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...

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Don't worry, she's not cancerous

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Horizon Village

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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:LivWilliamHigh 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...

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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 "e...

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Parking lot aerobics

This was in the parking lot of our grocery store the other nig...

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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 dadIsabellaI remember reading in a book about Thai culture that Thais love children, but I had no idea how true it was...

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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....

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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....

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