in the kitchen washing our dinner dishes when all of a sudden, I hear Chris asking me if I knew how old the sippy cup was that she just pulled out of her car's hood. 

Hmm. I hadn't noticed her putting things into the hood and taking them out at all since we moved. "She took a sip, make a face, and put it back," Chris added helpfully. I dried my hands and pulled the Take n Toss cup out of the hood, revealing about two ounces of a mysterious dark liquid. I took a sniff, and it had definite notes of fermentation. Ew. I dumped the contents of the sippy cup down the drain and was left with a bit of dark moldy sludge. 

I can't help but feel sad for my poor little Sadie. She was probably delighted to come upon the sippy cup that she'd packed away in June, when her little red car was wrapped in cardboard and slipped into our sea container for the journey from Bangkok to Vietnam, and now on the fourteenth of August, it sort of betrayed her ... 

cat in the hat

This holiday in Edmonton is still a pleasure. The kids are having a great time with their grandparents and auntie, the big backyard, trips to the most-excellently stocked children's section at Chapters, and I am enjoying my parents' front-loading washing a lot. I'm very much shopped out, and I hope that today's jaunt out to pick up sneakers for Madeline in the next-size-up and a mattress cover for Sadie's future twin bed is nearly the last of it. 

I am not sure what Sadie is going to do when we fly home to Saigon and leave my sister's cat behind here, though. At first she was literally shaking with fear when the cat would make an appearance, but now she tries to communicate with Timmy with enthusiastic "meows" and when he's hiding somewhere, she crawls around on all fours, meowing, and lays down in the back porch like she's seen him doing. This would be cuter if the porch wasn't covered by a cat-hair-and-grass-laden mat, but I still chuckle. At least a little. 

cannot deny the evidence

Yesterday, Madeline and Sadie were playing on the carpet with three or four of our Little People playsets. I was busy in our storage closet, purging it of empty boxes and trying to organize holiday decorations and so forth. All of a sudden, the background noise of happy sibling interaction was replaced with hysterical tears. 

I sprinted out to the living room and gathered Sadie into my arms to comfort her, and noticed Madeline sitting on the sofa, looking a little guilty. "I sort of hit her on the head," she confesssed, looking extremely uncomfortable and guilty. A short convo about what and why and how followed, and Madeline was let off with a stern warning for this seemingly accidental infraction. 

A few hours later, we were hanging out in Sadie's bedroom. I was feeding Sadie, and Madeline was looking at books. I looked down and noticed a new mark on Sadie's arm - actually, a whole serious of little marks, arranged in two semi-circles. I immediately knew what had really happened when Sadie was upset earlier! Unfortunately for Madeline, she failed to anticipate the tell-tale bruising left by her teeth on her sister's arm when she tried get away with the perfect crime and confess to lesser charges. Sigh. 

tired and cranky

I usually am a pretty happy soul after both of my girls are tucked into their respective beds for the night, but I'm finding it hard to rally tonight. I'm too tired. Yesterday, after Sadie woke up around eleven, I stuck her in bed beside me - with Chris gone for his new job, there's plenty of room. Except she pretty much fidgeted for the next four hours. I think that she might have actually dozed off in twenty-minute spurts, but I can't say that I did. I finally realized how much time had actually passed during her restless fugue around 3 am, and I promptly returned her to her crib and we both slept for a couple of hours. I re-settled her again around five, and while I had to be up with my alarm at 6:15 to get Madeline ready for school, Sadie slept until nearly eight o'clock. 

I am clearly not at my best today. We were supposed to be doing school tours in Saigon this Friday, and I've our visa application forms and photos ready to go for over two weeks now, but it's taken so long to get this trip organized that it's probably too late now to get our visas processed. I am very cranky about that - I purposely had everything assembled in advance because I know that it scrambling at the last minute would be frustrating. I've been quite worried for the last six weeks that the International School of Good Reputation won't have a space available for Madeline because we're applying so late in the year, and that she'll end up going to the International School of Last Resort and we'll have to home-school her in order for her not to be held back a grade in the future. Not that I really know anything about any schools there, anyways, but I tend to get anxious about things like this. But waiting another week doesn't seem so horrible at this point. Maybe that's a good thing. 

That brings us to bedtime this evening. Why doth my baby protest so? Screams at getting changed into her pajamas and a fresh diaper, screams at the sight of her sleepsack, the sight of her lights being dimmed ... and yes, screams at being put into her crib in less than a state of complete slumber. Darned eighteen-month sleep regression. It's like the period when I could go through our bedtime rountine and plop her in the crib and she's lay down and fall asleep on her own was just a figment of my imagination. Blah. Anyway, I've done as much as I can on the 3-4 hours of sleep I got last night, so it's time to get off the computer ... 

four out of five insects agree ...

Sadie's blistery bug bites?
Originally uploaded by goingdomestic.

... that Sadie is quite delicious!

In all seriousness, this is the most skeeved out/alarmed I've been about an insect bite. Three of these actually appeared on her legs on Monday night/Tuesday morning. The one in the photo is the worst. There's a whole collection of blisters - one big one, a few mediums, and a host of teeny-tiny little ones. I've never seen anything like it.

That's why I googled last night, sort of regrettably. The top results for searching on insect bites and blister appear to be about spiders.

Spiders! Spiders are snacking on my sleeping baby, in her sleepsack, at night? Are they snacking through her sleepsack???

I sort of ruled that out due to the sleepsack thing, but I will be thoroughly checking the sleepsack and her crib area when she wakes up from her nap in a little bit.

I did find some articles suggesting that infants who tend to be prone to eczema might have a blistery reaction to mosquito bites, and Sadie very well may fit into this category. I know that there were plenty of mosquitoes around her feet a few nights ago, when we were dining al fresco. Other possible explanations? Ants, maybe? Fleas?

I am really just hoping that this isn't from a spider.

this bedtime is brought to you by ...

I'd like to be able to say that I am a master at the art of putting two children to bed by my lonesome. In truth, I have some help on the oft-frequent nights I'm home alone with the two tired kids and bedtime creeps near and their dad is traveling or stuck at the office. While I was awaiting the arrival of Sadie, the thought of being responsible for putting both of the children into bed all my myself was the scariest part of becoming a parent of two children. I was certain that Chris and I were going to have week-long ugly arguments about being home in time for bedtime. I'll be honest - there were some bad nights, nights where poor Madeline waited in her bedroom for over an hour and a half for me to get to her to tuck her in and kiss her sweaty little forehead - but I've become a little smarter about how I manage the putting-the-kids-to-bed process. 

And so, bedtime is now officially sponsored by:

• iTunes, where I download Ramona Quimby and Ivy & Bean and Clementine on audiobook for Madeline to listen to on my iPod while I turn my attention to getting Sadie down for the night. After the littlest one is tucked in, I steal back into Madeline's room and we usually read a picture book together. 
• Fisher Price and Cloud b, who make the Ocean Wonders Aquarium and Sleep Sheep that provide the orchestal backdrop to my seventeen month-old's dreams. 

And I probably should also thank Duracell and Energizer, as I am quite convinced that if we experienced the Great Battery Famine, Sadie would not sleep a wink. She'd just blearily stare at her silent crib aquarium and try to lift a tired arm to point to her mute Sleep Sheep. Ah, who am I kidding? She'd probably just yell, not having the words to tell her parents how crazy they are for expecting her to sleep without her fish and white noise. Goodnight from somewhere in the twenty-first century.

click

I've written before about how I am always amazed at how my children can wake up one morning and be so much smarter than they were when I tucked them into bed and kissed their damp little temples the very night before. I am always overcome with joyous surprise and wonder to discover that Madeline has developed an understanding of the life cycle of bees overnight or that Sadie suddenly can complete her stacking ring in order. It's harder to see the cognitive development coming, isn't it? I watched my children progress from sitting up on the floor to pulling up on the side of our coffee table, and knew that standing independently on the horizon. Predicting what their little minds will be working on next eludes me, though. I rarely see the "click" coming.

Case in point: Sadie at The Little Gym on Tuesday. She sat on her bottom (after happily bopping to the welcome song for a few bars, of course), shaking her pair of jingle bells very eagerly from the first notes of the guitar to the final ones. She attempted to copy the other toddlers in the class when they greeted their instructor, Pi San, with a wai (which he thought was awesome. I like Pi San). She scooted up a set of soft stairs to reach the balance beam, and trotted to the other side. She stood on her tiny tip-toes to reach the lower of the uneven bars, closed her hands around the polished wood, and showed me once again that she has the fittest abs in the family by pulling-lifting her little legs up to her tummy, so that her teacher could help her spin around the bar. She watched Pi San balance on hands and feet to bear-walk sideways across the parallel bars, twelve inches off of the ground, and then ran over to try to figure out how to get her hands and feet into a similar position, getting herself into quite a fun tangle.

Sadie wasn't successful with that endeavor, nor everything else that she tried to do at The Little Gym, but what was different about this class from the ones before is that she tried to do everything. She watched her instructor and the other toddlers on the equipment and wanted to do what they were doing instead of banging her hands on the window to the foyer or stationing herself on the spring-board to dance the class away. On Tuesday, I was just blown away by how the routine just clicked. She obviously understood the purpose of our visit. There are some days when she's just not interested or co-operative, or frankly, just doesn't have a clue about what we're trying to accomplish. 

When Sadie woke up on Tuesday morning, she looked exactly like she did the night before, when I put a fresh diaper on her bottom, fastened the snaps on her purple pajamas, and zipped up her sleepsack with the goldfishies from chin to toes. I think it's absolutely wonderful how she'd changed on the inside. 

ode to half past five

It was not willingly that I got out of bed this morning at 5:30. It was preceeded by the electricity in our apartment building going off about five minutes earlier, which left all of us without our air-conditioning - I'll admit that makes me grumpy. Of course, when the electricity goes out, it plunges Madeline's bedroom into total darkness, which is a problem as she has insisted on sleeping with the overhead light on for the last three hundred and sixty-five days or so. Of course, my five year old, despite being sound asleep, senses that she's in the hot and dark and immediately starts to wail, "Mommy! Daddy! Mommy! Daddy! Mommy! Daddy! ..." 

You'd think that these events would wake up the baby, but no, not really. Sadie had been tossing and turning for the last couple of hours. And since she was tucked into bed with us (where you'd think that she'd be content and busy sleeping, right?), tossing and turning really means that she was climbing from one side of me to the other at fifteen minute intervals, stilled only by topping off her milky tummy. 

These goings-on collided when the power went out. Madeline summoned her courage to sprint across the den and fumble her way to the far side of our bed, where there was a small patch of real estate available beside Chris. Despite the darkness and maybe because we were without the hum of the A/C, the pat-pat-pat of her feet attracted the notice of my little tosser-turner, who popped her not-so-sleepy little head up to greet her sister with cheery good-morning-ish babble. That's when I knew that I was done, that we were done, and there was no going back. I checked the time on my iPod, sitting on my nightstand. 5:30 am. I rolled to my right and fumbled for my slippers.

Good Morning. 

so, this is what being well-rested feels like

I am sure that everyone and their dog is tired of listening to me post about my perpetually-night-waking children after nearly six years of blogging here, but I have to document this or else I will never believe that it actually happened. Last night, Sadie woke up ONCE b/w 7:10 pm and 4 am. And that was at 9 pm, so didn't have to haul my tired and sorry bottom out of bed until I'd been asleep for like, six hours. Wow. No matter how the rest of the day goes, today my toddler is a rockstar!

toes and teeth

Sadie's nearly-emerging cuspids are the pointiest teeth that I've ever seen. When I catch a wide and open-mouthed smile, all I can see are those four little vampire fangs. Where Madeline's like that when her bicupisds came in? I honestly can't remember, but I don't think that they were. Surely they would pointier now if they started out like Sadie's!

Also in the my toddler-is-a-freak-of-nature department, one of Sadie's toenails is falling off. It's looked sort of off for awhile now, but today I noticed that it's just hanging on. I think I remember her catching her foot on one of the closet doors, so I'm attributing her injury to that. Ick! 

news flash

Sadie was not up for the day until eight this morning! 

She stirred around seven, but Chris reached over and patted her, and she settled again. I am pretty sure that she hasn't slept that late since she turned four months old. That was a year ago. Also newsworthy is that she didn't make a peep b/w 7-11 pm-ish. I cannot remember the last time she slept that long ...

may i present our newest legal resident

Today, when Sadie happened to be sixteen months and two days old, we finally closed the long-stay visa process that we started in Hanoi, Vietnam at the end of last April. It doesn't normally take ten months. The type of visa that we have needs to be applied for from outside of Thailand, so that's why we went to Vietnam. Secured her single-entry visa, re-entered Thailand, and Chris's company was the liason for the rest of the paperwork to have a long-stay visa for her approved. We thought that things have gone swimmgingly until we were at the Qantas check-in counter in Melbourne in July, when the error was caught. For some reason, Sadie's visa had already expired. 

The good news was that Thai immigration figured that the date on Sadie's visa was a typing error, so she was able to re-enter Thailand. The bad news that we got after we were home was that it was actually a different error, and we'd have to re-start the visa application process all over again, down to having to apply from another country. I'll admit it - I was livid and stayed rather angry about having to start over again for several months. We secured Sadie her second single-entry visa in London over the Christmas holidays (when my rage had given way to acceptance), and thankfully, all of the pieces of the puzzle that came after fell into place they way they needed to. 

There were a few tense moments yesterday when I was unable to communicate to the id photo staff that I wanted the date stamped on the back of the four ID photos that I needed to submit, but I guess that wasn't important, in the end. 

Addendum: sixteen things plus one

Chris suggested an extra one, last night, after I'd already posted.

16+1. We can't take Sadie down to the open-air lobby of our apartment or over to the small playground on the grounds without hearing a "Hello Sadie!" and seeing our little girl smile and wave back to the people who work here in cleaning, maintenance, or security. No anonymity here for toddlers. 

sixteen things

Sixteen things from the last two months. Why? Tomorrow, my smallest kid turns sixteen months old, and frankly, that just makes me more acutely aware of that I have been a huge slacker about chronicling her early years (well, year plus a few months). I've blogged less, scrapbooked not at all, and I don't even keep a notebook where I jot down each month's milestones (like what did for Kid 1.0, of course). I do have plenty of photos, which I guess I should be pleased about, but those images only capture a little bit of Sadie. Anyway, so I don't forget: 

1. She's been a fan of baths, showers, pools, buckets of water for washing the floor, and water in general for most of her life, but now her favourite thing to do when she finds herself with water to play in is fill a cup, and then dump it out, re-fill and re-dump, rinse and repeat ...

2. Her favourite book, hands down, is Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb. I love it. I love it because I remember my mom and dad reading it to me when I was small, and it was also Madeline's favourite book for awhile (she actually slept with it). 

3. Her new pair of 18-24 month-size Pediped shoes arrived this month, to replace the 12-18 month-sized ones that she managed to out-grow in THREE short months. 

4. Sadie was 10.3 kg (22.7 lbs) and 80.5 cm tall (nearly 32 inches) at her 15-month well-baby check-up at Bumrungrad. 

5. We acquired a fitball for our home this month, and Sadie thinks it's really fun to bounce on it, and will emulate the things that she sees Chris do on the fitball on her little 8-inch yellow play ball. 

6. I am sure that in her fifteenth month, Sadie has eaten her weight in frozen blueberries. She started to shun the probiotics-laden baby oatmeal that I like to serve with fruit, though. 

7. She is trying to talk more. Sadie will push her toy cars across the floor and makes a vroom-like sound effect, and I've observed her testing out animal sounds as well. Sometimes she'll say "ball" or "up", but Madeline could really care less about those. It's all about waiting for Sadie to say her name, of course.

8. Signing! Sadie is signing "all done" and "eat", and occasionally "more". She also has an all-purpose "gimme" gesture, which I guess counts as well. I'm rather dumb-founded that Sadie signs at all since I was a real - wait for it ..... slacker - about baby signs with my second child as well. 

9. Loves to dance! She will dance to recorded music, actual live singing, even just the rhythm of hands clapping. Her moves involve bouncy deep knee bends, jaunty head-bobs, a few twirls, and lots of floaty little hands and arm flaps. 

10. She has a ridiculous amount of fun with the floor-length curtains that hang in all the windows in the apartment. She will either wrap herself up in them or duck behind them, billowing out the width of the panel as she dashes to the opposite end in a game of hide-and-seek.

11. Sadie had a great time when my parents were here to visit. I don't recall my dad ever turning down Sadie's request to be held or picked up, so they were fast buddies. I know that my mom wasn't very comfortable sitting on the floor to play with her, but I saw them hunkered down on the rug plenty of times, and Sadie had a lot of fun inventing games with tiny packets of sugars that they could play together. 

12. Sadie and Madeline play together more than I expected them to, actually, considering that Sadie is still so young and they have a 4.25-year age-gap. Maybe it's a slightly more sophicated version of parallel play when they are both hunkered down on the floor with the Little People or hanging out by the big Laugh n Learn House, but it's really lovely that they want each other's company. 

13. Sadie rocks Peekaboo Barn. I tell myself that the only reason that Sadie ever touches my iPod Touch is because we're stuck in a car somewhere in a Bangkok traffic jam, just so I feel better about introducing her to technology at the tender age of fourteen months. 

14. Sleep has just been going downhill ever since she turned four months old. She still wakes up numerous times at night. Last week it was about every twenty minutes unless I was directly beside her (she was sick, which gets her slightly off-the-hook). She's even more sadistic about sleep than her sister was. 

15. She hasn't repeated her little "escape from the crib" act, thank goodness. I've only recently become comfortable putting her in it when she's not totally asleep. 

16. Hurrah for receptive language. My kid is happy to oblige requests for hug, kisses, or respond to "Sadie, get your shoes!", "Where is Madeline? Let's find her!", and probably understands ten times more than I actually give her credit for. 

careful listening

On Wednesday, Sadie was perched on my knee at her pediatrician's office while the good doctor peeked in her ears, poked her stomach, measured her head, etc. "How many words is she saying?" he asked, all the while checking out something in her mouth. 

Well. Does it count that she makes a "b" sound when she sees birds, sometimes? 

"A dozen?" the doc suggested, while he checked out some other part of Sadie.

Did the "d" sound she makes when patting the door count? The "Muh!" when she wants more food or wants anything in general, usually accompanied by a wildly opening-closing gimme-type hand gesture?

"Maybe two dozen?" Dr. Somyod proposed.

"Um, more like half a dozen," I conceded, and I felt a little concerned that she might be lagging behind. 

The next day, which was in fact yesterday, Sadie started experimenting with the word "Up!". And today, in the car I told her that we were going out to look for an exercise ball for her dad. "Ball" she repeated solemnly. While my child may not understand the concept of sleeping for more than an hour at a time, she seems to have an understanding of irony and being fashionably late.

reading is a low-contact sport

I stumbled upon a very handy blog about children's books a couple of months ago: Chronicle of an Infant Bibliophile. Handy because I was trying to find a new flap book for order Sadie on Amazon and they don't have a category as refined as that, and I wasn't about to give up and order yet another too-cute Karen Katz book. But this blog does have a category for books with flaps, and Sadie really seems to like Dear Zoo. It's all good!

On that note, maybe I ought to get Sadie looking at books more often, because her future-stuntwoman ways resulted in another fat lip today. Less scaling the furniture and more sitting peacefully on the floor turning pages (and lifting flaps) would not be a bad thing for that little girl ... 

the one about jet-lag, fillings, and new blogs to read

I would have posted more this week had my attention not been spend perusing Mom-101's list of top mommybloggers whom were not on the radar screen of Babble magazine (which I haven't really read since they ursurped a photo from Sweet Juniper awhile back). It's time to update my blog roll, and this post is a good place to begin. 

Madeline's dental procedure yesterday was quicker than I'd imagined, largely because her dentist had prepared me to expect a root canal but it turned out that a pair of fillings did the job. My kid was very apprehensive enroute to the dental office, but co-operated perfectly during her appointment. She happily told me that her tooth doesn't hurt when she chews any longer, and the procedure didn't hurt as much as her friends told her that it would.

We've been home from our winter holiday for ten days and nine nights, and Sadie is slowly getting over her jet lag and back onto her regular nap and night-time sleep routine. I should have added a third item to my post a couple of weeks ago about the things I've learned about traveling with a toddler:

3. Your toddler might not recover from jet-lag as swiftly as adults or even preschool-aged children. Traveling across more than two time zones might be on the hold for me for the next couple of years as I really don't want to stay up at night here in Bangkok, waiting for it to be Sadie's bedtime wherever we happened to be traveling. 

Wednesday night Sadie went to bed at a near-normal time and had a near-normal wake-up time, but yesterday she woke up sometime after midnight and was pretty certain that she needed to be awake still. Which really sucks for me. 

there's a mystery afoot

Last night, instead of falling asleep right away at bedtime, Sadie was fussing in her crib as I was reading Bob's Best-Ever Friend to Madeline. About halfway through the picture book, it sounded like a teary Sadie was passing by Madeline's bedroom. Seconds later, I heard Chris start chatting with her, and it sounded like his voice was coming from our living room. As I got to the last page of the book, Sadie wandered into Madeline's room, so I scooped her up, finished the story, and we both said our goodnights to Madeline. 

I strolled into the living room with Sadie in my arms. I don't remember who said something first, but I think that Chris might have said something like, "Oh, you decided to get Sadie up!" which was totally bewildering, because it would have been he who fetched Sadie from the upsetting situation in her crib. I might have remarked, "Um, no, it wasn't me who sprung her out," which led to the confused expression on Chris's face. He explained that he'd been over on the sofa the entire time that I was reading to Madeline. 

So, I didn't get Sadie out of her crib. Chris didn't get Sadie out of her crib. We found her sleepsack in an unceremonious pile on the floor, and the side of her crib was still up. 

how Sadie was taken hostage at three day old, or: checking out is hard to do

On the Saturday after Sadie was born, I was all set to check out of the hospital and head home. Chris and Madeline arrived by nine. I had already changed out of my hospital gown and packed my bag up; around eight in the morning I'd reminded the nurses that i was checking out that day. As far as I knew, we were just waiting for the bill for the delivery and stay, and Sadie's hearing test. At ten o'clock, the bill hadn't arrived, and no one had come to collect the baby for the hearing test. The next time I saw one of the nurses, I reminded her that we were leaving that morning and Sadie still needed her hearing test. Shortly thereafter, my sleeping baby was whisked away to the nursery for what I assumed was a ten-minutes-or-less procedure. Either Chris or I confirmed that our bill was being prepared. 

 At 10:30, I was summoned to the nursery, surely to collect my baby. But no! The nurses showed me all of the parting gifts that Chris and I were supposed to haul home with us: a package of ginormously wide Mommy Poko diapers, a tub of cotton balls, a bottle of betadine, a pink package of phlalate-laden J&J products, and most curious of all - a ceramic plaque. This plaque featured a window displaying a tiny set of Sadie-footprints (which now explains why Chris told me that when he peeked into the nursery, he was certain he saw a nurse painting the soles of her feet), and most curiously, a photo of a baby.  We were not quite sure that the baby in the photo was ours, seeing as this baby's eyes were wide open, and I'd not yet seen Sadie open hers more than halfway, and for no longer than three minutes at a time. She was a very sleepy newborn. Chris remarked that maybe the nursery takes these photos at the exact moment that they startle the babies for their hearing test. Perhaps we have photographic evidence of the very first time Sadie had the bejeezus scared out of her ... 

Could I take Sadie back to my room? No, they needed to keep her in the nursery "for observing". Meanwhile, back in my room, our bill still hadn't shown up. It was 11 o'clock, and according to the hospital's policy, if I wasn't out by noon, I'd be charged for a fourth day of hospital stay.

A few more calls were made to the billing department, which probably labeled us as pesky customers. I was getting majorly twitchy as it had been over three hours since I'd fed Sadie and was certain that she was howling her little three-day-old lungs out in the nursery, irate that her lunch wasn't being immediately produced. I went over to the nursery to explain that it had been many hours since Sadie had been fed, but the nurses were insistent that she needed to stay in the nursery. Sadie wasn't actually screaming in hunger as I had imagined; she was still sleeping but the thought of the hour-long drive home with a hungry-and-awake baby was not appealing. I ended up feeding her there, surrounded by several dozen little plastic tubs containing swaddled babies both sleeping and fussing. I was suprised by how many babies were in the nursery. My guess is that Thai parents are not as into rooming-in, whereas that was the norm when I delivered Madeline in Calgary.  

Could I now take Sadie back to my room? No, she still needed "observing" but "come back when you have receipt."

Seriously? When we had a receipt? This is what for-profit healthcare is like? Hospitals take newborn babies hostage until their parent settle the bill? This concept was so weird to us, being Canadians used to cushy publicly-funded healthcare delivery. 

Finally, around half-past twelve (finally!), we were able to pay the ransom our bill, and we had a slip of paper to take to the nursery so that we could leave with Sadie. We had the carseat reasdy, and were rather surprised when Sadie appeared in the arms of a nurse, wrapped up tighter than a spicy tuna roll in a hooded blanket featuring the name of the hospital in embroidery across the top. So much for the idea of a "coming home outfit" . Thankfully, I'm not so much into stuff like that. The nurse maintained her tight grip on our baby until we were all loaded into the car, when she was finally passed to me. I then spent ten minutes trying to undo Sadie's swaddle to get her into the infant seat - they'd taped her blankets closed! 

All told, it took about five hours from start to finish to check out of Bumrungrad that day. And I really have no idea why. 

Whunting? Grining?

There is so much that Sadie wants to say these days. 

• "I want up!"
• "I want down!"
• "I want to go outside!"
• "I want to have a bath!"
• "I want inside of this locked cabinet/door!"
• "I want water - but from that cup that you are drinking from!"
• "I need to play in the sink!"
• "I want Tylenol, too!"
• "I must taste that sticker!"

The unfortunate part, though, is that she uses the exact same whine/grunt to communicate every single one of those things. 

international incidents

Sometimes I am not sure what to think about parenting in a foreign culture. There are so many things that I experience with my eyes alone, as I don't understand the language to add hearing to my level of understanding.

For example, I've been getting a weird vibe from Sadie's music class. Today there were three new toddlers in attendance, with their moms. And their nannies. I tried not to stare in curiosity, but I really didn't get it. What did those moms expect to happen during a 45 minute music class that they could not handle alone? Could they not deal with a diaper change, or a tantrum? I spent most of the class ruminating on that instead of focusing on shaking maracas. 

Also, those other toddlers pretty much sat politely in their appropriate parental laps for the entire class, while my little girl alternately would wander over to offer her drum/shaker/scarf to her instructor, investigate the row of cabinets along the wall to ensure that they were indeed locked, and well, sometimes she sat in my lap. Or near my lap.  I know that some of Sadie's interactivity is appropriate for the class, such as running over to the shaker container to drop hers in at the end of the activity, and jumping up to push the large gathering drum into it's storage cabinet (someone has to demonstrate those things, right?). But the rest of it was acting out of turn, even though it's typical toddler behavior from my own cultural perspective. Her need to explore and investigate is something that I encourage, and something that my Canadian and American friends who are parents encourage. But in Thailand? I'm not sure. The way that those other toddlers sat around and let their moms direct their hands up/down/around to emulate the instructor perfectly makes to think that Thai parents value something quite different in their toddlers.  And now I really wonder what Sadie's instructor was saying when he'd switch back to speaking Thai and be looking in her direction ...

hungry and motivated

Hey Internets! It's happened again! Last night I tucked Sadie into bed, turned on her crib aquarium and her Sleep Sheep,  and said "goodnight". Today, she's sitting in the Tripp Trapp, saying and signing "More!" because I am obviously not handing her spoons loaded with (homemade) fried rice fast enough! 

Why is it only my kids who wake up smarter in the morning? I just seem to get more absent-minded ...

hello november

We kicked off November with a day that was pretty much devoid of highlights, but there was one thing that happened that made me laugh. The girls and I were sitting on the floor and Madeline became upset about something, so I told her to come over to me for a hug. She did. And then Sadie toddled over with her arms outstretched to join in - which had not ever happened before! It was terrifically cute!

Also, this year again I am thankful that Thailand does not participate in Daylight Savings. The sun rises and sets at about the same time every single day of the year, and it makes bedtimes and waking-up times fairly smooth!

smarter/faster/stronger

I clearly remember thinking, about four years ago, that sometimes Madeline-the-toddler would wake up in the morning and be a lot smarter than she was when I put her to bed the night before. The weekend has had a very deja vu-like quality because I've seen the same thing in my newest toddler. All of the sudden, Sadie is 

• trying to put shoes and socks on her feet (and usually chooses her own shoes and socks)
• almost saying "Hello" when she plays with one of her many pretend telephones
• scooping her own yogurt and oatmeal with decent accuracy
• drawing other people into her play as she engages us in many rounds of "Peek-a-Boo"
• picking out appropriate sleepwear from her chest of drawers (okay, okay ... that one might have been a random one-off for this evening).

She's brilliant, obviously :)

day three hundred and sixty-five

It's been a month and a half since Sadie's first steps, and this week walking has overtaken crawling as her locomotion of choice. She's terribly cute, lurching herself along, looking like she is always one step away from spilling on the floor. It's quite a contrast to Madeline when she was finally walking. At fifteen (nearly sixteen) months, Madeline was considerably more graceful on her feet.

Tomorrow, at 1:14 pm in Thailand and 12:14 am in Alberta, Sadie turns one year old. We're not really doing anything big to celebrate it - there are no close friends or family here to invite over for a barbeque, she's too little to rent out The Little Gym or whack a pinata - but I hope that she'll notice the little things.  The sprinkles on the cupcakes that I iced this evening, the cheery bunting that I sewed in the evenings last week, the shiny foil balloon that I am going to make the trek into BKK to hunt down first thing in the morning ...