a little holiday

It was with some trepidition that the entire family recently took off on a holiday a few weeks ago. Princess and Thor were stoked that this trip involved an airplane and Sweetpea had the priviledge of taking her first flight at the tender age of 7 weeks. I was suitably impressed to find an air-conditioned taxi (and even with seatbelts!) when we arrived on the other end.

During the first few days of our holiday, the kids made new friends while hubby and I renewed old acquaintences. As much as we enjoy these times, social gatherings in this country often involve late meals, late nights, and lots of things that kids find boring. Fortunately, that's not always the case.

entertainment often takes a different form in our new country

One family invited us to tea and we arrived to find their house expanded to accommodate livestock. While this may be odd to those of you reading from overseas, Princess and Thor found it suitably entertaining. Unfortunately, in his enthusiasm to capture the moment, hubby gave mommy buffalo a bit of a startle. Thor was unimpressed by her rapid movement and snorting and nothing we could say would convince him to approach aforementioned cattle again. That didn't keep him from giving the chickens a thorough check, though.

Oh, and notice the long curls. Just two days ago we finally got the courage to take our screaming little bundle of humanity to the local barber. When hubby returned, I asked how it went. He looked surprised and asked if I had heard it from the house! His only other comment was, 'he didn't scream.' And as there were no stab wounds on Thor's head, I am pretty satisfied.

Summer has come - well - officially it hasn't , but don't you think 39C/100F qualifies? I do. To maintain wifely and maternal sanity, we went shopping today and purchased baby monitors. This is so I can run the AC in our room and still hear small children yelping for water, mossie/mosquito itch cream, or ducky. Then we went swimming - another sanity saver. Sweatpea promoted the process by sleeping

a pre-summer snooze

through the entire swim - enabling mommy to come out with a body temperature somewhat below 100F.

So how do we know it's hot? Besides sweating and drinking gallons of water? Well, I had a fever last weekend, but aside from the body aches, it was enjoyable to feel a bit cool! Yesterday, Thor and Sweatpea were not fully dressed. Thor was running around in swimmers sans t-shirt and Sweatpea just had her nappy on. On observing this, our language teacher wanted to know what we were going to do when it got hot if we already had our children naked now? I really don't want to contemplate it!


Of course, at least the weather hasn't been as hot as our AC sleeper compartment during the train trip on our holiday. Yes, you understand right. AC stands for Air Conditioned. Or so we thought. On the first leg of our trip, we found it stood for Airless Closet. As we took off from the station, the electricity in our carriage went out and we discovered that the power generator didn't get attached until the NEXT station. Unfortunately, when they went to attach it, the generator didn't work. After much to-ing and fro-ing, they transferred us to another train (and thankfully found a private compartment for us). Despite the time (midnight), the kids were great and mommy only had a small mental breakdown.

But back to our holiday. The next attraction was an overnight train trip. No DVD player required because little Thor had his nose pressed to the train window for at least half the trip.

Entertainment on our new 'flat screen' TV

Cries of "Look mommy, a mountain" (time to visit the Rockies, Himalayas, or Snowy Mountains as this rise in geography struggled to be called a hill ) or "DONKEY!" kept us all entertained.

Not to be outdone, our return train trip contained its own form of railway excitement. As we pulled out of the second stop on our journey (kids all asleep) we felt a tremendous jolt and heard a major clunk. This was rapidly followed by complete cessation of movement and a rather noticable gathering of men around our carriage.

Everyone has an opinion . . . or a hammer

In this country, women don't really spend much time in male-dominated areas. So, like a good wife, I sent hubby out to investigate the situation. He came back rather promptly to inform me that our previously 20 carriage train had now become a 6 carriage train - and we were the new caboose! 45 minutes of hammering noises later, we were on our way again. I only lost a little sleep that night waiting for the train the 'break' again causing a massive derailment . . . but I digress.


So in between train trips, what did we do? We made new friends and went swimming with them,

recipe for fun: to summer add a generous portion of water and a few sweating children

went to the 'airplane park' with some more new friends and generally had a great time. Hubby and I also hope that this trip has served to correct some of the rather skewed perceptions Princess has about life. As we left for the airport this time, Princess asked Hubby where our new house would be and would we be taking our things with us? It's at this point that we realized maybe we've moved a bit TOO much in her life.