I think I have some plant DNA, though.

This was a good moment. A little writing with a banana chai cocoa smoothie and a piece of raw chocolate cake. Chocolate!

I want to say thank you for your kind words and prayers, my beautiful readers and friends. I wrote on a day that I was feeling rather bleak and overworked, and as the days grow better and we move forward, I feel lighter and less afraid. We will probably send Chinua to Bangkok to get some more tests done, just to rule out any other causes of such a huge spike in blood pressure, and for how he’s holding steady. He's feeling a little better each day, exercising a bit more, doing more. 

I feel (mostly) at peace with my bigger role in our family right now, while Chinua still needs a lot of rest and is unable to do the caregiving. Today was a bit rough, partly because the person whom I would normally turn to when I need to offload a bit of stress is the same person who cannot deal with any stress at all. I realize that I am not very good at taking care of my own self, that I rely on him to talk me through things a lot. And yet, there is peace. It is the grace of God. Perhaps it is also because the rains have come and our ground is drinking them in. Soon the haze will be gone and the mountains will be clear and close. Every shade of green will leap out of the earth. I love the rainy season.

I’ve also come up with a scheme for painting, which is to set my easel up in the main room in the morning and try to catch a few minutes here and there throughout the day, around school and food and toddler-babies who drink from puddles after the rain. (While lying on their stomachs and putting their faces into the aforementioned puddles.) 

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I’m a little baffled by the fact that although my kids haven’t really had much outside influence lately, they are as obsessed with Frozen as the rest of the world. They haven’t been clicking around the Internet and seeing all the Let It Go parodies that are out there. But they are constantly asking to watch the songs on Youtube and they have memorized them and they skip around our bamboo trimmed meditation space singing, “Do you want to build a Snowman?” It must be a sign of some really well written songs, and I especially believe this because my oldest son, who hates musicals and any kind of romance, was the one who wanted to show me Let It Go, because “It’s actually a really cool song.” It’s intriguing to me because on Twitter I’m reading about people’s kids singing Frozen songs, and then in my life, my kids are singing the songs (the last song they memorized together was the Dwarves song from the Hobbit… “To Dungeons deep and Caverns old…”) and then I’m walking in the mall in Thailand and a tiny Thai girl, four or five years old, walks by singing Let It Go, and I wonder what makes something so infectious that even people who are out of the center of the fad are caught up in it? Also, Leafy does great Olaf impressions. 

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And since we are talking about my kids, here are two quotes for you from Kenya: 

Kenya: "You know, a snuggler fish?"

Me: "A what?"

Kenya: "What is it? A cutie fish?"

Me: "You mean a cuttlefish?"

Kenya: "Yeah! A cuddlefish!"

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Kenya: "Don’t you wish that you had bird DNA in you, so that I was born with hollow bones and wings and I could fly??

Me: "I can’t say that I have ever thought about it or wished for it, no."