How it goes.

You guys are so picky. I give you photos of pillows, and it's not enough. You need a baby.

I'll kill the suspense and say, nope. There won't be pictures of a gorgeous baby in this post either. I know. I've adjusted and moved on. I really thought it was going to happen quickly, that I would arrive in Chiang Mai and boop! Out comes a baby. But we're playing the waiting game.

Here's where I'm a lot more mature than I was ten years ago, waiting for Kid A at the tender age of twenty-two. I cried about it. I barely restrained my irritation with our housemates when they would breathe too loudly or talk or exist. I got my hopes up and then dashed innumerable times. Because I putz around for weeks, having contractions, ceasing to have contractions, and so on and so forth. It's how I do labor. Everyone has their special way. This is mine. (Grrrrrr...)

Of course at the end it doesn't help that one gets daily more uncomfortable. I was telling my friend Leaf that it feels like I have the opposite of a corset. My ribs hurt, they're being pushed out from the inside. My back is out and by the second half of the day there is no position in the known universe that feels comfortable.

But I'm calm about it. That's what it means to be thirty-two. In my life anyways. My new line of logic is that there's no cause to get dramatic. "Don't get dramatic about it," I tell myself as I drive along on my scooter (which I'm still driving). "It's a baby. It will come out."

Speaking of being over thirty, the other day I was on the bus from Chiang Mai to Pai (of course- I spend a lot of time on that bus) and I was talking to a couple of girls who were twenty-one and twenty-two, respectively.

"Just wait till you hit thirty," I said, probably for no reason. "You'll love it. All your angst and self loathing will disappear."

They looked at me like, Who said we had trouble being twenty? We're having the time of our lives, traveling the world, you wrinkly-eyed mad woman.

Is it too much to assume that everyone struggles with anxiety disorder and many babies in a few years and too little money and self loathing in their early twenties? Yes? Hmmm.

So anyways, here we are, and I was telling Chinua that the place where we're staying is such a perfect place to be when you are expecting a baby. There are two families, one with four children and the other with a children's home, so they have ten kids. Then there are ours, and this is just child heaven. The trees are ripe with children, they are falling from the branches.

The couple who are fostering eight kids were commenting on my kids the other night. Everyone had cake and my kids asked for more. "Oh I get it," they told me. "Your kids come from a small family, so have the idea in their minds that there's a possibility of seconds."

It's nice to be staying in a place where my family is considered small. Especially in Asia.

I've been going for walks. Looking at flowering trees, my most favorite things. 

This one is a night-blooming fragrant tree and it smells sooooo good.

And of course, bourgainvillea. God's perfect shade of pink.

I went for a walk with the little kids, and my big ones.

Other than one boy accidentally dropping his five baht in the sewer, it went perfectly.

The boys showed us how certain seed pods explode when you drop them in water.

And then one day the radiant ten-year-old girl who lives here turned all the little girls into princesses.

The ten-year-old declared it dance time, but the princes were skeptical and reluctant to dance.

"Not us," they said.

In conclusion, it's been beautiful. We are blessed. But I realize I still don't have a picture of a baby for you, so I'll give you this: A picture of me with birds on my head.

(I was very happy, this was the most fun I've had in a long time.)

Still no good?

How about my kids holding a seven-month-old tiger? No?

I'll do my level best to get you a picture of a baby very soon.