Things I've observed, Part 2

So, from my notes we had:

Cha chas
Getting on buses with my kids
Pink hijab
Dentist glass tables bikes
Middle aged dancing man
Spanish people durian
And I’m adding: Dog food purse

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Here we go!

Cha chas

On our recent dentist/visa trip we went to a flashy new mall in Chiang Mai, which had an amazing playground. I paid for the kids to use it for three hours. It was a bit of a splurge, but free playgrounds aren’t an abundant thing in Thailand and this one had three levels with a huge ball pit and giant slides. It was awesome. While I was paying, the woman said, “Give me your phone number so I can call you if I need you. We won’t let your kids leave until you come and pick them up.”

My jaw dropped. “I can leave them here?”

I skipped out of there as fast as I could with Isaac still in the carrier on my back. I knew exactly what I was going to do, what I didn’t really want to do with my kids with me. I was going bra-shopping.

I needed to buy a new bra because my cha chas have left me, they are once again diminishing past the point of deserving the name cha chas. They are in the wane cycle. This is because Isaac is nursing less lately, and there have only been five times in my life that I have filled out a t-shirt in a way worth mentioning. Actually, I should say twice, because the first four times were attached, really. Pregnant nursing, pregnant nursing, and repeat. After Solo was weaned, I was shocked to see what my real size was. I lived on a beach where I could often see people filling out their bikinis while my own bikini top flapped empty in the breeze, and I became rather jealous.

I’m accepting of my cha cha-less self these days. I’m going for the Japanese loose shirts look. The “We’re flat chested and we love it!” look. Or something like that. And yes, I’m blogging about boobs. I’ve gotten older, I’m uninhibited. What will I be writing about when I’m sixty? We’ll have to wait to find out.

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Riding on buses with my kids

When I was a teenager and rode the city bus to school, I used to have these frequent daydreams about having kids and riding the bus with them. We’d be a diverse group, I thought, since a lot of my kids would surely be adopted and probably of various ethnicities. I imagined us all trailing on, causing a bit of a stir, sitting and joking together. It was a pleasant daydream for fifteen-year-old me, awkward, in my man phase (when everyone mistook me for a man and called me Sir), in grungy Japanese All-Stars, fat corduroys, and a polyester shirt. This was before I knew I liked art, or writing, before I ever had a boyfriend. (I had my first boyfriend and kiss at twenty. He was Chinua.) I knew I liked reading, and I knew I liked kids.

Looking back at this little daydream, what strikes me is how completely it was fulfilled. There is nothing truer in my life than the fact that I ride on buses with my kids, that we are diverse, that we cause a stir, and that we sit and joke with each other. I couldn’t have imagined almost anything else about how my life has turned out, but I imagined that. Wow.

They’re such excellent bus-riders, too. (And train-riders, sky train-riders, plane-riders, tuk tuk-riders.) On our recent trip to Chiang Mai, I asked Kai to hold Isaac so I could get back on the bus and check under the seats to see if we had left anything behind. When I looked up, though, Kenya was already doing it, and she continued to do it in each place we left, the entire time we were away from home. Then I had to take an unplanned trip to Bangkok because I couldn’t get my Indian visa in Chiang Mai. Chinua was back in Pai, building the fence for our meditation center. I put the kids on a bus to Pai and they rode back on their own. It went flawlessly. (The buses are not really buses, more like big vans, and the drop off is very close to our house. Chinua met them there.) Riding on buses with my kids. That’s my life.

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Pink hijab

This one is about Isaac, who talks non-stop. Non. Stop. He talks to anyone who will listen to him, forming full sentences with laughs for punctuation, listening for responses, but he doesn’t use any words. He loves to talk to people walking by, people on the bus, people on the street. Everyone.

One day I heard him rattling away with enthusiasm and I turned to see who was getting such a thorough talking to. It was the toddler from across the street, just a couple months older than Isaac, who had been carried over to our fence by her dad. She was wearing a pink hijab with sparkles and staring at Isaac, who was talking a mile a minute, as if she had never seen a specimen quite like him before.

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Dentist glass tables bikes

We went to the dentist for a yearly check up recently. Clean bills for Kenya and Solo, Kai has one cavity in a baby tooth that is due to fall out soon, and Leafy had a tooth that we already knew had to be taken care of, so we took care of it that day. The dentist’s office was lovely and bright, with toys and even bikes to play with, which seemed fantastic, until I realized that the combination of glass and bikes was going to make me fall down dead. My kids rode the bikes in circles in a room where every wall (floor to ceiling), door, and table was made of glass, and I couldn’t help thinking that something in this set of circumstances was horribly, horribly flawed.

“Careful!” I said/shrieked inanely, while my kids did their best to drive slowly and carefully, but you know how these things go, how everything only escalates with boys, how there is no settle down mechanism in their brains. Left to their own devices, boys will escalate every single game until someone is in the hospital getting stitches or a cast, and that is why they need sisters and grownups. In this case, Kenya was also drunk on indoor bicycles, and I couldn’t count on her to put a halt to things. All I could do was call out directions, “Watch the wall! Not near the tables! No, not near that wall!” The toys at the dentist’s office put me in bed for a week.

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Middle aged dancing man

The kids were playing on the aforementioned mall playground and I was finished with my bra shopping, so I sat and was highly entertained by people playing that arcade dancing game where you have to step on the squares, you know the one? I’ve only ever seen it in movies before, but this arcade has a few machines and I couldn’t have been happier than I was when I sat watching people use it. First there were the high school students, still in their uniforms from school. They were awesome. But later, out of nowhere, a middle-aged man with glasses, a polo shirt, dress pants and dress shoes approached, lurked casually for a minute, and then began his game. He was rocking it, not in a  “Wow, what a great dancer” way, but in a “He hits every step with his own style” way. He was fully into it, arms waving, feet skipping back and forth across the squares. He competed with another high school student and won. He went on and on, until finally, he pulled out a handkerchief, wiped the sweat off his head, and left.

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Spanish people durian

Solo gets confused easily about nationalities and languages. He still doesn’t really have it all placed in the proper categories in his head— where people are from, where we are from, what language we speak. Lately he has taken to calling every foreign language “Spanish.” I’m not sure why. We tell him the kids are going to Thai class, he needs to practice his Thai, he needs to say thank you in Thai. Nope, he calls the language Spanish.

In our guesthouse the other day he pointed to a sign that had a picture of durian on it, with a big red circle around it, a red line slashing through it.

“It’s the yucky fruit!” he said. (They do not like durian.)

“Yeah,” I said. “You’re not allowed to have durian in this guesthouse.” (It smells really, really bad, so it's banned in most guesthouses.)

“See?” he said. “Even Spanish people don’t like durian.”

This is such a perfect example of a Solo sentence. I can't express the delight this boy brings to my life.

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Dog food purse

We’re on our way to India, stopped over in Bangkok for a couple of nights, using the sky train because Thai protests have taken over the ground level streets.

Kenya carries a purse with her everywhere she goes. In her purse she has her wallet, pieces of blank paper to draw on, pencils and pens, modeling clay, and dog food. She started carrying dog food when we got Wookie (as if that explains anything) and the dog food has come in handy while we’ve been walking around Bangkok. Kenya uses it to feed fish in coi ponds, or stray cats.

Lately she told me she doesn’t like it if she feels that people think she’s not girly. Girly as in, likes to do makeovers and play with barbies. So she goes along with the makeover parties and barbie playing if they come along, but in all honesty, she’d rather be feeding stray cats in Bangkok alleys. (She would be so happy to be a farm girl, or to live somewhere that she could ride horses. She lives here, so she feeds elephants and street animals.) I told her she’s plenty girly and girly has nothing to do with plastic dolls, and I wouldn’t want her to ever be anything other than amazing, animal loving Kenya.