For the love of bathtubs (and carpet!)

Day 24:

Okay, so my allergy prone self doesn't really love carpet, but when you haven't seen it in a year, it feels nice to walk on.

So, where in Thailand, on short notice, am I enjoying a bathtub AND carpet...I'll get to that later, but I don't want to get out of sequence. I have at least two cousins of mine that are quite infamous for reading the endings of books first and opening their Christmas presents early and re-wrapping them.  Spoil sports!  Patience...in due time...

Yesterday, I didn't post about my day to day happenings, but I was thankfully feeling much better.  It was so nice to get out of the house for lunch, catch up on a lot of housework, and do "normal" things...as if any thing I do is actually "normal", fairly certain that ship has sailed. I think my brained was wired uniquely, like they broke the mold, and not in a good way.  I'm always walking places and forgetting why I'm there, I almost put bleach in my fabric softener drawer in the washing machine and I most definitely was NOT washing whites.  I've also, stubbed my toe, shocked myself AGAIN with the kitchen aid, made a second and epically upsetting batch of bread-splosion, and nearly fallen at least 3 times just in the last couple days.  Doug teases me about needing a 24/7 caretaker, but sometimes it's a little too close to the truth. 

So, good day yesterday, in fact in the evening Kees saw me filling ice trays and wanted to make colored ice again. It's been a while since we've done that, before we moved to our new place in fact.  I finally tracked down my food colorings after a very disappointing incident where I had 4 extra eager kiddos at our house ready to paint popcorn with sweet condensed milk in various colors only to realize I had misplaced the colors, we ended up with just brown..by adding cocoa.  They were such good sports about it, but I felt so bad I couldn't find the food colorings.  About 2 weeks after that happened, I now have possession of the colors, but not the dropper I usually use.  The first time Kees and I made colored ice, I put too much color in the water and it was more messy than it needed to be, so I had been using a dropper to just put a tiny bit.  We put the ice in the shower, watch it melt, and talk about what colors combine to make new colors (like red and blue make purple...I'm blonde sometimes I wish people would spell things out, I hope I'm not insulting your intelligence, just trying to be clear...when I read this next week I may not understand it...).  So Kees woke up about 2 hours earlier then usual and kept mumbling, I want to crack the ice, is it time to crack the ice.  By some mother miracle magic, I convinced him to sleep another  hour and a half. Love that boy, then we cracked half the ice in to the tub, realized we'd die of starvation if we didn't eat, put the other half back in the fridge, ate breakfast, and then cracked the rest.  My kids are so fun.  I love being a mom, seriously it's one of the best "jobs" in the world.  Many days I wish it was my only job because it makes sense and most days it feels like it can be scheduled and organized.  When I have a bad mothering day, I can easily trouble shoot how to try harder and do better the next day. (I have some dangling thoughts about language that I'm processing through right now, I'm not convinced I'm in the best frame of mind to share those now, but that's what this paragraph was segueing to, so more on that another day...)

While the kids were finishing up with bath time, I studied Thai with Kruu Jeab. Today was my first day of new lessons and I had planned this one out.  It was fun!  The time went by really fast and I'm hoping it will bring a lot of things together in my mind.

Speaking of Thai, Doug has his evaluation coming up next week on Monday and Tuesday.  We discussed this morning what all he'd need to do to get ready for it and he has quite a bit of "office" hours to put in...meaning the rest of this week and this weekend will be spent working on paperwork that goes along with his evaluation.  Our life is so weird.  We are work from home parents in a sense, but that doesn't mean Doug puts in any less hours, it just means he keeps very odd "office" hours. And it's sometimes hard for him to get long stretches of time to process all the information he's gathered because of our hectic lives. But every 6 months or so, at evaluation time, it becomes important to have a big chunk of quiet time to pull it all together in a sense.  Doug will do a self evaluation and answer culture questions that require a lot of in depth thinking, and he has to get all his thoughts prepared to discuss with our consultant at the evaluation.  I was thinking to myself how much I wish I could just pack up the kids and take them away to Gramee and Grampa's for the weekend so Doug could prepare and have the time he needs to get it all done and done well.  And wouldn't you know, my friend Alicia, who lives in our neighborhood, sent me a message about needing to stay at hotel for a night or two since her air was out.  I jokingly told Doug, "Hey, I should pack up the kids and take them to a hotel too, we could swim and get out of your hair while you get ready for your evaluation."  But then I started thinking about it, and it actually made good sense.  We even have reward points leftover on the website we usually book with and it covered the cost. (And p.s. it's $17 a night even without points...craziness!).

We got here around 5, we'll stay 2 nights, we picked a place close to the famous Night Bazaar and I'm excited to get lots of fun "culture" pictures for you all tomorrow night when we shop.  Tonight we just grabbed dinner and came back to our rooms to enjoy air conditioning!  Did I mention the hotel includes free breakfast and has a bathtub!  We haven't had a bathtub in either of our houses here in Thailand, and most hotels we've stayed in don't have them.  I wasn't expecting there to be one here, but was so excited when I found it!

And my Francis Chan quote of the day, which I actually really needed to hear is: “Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don't really matter.”