School Days

The kindergarten teacher at my dad's school has kindly agreed to let Olivia attend her class for a few hours a couple of days a week. Olivia loves it! The first time she went, the class was finishing up their unit on Ireland by celebrating St. Patrick's Day. Olivia got to decorate a cookie.



Olivia is also taking a gymnastics class at the school on Tuesday afternoons, so we have been spending quite a lot of time there. The girls both love playing in the park and hanging out in Nana's office. At the end of the day, vendors set up kiosks outside the school and sell everything from cheap toys to omlettes. We love getting fruit smoothies for 15 baht a piece. They are delicious and much cheaper than Booster Juice.




Olivia tells me they call this slide "the butt buster."


Isabella enjoying a smoothie in Nana's office

Today we dropped Olivia off at the kindergarten at 1:00 and took Isabella and William to a little coffee shop about five minutes off campus called Wawee Coffee. They have a nice patio in the back that looks over the Ping River. We sat and enjoyed our coffees while watching boats cruise along the river. It was very nice. I couldn't help but think about all the poor people at home enduring -35 temperatures. Today I am extra glad to be here.

Read more »

Don't worry, she's not cancerous

Read more »

Horizon Village

Read more »

Our first independent outing

We are slowly getting more independent here as we (I mean Dave) get more comfortable driving. Our maiden voyage in the Suzuki Caribbean was a trip to the pool in our neighbourhood. We made it there without incident, although we were both sweating bullets. There are a ton of t-intersections here and none of them have yield or stop signs, so when we approach one at the same time as another car, Dave calls out, "Who gets to go? Who gets to go?" over and over until it becomes apparent that the other driver intends to plow on through ahead of us.

Here we are, triumphantly visiting the pool:


Liv


William

High on the achievement of having left the house by ourselves, we decided we'd attempt ordering lunch. This actually wasn't any great achievement at all. It doesn't exactly require cajones of steel to point at listings on a menu, but we were proud of ourselves anyway. I can't say enough about how insanely delicious the food is here. I wake up in the morning dreaming of pad Thai and massive plates of steamed vegetables. At the pool we ordered three bottles of Fanta and two huge plates of fried rice with chicken, and our total came to $3.80. I think it's safe to assume we won't be losing any weight while we're living here!


Liv enjoying her Fanta


Bella, who is now battling a severe Fanta addiction

Read more »

Hungry?

Dave and I had a great time in the grocery store the other night. My parents came along to help us. I think my mom was embarrassed to be with the crazy foreigners snapping pictures in the produce section.

For all those times when you're craving a snack and only a single carrot will do:



Not too much I can say about this except "ew":

Read more »

Parking lot aerobics

This was in the parking lot of our grocery store the other night:

Read more »

Trip to the Bua Tong waterfall

On Saturday we drove about 50 km out of the city to visit the Bua Tong waterfall. I felt like crap because I have come down with mastitis, but thanks to a little DIY medical diagnosis and treatment, all I had to do was waltz into a pharmacy and pick out the antibiotic I wanted, so between that and some ibuprofen, I felt well enough to do some waterfall trekking.

The rock at this waterfall is limestone, so it's not at all slippery. It's really neat; it feels sort of like it is gripping your feet when you step on it. The kids could walk around without falling, and they really enjoyed themselves.


Dave and Isabella


Olivia and my dad


Isabella

I remember reading in a book about Thai culture that Thais love children, but I had no idea how true it was until we got here. As soon as we arrived in the Bangkok airport, the mobbing started. Everywhere we go, people come rushing over to see our kids. It's like the kids are celebrities. People will just stop what they're doing to watch them or come over and chat away to them in Thai. And when they see the baby in his sling, it's on. I think the only thing Thais like more than children is babies. People go crazy over him. It's really cool. Very different from home.

While we were at the waterfall, Dave and the kids went over to swim in this little pond:


Liv and Bella

I stayed behind to nurse the baby. At one point I looked over and there was a huge crowd of people around the pond. Sure enough, it was a group of Thai people taking pictures of the girls. This group of Thai kids asked if they could take a picture with Bella and Liv:



Think my girls are going to be bummed out when they get home and the paparazzi stop following them?

Read more »

We're here! And the trip didn't kill us!

We arrived in Chiang Mai yesterday around 3 o'clock in the afternoon. The trip went amazingly smoothly. Having had six months to mentally build it up into an impeding nightmare of epic proportions, I was very pleasantly surprised by how easy it turned out to be.

We started out on a flight from Edmonton to Seattle at 6:40 AM. The flight wasn't full, so they gave us an empty seat and we were able to put the baby's carseat in it so that I wouldn't have to hold him the entire time. The girls were psyched but tired. Dave and Olivia were sitting a few rows up, I was further back with William, and Isabella was right across the aisle from me. Both William and Isabella fell asleep minutes into the flight and stayed sleeping for the entire two hours. I took it as a good omen, and it was!

The only part of the trip that really sucked was the layover in Seattle. We had over six hours to kill there, and it was insanely boring. First we ate at Wendy's and watched planes take off for awhile, then we wondered around and browsed a few stores. We were thrilled to discover a kids' play area that was really cool, but even the coolest park ever isn't going to occupy a kid for six hours.


Olivia in the Seattle airport


The play park

When we finally boarded our flight to Korea, we were pleasantly surprised by two things -- first, how nice the plane was, and second, by the fact that the flight was only 11 hours long, not 15 like I had previously thought. Korean Air is an excellent airline, and I would not hesitate to fly with them again. We were given the bulkhead row, which has an attachment on the wall for putting up a baby bassinet. This was a real lifesaver for my arms, as I didn't have to hold the baby all the time. We all had individual TV screens on our seats, and there were tons and tons of shows and movies to watch on demand. Olivia watched High School Musical 2, and Bella watched Ratatouille and Shrek the Third. They had so much fun with their little TVs that we didn't even have to get anything out of the carry-on I had painstakingly packed with a million different things for them to play with.

Eleven hours is a pretty freaking long time, but it passed relatively quickly and pleasantly. We were all exhausted when we reached Seoul, and none of us were looking forward to boarding yet another flight. As it turned out, the last flight was the easiest of all because we were so tired we slept for almost the entire thing. We landed in Bangkok at around 1 AM, and after going through customs (a breeze) and retrieving our bags, we made our way outside, got into a shuttle van, and were at our hotel about five minutes later. The hotel was incredibly beautiful, and we were sorry we had such a short time to spend there.


The hotel


The pool at the hotel


Cuddling

We all bathed and showered before crashing, and we were awakened six hours later by a very peeved Isabella crying at the top of her lungs. It was highly annoying, and we were all very tired as well as starving. Not a nice awakening at all, and both Dave and I were thinking that right then we would have gladly traded Isabella for a cheese pizza.

We gathered up all of our many bags and carseats, and it was back to the airport for the final time. After checking in for our flight to Chiang Mai, we ate some delicious Thai food at a really cool food court (and paid $3 per can for Diet Pepsi!!). Our flight was an hour late, but it really didn't matter. The flight was only about an hour long, so it was nothing. We got the bulkhead row again, so we had a ton of legroom, and the customer service on Thai airways is excellent. We saw my parents waiting for us as we were standing around the baggage carousel, and there was a lot of excitement all around.

I can't believe we're here! This is going to be amazing.


The view from our balcony

Read more »

How do you pack for five months?

We are leaving in eight days, and since we're definitely not getting much use out of our summer clothes in this arctic climate, we figured we might as well start packing. It's proving to be a more difficult task than we originally anticipated. How much stuff do we really need to bring? There are quite a few unknowns: what size will William be in a couple of months? When will I stop looking four months pregnant and be able to fit into my regular clothes? Do our daughters really need four bathing suits and six pairs of shoes each? They would argue that they do.

We like to keep things as simple as possible, and even though our baggage allowance would allow us to bring a total of six checked items, we are thinking about attempting to get all our stuff into one smallish suitcase and one hockey bag. Maybe that's crazy, but in my mind the less stuff we have to drag around various airports the better. Dave is currently downstairs lovingly handwashing his hockey bag and treating it to a nice fabric-softener rinse. I believe he is even blowing it dry as I type. We'll see if this works.

Read more »