Teething. Oy vey.

Lots of crying from older kids who maybe are a little under the weather?  Man oh man.

Deep, sweet, and difficult conversation with a friend on the beach, watching the light turn from yellow to gold to bronze on her face as the sun makes its way down.  Hurting for her.  Jeez oh Pete.

More teething. Great Scot!

Missing my Dad on his 60th birthday.  For crying out loud in the sink.

Putting off laundry and the other things on my to do list, thus making my morning just a little more chaotic tomorrow.  Jeepers.

Three ice cream bars.  Oh, snap.

The pomegranate was perfect. Hallelujah.

Goodnight all.  Tomorrow is new forever.

You turned four months old a while ago, and ever since, I’ve been thinking about what I want to write to you.

First of all, Hello! Slow Down! Four months already. Jeez.

But that said, oh oh oh, I love four months.

Four months is I like it here. I think I’ll hang out a bit, check things out, open my hands instead of gripping them closed.

Four months is Trying to grab that… if I could just get a… little… closer… missed it again… must try… harder…

Four months is kick kick kick SMILE kick kick kick SMILE! And Hey! Where’d everybody go?

And Oh I love you I love you I love you.

Your eyes are eyes of healing, son. You look at us, and not one of us can keep from melting. Especially the women in the family. Of course I stare at you for hours on end, and my greatest moments are the ones where you smile at me, but I’m not the only female drawn into your deep eyes. YaYa runs to you as soon as she wakes up in the morning. She lies beside you and the two of you speak fathoms of sibling love to each other. Then Kid A comes over and gets mad. “YaYa’s attracting him away from me,” he says. We all want your smiles and your attention.

Leafy loves you too. He has nothing but goodness for you. I’m always amazed by his gentleness towards you, this rough and tumble brother of yours. But there seems to be no end to the good a baby brings to a family, the comfort of a sleeping baby in our arms, the fun of seeing you watching us more and more every day.

You’ve been talking, a lot lately. Often when you cry you vocalize frantically. You’re saying baby words, the kind that demand a reply. You communicate with utter gravity. There is an exchange in the world, of heart and response and already you know it, already you are diving in.

Here’s a secret. Don’t tell anyone. You are a drooler, just like your older brother Leafy. The Leafy boy had wet shirts for the first two and a half years of his life, but something your Daddy and I have just realized now is that a drooly baby can be used as a weapon. Forgive me son, but I often move your little face close to Daddy’s face and say, “Here, give Daddy a kiss,” and then he says ARGGGHHHH, as his entire face is covered in drool. Heh heh. It’s really funny. Maybe one day you’ll try it with children of your own?

I just love you at four months, little one. I can’t wait to know you more and more.

(After I published this I looked up Leafy’s four month post. Note that he has the SAME FACE as Solo.  Also that drool is a big factor in that post also.)

I’m exhausted. My brain fluid is leaking out through my elbows, that’s how exhausted I am. Did you know that it could do that? Neither did I.

Also, there’s something underneath my left shift key. I’m pretty sure it’s a dead ant. And I don’t use my right shift key, which my eighth grade Grade Eight (Canada, yo!) computer teacher would hate. It makes writing a bit annoying.

Also, there are people bathing at the well outside my window. Sometimes my life feels very strange.

Why am I exhausted, you ask? (Thanks for asking, by the way.) It’s because teething has begun, and last night by the time I got to sleep the bread walla was already riding by on his bicycle. Which means it was about 6:00 AM. Not good, my friends, not good. But I’m hoping to sleep better tonight, because of the TYLENOL I gave my hurting son. My philosophy on baby meds is this: Sanity. Let me repeat that. Sanity. For both of us. It is for the greater good that we remain sane.

We spent the night at the house of some friends, (I avoided an awkward apostrophe moment with the way I worded that sentence) and wow, these friends are beautiful. The husband is French and the wife is Italian, and they have kids that match YaYa and Leafy in age. So sweet. The woman, I’ll call her S, is one of the loveliest and most joyful people that I’ve had the privilege of knowing. The kids all slept in a row in the great room, and S threw them each a flower before they went to sleep. I watched as her daughter spread the petals of her flower all over her bed and then lay down on them to go to sleep. (!)

The last eight months have been a study in cultural adjustment for me, and since the community here is so International, it’s like a UN study of culture adjustment or something. I’ve met people from Slovania, from the Ukraine, from Portugal, Korea, Iraq, Iran, of course Israel, countless Russians, people from Denmark and Belgium and Finland and Germany, people from all the corners of the UK, and the other day I met a couple from Luxembourg. They spoke Luxembourgish. It’s a recognized language now, though it used to be considered a dialect- a particular mix of German and French.

But get this. 200,000 people speak it. 200,000. That’s like Yonkers, New York; Providence, Rhode Island; Huntsville, Alabama; OR Dayton, Ohio deciding to speak their own language. Just one of those cities. The world is a cool place.

But so, there we were, our European friends and us, and we had decided to wait until after the kids had eaten to eat our own food. We do this because we like to enjoy our food, just one out of a hundred times. But YaYa didn’t want to eat her fish, so I picked up her plate and polished it off for her. S entered the room and said, “Oh no no, Rachelle! Not like this!” Because we were setting the table with champagne and candles, not eating our children’s leftovers for dinner.

And once again I made the great North American gaffe of being overly casual. Like waving goodbye (K, Bye!) instead of kissing. Or standing when you eat. Or shutting the lights off while you say to your kids, “Goodnight! If I hear any noise out of there I’m coming in and smacking people indiscriminately!!!” (Not that I ever say that.)

I mean, who’s to say that my way of putting my kids to bed isn’t just as sweet as throwing flowers at your children? Ahem. (Cough.) Well? Who’s to say?

Oh dang. Maybe if I’m really good, one day I’ll get to be European. But then who will make potty jokes with Chinua? I guess I’ll just stay me.

Do you like the new digs?  I felt like I needed a new way to care for my posting here.  Does that sound strange?  It’s sort of a New Year’s blog resolution, or something.  A new face.

I designed a new banner, too, but got lost in the coding trying to figure out how to override the current header.  Finally I said, ENOUGH WITH THE CODING!  And that was that.   Someday I will dive back in.

Another bit of New Year’s blogging resolution is my realization that I simply don’t have the type of brain that will allow me to carry two blogs along.  And so Chinua and I are parting ways in the blogosphere.  He will be continuing with Fly Fishes Fly and I will amble along over here.  I can’t say that it is permanent, but I am very determined that my novel will live, and that’s another reason to clear space in my two minutes of writing time per day.

Last night, driving home in the dark, I entered into a new level of long-suffering.  We had gone for a check up of Kid A’s thumb, and after dealing with the sexist joking of the (otherwise very kind) plastic surgeon–”You want your thumb to work properly, don’t you?  So you can keep your mother under it?  (!)  And your wife.”(!!)–we stopped at the playground for a while.  I mused about the fact that I had been a little depressed by the playground when we first arrived.   It was too much of a leap from the playgrounds in Sacramento, and even the playgrounds in Turkey and Israel.  But there we were, yesterday, and all I could think of was how nice it was for the kids to climb on the jungle gyms.

The sun was heading on its way when we started the hour and a half drive back home, and we were in for it.

Crying children, Leafy slapping people, darkness and people who drive with their brights on, dogs running in the street, cows wandering (you never know when they’ll walk in front of your vehicle), men and women walking in the middle of the road, only visible when your headlights hit them, roads with potholes the size of craters, roads the width of one small vehicle, buses passing and driving you off the road, gearing down, gearing up…

It’s almost too much.  Did I mention that I was driving?

But we pull lessons out of everything, like those pieces of paper at the top of a Hershey’s Kiss.  And the drive, though harrowing, didn’t last forever.  At last the kids were in bed.  At last I was no longer squinting to see whether a person would show up two feet away from my vehicle, looming out of the darkness.

At last I could rest.

I hope you can rest, now, on this last day of the year.  

Blessings for the New Year, dear friends.

Love,

Rae

Our calendars are still available, and I’ve put them on sale, since we’re so close to the New Year.

The money from the sale of any more calendars that we sell will go towards our curriculum purchases for about the next year and a half. I think that if I sold about 120 of them, I would have all I need for all of the kids. Including Solo, because we are enriching his brain with egg whites and charts of the periodic table.

Just kidding.

Selling 120 is kind of a long shot. But for those of you who would like to see bright photography of our travels, you can buy the 2009 calendar here. Enjoy!

There are some definite perks to having a family that right now is a bit like Romper Room, and there are some definite drawbacks. One thing about having four children, the oldest of whom is six, and being a homeschooler to boot, is that the moment you turn your head from the dear darling angels, they turn into beasts.

You turn back to them, in shock, unable to comprehend that in four minutes of your inattention they have poured sand into everyone’s hair and spread mashed potatoes over the floor, but it’s true. They really have. Or they have gone and slapped each other and everyone is crying.

Leafy is doing this screamy thing lately, mostly to protect himself and his things from his sweet, strong, and controlling older sister, and his sweet, strong, and domineering older brother, and the sound that he makes causes me to immediately walk out of the room so that I can flush my head down the toilet.

I can’t bear the screamy thing.

The worst form of inattention in my house seems to be Mama’s computer time. Can I get an amen? Because the minute, the very second, that my eyeballs focus themselves on the screen, all of Pompeii erupts in my house and I’m too fragile for Pompeii.

So, I’ve limited computer time to 1) The two seconds that I’m awake before the children are, and I’m thinking, YES, I’m up! They’re not! I’m UP! They’re NO… Oh dang. 2) The two seconds that I manage to stay awake after they go to bed, and 3) Studio time, which is for my novel, and occasionally a blog post. Occasionally. Also 4) the very occasional internet glut, which happens when Chinua asks me if I’d like some time off and I don’t feel the ticker going, telling me to write, write, write. This is the time that I read blog posts, when I get to read them at all.

And when large holidays loom up before us like wildebeests coming out of the mud, those four seconds before the day and after the day are taken up by wrapping and cleaning. Nothing for it, wrapping and cleaning must occur.

This is all a big buildup to say that I didn’t die, neither did my fingers become paralyzed. I did take an only partially voluntary break from the internet.

What’s been going on is Christmas, and giving, and the reading of Christmas stories, and celebrating, the the requisite Christmas cry (I have to cry on Christmas Day, it’s a tradition) and a Christmas party in our backyard which is a little farther along from looking like a construction site, and paper stars with lights in them, Goan style, and wow- we’ve been busy.

I know. I’m all, poor me, I’m forced to actually interact with my children and play games with them, rather than do fun grown-up things like obsess about the yarns I cannot buy and stalk knitters on the internet. Also crafters, although I’ve decided to stop imagining that I am a crafter.

I had to drive to the capital, Panaji, to do my Christmas shopping, which I did for the kids in a tiny toy store with approximately four hundred people who were packed shoulder to shoulder. I sweated and wept, because I hate buying things that are cheap and I had very few choices, but in the end I’m happy with what we got.

Then, yesterday, I decided to make samosas for our Christmas Party, and ended up finishing with a pan of delicious samosas and a vow to never enter the kitchen again in my life. That’s my M.O. Burn yourself out with silly pastry-type foods for large parties.

Anyhow. We all cope in varying ways, and I’m recovering from Christmas (which was actually very small and perfect, although sad because we were far from family) by looking through silly photos of my family. Take this one, for example:

It would be fine, except for the fact that the YaYa Sister is having a moment of crisis.

Or this one:

This one is great. Except that Yaya is still in crisis, Leafy has joined her, Kid A is a little too happy, I look like I’m sharing some cheesy joke with you, and why is everyone barefoot? Also, what is happening to Chinua’s hand?

Or here:

YaYa and Leafy have seen the silver lining behind the dark cloud,  but now Chinua is sharing a cheesy joke and Kid A is facing a direction called AWAY FROM THE CAMERA, and what is happening to my hand?

Or Exhibit D:

Mama’s smiling a little too big, Daddy looks like he doesn’t wan to be there, Leafy’s doing his best Magnum, and Kid A has gone GQ on us. YaYa? Can we get a normal smile? Please?

But here’s a shot of Uncle Matty with a stroller.

And here’s one of some ladies with sticks on their heads.

And here’s one of Matty with some fruit. This is the fruit and veggie stall that I go to almost every day, and when they realized that Matty was gone, back to Canada for good, or at least for a long while, I could have sworn that they all took their hats off and laid them over their hearts. But that could have just been my imagination.

Yes, this has really helped me to cope with my post-Christmas blues.

She still doesn’t have the Christmas thing together at all. Year after year, it’s messed up.

I think she’s doing a pretty good job, really, all things considered.

A good job of what? She hasn’t prepared anything.

Well, how would you do, trying to prepare for a holiday when you’re in a new country and you don’t even know where to get the things you need?

It’s not really just that, though. Have you noticed how she’s dropping all the balls? The thin strands that she grasps to hold her relationships together, the emails going unreplied, the way she knows the phone calls that she should be making– but still doesn’t make them.

Is unreplied even a word?

You know what I mean. Don’t pretend you haven’t seen it. She doesn’t send photos out, she hasn’t done Christmas cards this year. She’s just irresponsible. I saw dirt in her baby’s ear the other day.

She’s so young, though.

Not that young. Wasn’t she supposed to publish a book by twenty-five? HA! How’s that going for her?

Wasn’t that your stupid idea? You told her that youth was some sort of competition. She’s too smart for that now. She knows about the body of work that she will gradually add to, all of her life. There is no need to be a prodigy, no need for fame. Just page after page, added to a pile, like leaves in an old book, crumbling slightly because they’ve been read over so many precious times.

It’s a pretty small pile, at this point.

But zoom out, and all of her children are part of her body of work, and zoom out again, and all of those relationships (which are not held together by anything as flimsy as threads, regardless of what you mistakenly believe) are part of the body of work, and then come back even farther and you can see that every dish washed clean in a late night sink, every old smile held on by sheer willpower, all of these are a part of a majestic body of work. By the time she dies it will be higher than the tallest trees.

But she can never keep up! All of those late night dishes are in danger of falling over and crushing her, and her laundry is never clean and there are all of those emails that go unanswered. She knows that she needs to do these things, but she’s always failing, she’s always so far behind. I saw her lying in bed this morning, when she knew she should get up and start working.

She was watching the wind move the trees.

She knew she should get up, though.

Yes, but isn’t there a lot more to life than your to-do lists? You always talk about owing– she owes a lot more than work. She owes delight, she owes noticing, she owes attention and laughter and listening to that rustling of the wind in the coconut trees and sitting on the floor memorizing the faces of her children.

I’ve lost you.

That’s because you’re losing her. She won’t let you mess with her forever.  She won’t listen to you anymore. She’d rather watch the wind.

Well, I did cry pretty hard before Matty left.

I sort of fell apart.

But then I got in the taxi to go with him to the airport.

We talked along the way.  I have a good brother.

On the way home I thought a lot about life, and how we find ourselves in places that are unexpected.

I thought about moving.  I thought about quiet, and peace, and about joyous chaos, which seems to be the state of my life, lately.

I thought about how isolated it makes me feel when people react as though I have two heads when they see how many children I have.  And then I thought about how much I love my brother- how it felt like a chunk of me was going to sleep again when he went away, and I thought about YaYa feeling that way about Kid A or Leafy or Solo when she’s older.

Suddenly everything seemed right again.

The shape of the sun’s light inspired me, and I worked on my book a bit, in the quiet car as we drove the long drive to get home.

We meditated on this verse yesterday morning:

You will keep him in perfect peace,

whose mind is stayed on You,

because he trusts in You.

Trust in the Lord forever,

for in YAH, the Lord, is everlasting strength.

Isaiah 26:3 and 4

I could sit and let these words sing through me all day long.

1. I spent two glorious sessions in the studio and have not been back since. I forget why. Guests, or something. Oh yes, dear visiting friends and frolics and gallops and wriggles. But those days were so life-giving to me that they must become part of my daily routine, by hook or by crook. It’s funny how much I can get done in an hour and a half with no interruptions or unfolded laundry staring at me.

I WILL write this book.

2. You know we are under terrorist threat over here, don’t you? The two big bazaars have been shut down, here in Goa. There is a Saturday Night Bazaar and the Anjuna Flea Market, and both are on hold until after New Year’s. Bummer. That always feels like they’re winning. A lot of people count on those markets for their income.

I’m horrified to imagine Goan people (some of the kindest, sweetest people in the world) or other Indian people or Westerners getting hurt. But I’m not afraid. This is because of the lessons I received last year.

Tomorrow I will write about the lessons. They bear repeating.

3. Though I can’t claim a super amount of empathy for the masterminds behind terrorism, my heart always bleeds for the gunmen/suicide bombers/whateverwhatevers. These poor young guys with no jobs who are picked up and brainwashed and sent out with weapons. And then boom and flash and it’s over.

4. I am bringing Kid A to see a plastic surgeon on Tuesday. He may need another operation to get the use of his thumb back. Where? When? These are the great mysteries. I don’t know how to communicate how I feel about the way my son’s little hand was worked on in that terrible hospital, but angry and sad and guilty are some words that I could use. However, life goes on and so do we and he is brilliant and blossoming, so all is well. We’ll fix this. Pray for us.

5. Yesterday Matty helped us take a family photo. Har har har. You have: six-year-olds and their funny face tics, four-year-olds and their lack of understanding about what “smile” means, two-year-olds and unnatural seriousness, a baby whose head wobbles every which way, and a Mama and Daddy who are opposite in coloring.  I’ll show the results soon.

6. Matty leaves today. Oh the pain. It has been the best visit we have ever had, which is a special gift that I did not expect of moving to India. Lara, you done a good and unselfish thing by giving him up for a month.

7. Sometimes, in the midst of the dust and heat and work here, there are moments so crystalline, so lovely, so breathtaking, that I almost sit down and cry. I love it here. Sometimes missing my friends and family gets to be unbearable, but that is the moment when the breeze brings me the fragrance of jasmine, or the moment when I walk out into the waves holding my daughter and she turns her wet salty face up to me and tells me she loves me.

8. My other studio is my kitchen, and I’ve been cooking up a storm. Yesterday I walked down to the beach first thing in the morning and bought prawns from one of the fishermen who was folding his nets. The gentleness of the early sun on his face was exquisite. My husband brought me a coconut, and I spent the morning making a prawn curry with rice and chapattis and we had people over to eat it with us.