Navagating

Huge milestone

2012-11-18T20:55:00.001+07:00

Houston, we have ponytail!

We went to a wedding!

2012-11-18T20:44:00.001+07:00

And we brought the cuteness.

Navagating on Holiday

2012-11-06T22:15:00.001+07:00

We'll be back up and running soon.
Til then...

{31 for 21} Illegal in most places

2012-10-22T16:34:00.001+07:00

But quite normal here. For the record, this scares the bejeezus out of me but it's getting very hard to avoid. And it is considered normal here. I leave it to dad though, I think you have to grow up riding for this level of confidence.

She's getting her own seat installed today. That's better, right?

{31 for 21} This Sunday we...

2012-10-21T12:01:00.001+07:00

{31 for 21} For Comparison

2012-10-17T20:00:00.000+07:00

at 3.5 months

The same lack of hair. Poor kids.

{31 for 21} WISE - Tastes Like Chicken

2012-10-17T11:04:00.000+07:00

I'm relaunching the WISE series. As in: What Is She Eating? Series.

Today's food:

It's fluffy threads, akin to candy floss. But its not candy. It's not a vegetable either.

Imagine jerky. Imagine jerky so dry it was almost power. Imagine if that jerky wasn't in chunks but in tiny shreds. Imagine it and you have this.

Chicken floss. Also, see pork floss.

Its sweet kinda freeze dried meat power floss stuff. You can eat it straight (gets everywhere) or dump it on hot steamed rice and mix it right in. Nava approves. It's 10% sugar so Mama cringes a little but hey, at least she's eating.

And honestly I can't feel too bad giving it to her because when I was an exchange student in Thailand in high school and I'd hit my limit of meat that was full of bones and gristle and fat and skin not to mention tough...I found pork floss and I loved it.

{31 for 21} In my other life as a doula

2012-10-15T20:00:00.000+07:00

I usually don't talk much about myself outside of my role as Mother on Navagating. However, after nearly two years blogging I feel like broadening the scope a little.

Since Nava's birth I became a mom and I've also become a birth doula. Oppertuities to doula are very limited here in Vientiane as the women likely to know about doulas and actually want one don't birth here. They go to Bangkok; they go home; they go to Bali (okay, really only I did that last one).

So it's kinda hard to doula in the normal sense. So I've been working on the other ways new mothers need support. As I shared in my story of breastfeeding Nava, there is little to no support for lactation here in Vientiane. So I'm working on changing that one little step at a time.

Behold!

Mothers of 1, 2 and 4 with babies 3, 2, and 1 month(s) old!

This was the first 'official' meeting of the Vientiane nursing mother's coffee klatch. I hope this group will grow into a longstanding line of support for mothers in Vientiane. I really hope to find some way to grow it out into the local Lao community too. I'm not sure how just yet but I think I need to be patient and let it organically take shape so it sticks for the long term. I'm so excited that something has started!

It definitely helps that we've had what one of my FB friends termed a "baby blizzard" here in the last couple of months. Loka was the oldest!

{31 for 21} Candle Joy

2012-10-14T20:46:00.003+07:00

It's been a weekend of birthdays here. Yesterday, Nava got to watch a friend turning two blow out candles on an amazing Eeyore cake. Today she saw brother and sister playmates blow out candles twice.

And today our power was out all day (it's a developing country thing). Come 6pm, they still hadn't turned the power back on so dinner time was by candlelight. It's a routine we've done many times before around here but today Nava had certain opinions about how it should go down.

Like that we should be Singing.
And Clapping.
And Blowing.

Yup, it was Happy Birthday Dinner time. Kinda makes power outages something to look forward to...

{31 for 21} bribery material

2012-10-13T09:05:00.000+07:00