In no particular order …

Watching Playschool, eating mandarins, and feeding chickens. My parents have been wonderful at helping care for Dominic, but I’ve still had plenty of time with the little man. We’ve discovered the kids show Playschool and also spent lots of time roaming around outside. We play in the sandpit, water the flowers, trek up the back to the chicken shed to collect eggs, and pick mandarins in the orchid. Both of us are loving the green grassy space here and the opportunities for more playdates with other mums and kids.

Consulting. I’m still working as a consultant helping develop training programs on stress and resilience for staff for a government agency in the States.

Working on Modern Love Long Distance. I’ve made a big (maybe crazy??) decision. Barring any more unexpected speed bumps (fingers crossed) I’m planning on launching this website on long distance relationships in mid-July!!! More details coming soon. 

Freelance editing. I was asked recently to edit several essays written by someone who doesn’t have long to live. It was a bit of a different editorial experience working with “legacy pieces” like these, and an honor.  

Writing speeches. I gave a keynote speech on “what home means” for 70 women at a dinner last weekend, which went well. I have several more speeches to give over the next couple of weeks – including one on post-natal anxiety for a group of mothers.

Wiping little man’s nose. Dominic’s had three colds in the last six weeks. It’s winter here and he’s not immune to any of the local bugs, so guess I shouldn’t be surprised. However, chasing him with a tissue and getting up multiple times a night to soothe a fretful sick kiddo aren’t my favorite parenting moments.

Talking to Mike on Skype. Mike’s in Vientiane now. The movers packed up our house in Luang Prabang last Friday and Mike flew South on Saturday. He’s continuing his new role in the headquarters office now as well as house hunting, looking for cars, etc. Lots and lots of logistics for him to deal with solo and we’ve definitely wished we could tackle some of these together – especially the house stuff. His back is continuing to heal and he’ll start seeing a physio regularly now that we’re based in a city that has one.

Struggling with vertigo and pregnancy aches and pains. A week after I got to Australia I was suddenly afflicted with severe vertigo. It took almost a week before I could look down or sideways without wanting to throw up (which is somewhat problematic when your main charge is only waist height). The worst of the vertigo started to clear after a week but it’s still not completely gone. The world still spins sometimes when I roll over in bed or sit up too fast. No fun. I’ve also been pretty tired. With so much to do it’s hard to step back and lie down during Dominic’s nap times, but some days I’ve had no choice – literally no energy to do anything other than collapse into bed for a while. Everything seems to be going OK on the pregnancy front though.

OK, not an especially lyrical or amusing update, but it gives you a sense of what’s been going on. If you want a bit more of a giggle you can jump on over to my piece today on A Life Overseas – You Owe Me Grace. This piece was written a couple of years ago about an unfortunate meeting of a golf cart and a gate, but it still makes me laugh and think.

Hope you’re all well. Thanks for reading, as always.
What have you been up to lately?

That line is: “When a child gets hungry enough, they’ll eat.”

This really pushes my buttons.

You see, Dominic is what you might call a picky eater (“non-eater” would also be appropriate). I’ve never seen a toddler so unmotivated by food. He would seemingly rather do anything than eat most of what we put in front of him.

This has been the cause of more stress and angst over the last six months than any other parenting issue, and after watching Dominic carefully I’ve decided the following …

1. Almost all children probably will eat enough to stay alive if you provide enough good food but don’t coax them into eating it.
2. If this is all you ever do, some children will not eat nearly enough to get what they need (either calorically or with regards to micro-nutrients) to grow and develop according to their potential during this critical developmental phase.

Some kids are simply too distracted by the lure of exploration and play to be bothered with food most of the time. And some kids, I now believe, rarely feel hungry enough to voluntarily prompt them to pay attention to their plates rather than their dogs/the fan/the wonder that is gravity/trying to maneuver their foot up on the table/gazing at their own fingers/watching paint dry … the list could go on.

I have read plenty of expert advice about how to conquer the picky eater. Some of the common suggestions (routine, variety of food, minimize distractions, etc) have helped some times and not others. Nothing has worked consistently enough to keep him well nourished. Consequently, the lengths I have gone to in recent months to get food into my child would have shocked my pre-parent self.

I’ve decided to put all this experimental learning to good use and publish a new list – a list of tips and tricks for picky eaters that you won’t find on any of the experts’ sites. Never mind that this is because the items on this list are ridiculous and, frankly, sometimes less than hygienic. No, never mind that, because these are things that have worked.

I offer them to you in the hopes that they’ll at least make you laugh.

If you also parent a picky eater and this gives you some new ideas for how to ignore all the “expert” advice that doesn’t work for you, better still. And pay no attention to people who will tell you that you’re setting bad patterns that will impossible to reshape. Regardless of how this all turns out, I’m fairly sure Dominic won’t be demanding to eat his dinner out of the palm of my hand when he’s thirteen years old just because I let him do it sometimes when he was a year and a half. Just a guess.

So without further ado, here are twelve things that Mike and I have done recently to cajole Dominic into eating (Mum and Nana, don’t read past number 8 – you’ll be too disturbed):

1.  Clap every bite. Seriously. Make a big celebration out of every bite of healthy food. Never mind the fact that your royal babyness will start to expect applause for putting a single pea in his mouth. Also, don’t fret that he will, in fact, start to expect applause not just from you but from everyone else sitting within twenty feet and that he will point to person after person commandingly until they oblige him with said applause. Just hang onto the fact that he ate a pea.

2. Perform a “happy sandwich/noodle/chicken/carrot dance”. The happy sandwich dance will work when simple applause is no longer enough. The more ridiculous the happy sandwich dance makes you look, the better. That way, when you point to your child’s tray and say, “if you eat this piece, Mama will do the happy sandwich dance,” your tiny tyrant’s face will light up and he will wave his arms in the air in anticipation. Do not think about how silly you look waving your own arms in the air and shaking your butt, especially when you do the happy sandwich dance in public. Instead, think of it as an unscheduled mini workout.

3. Make it a game. The game that’s worked best for us is “chicken on a stick.” Break off a piece of chicken satay and work it to the end of the skewer. Offer it to your child. When he closes his hand over the chicken, use your most dramatic voice to say, “one … two … three … PULL!” Then yank the stick away, leaving the chicken in his hand. Don’t do it again until he puts that piece of chicken in his mouth and eats it. (Warning: This can work so well when you first start to do it that you child may eat more chicken than his under-fed little system knows how to cope with and then wake up screaming in the middle of the night because of a tummy ache. Yeah.)

4. Bargain. This one has only started to work very recently. If your child loves fruit, have a cup of cut up grapes, watermelon, or mandarin sitting on the table. When he points to the fruit and whines, tell him you’ll give him a grape if he eats one thing off his tray. Repeat, bite for bite.

5. Peanut butter and pine-nuts: On nights when he won’t eat any dinner at all, wait half an hour and then feed him teaspoons of peanut butter straight out of the jar and let him wash it down with whole-fat milk. Also, pine nuts are loaded with fatty nut goodness and easy to chew, and for some reason Dominic will eat these when he won’t touch much else. Go figure.

6. Milk boxes, yogurt squeezes, and ice cream. We never thought we’d be “milk box” parents, much less parents who put three different types of milk boxes in the fridge and let our child choose which one he wants. Also, I’ve noticed that Dominic will drink eat yogurt out of an expensive “hold and squeeze” container when he won’t touch identical tasting yogurt off a spoon. Finally, ice cream is a fail-safe. He will always sit still for ice cream (well, always except at the ice cream shop with the running fountain and the goldfish. Apparently, fountains even trump ice cream.) Yes, in case you were wondering, I have sometimes fed him ice cream on nights when he didn’t eat any dinner.  

7. Feed him in different locations around the house. Sometimes on days when he won’t touch a thing in his high chair, Dominic will eat when we’re sitting together on the stairs or when he’s distracted by the television.

8. Let him eat his dinner “like the dog.” This might mean letting him pick up food with his mouth off the palm of your hand or kneel on the floor and eat straight out of a dish without using his hands. NB, do not use the actual dog dish, no matter how much your toddler seems to want you to (even I don’t go that far). Also, if you are letting your child eat off the floor, make sure the actual dog is locked outside. Trust me, the actual dog is much more food-motivated than your toddler. If given half a chance the dog will nose his way in there and eat your baby’s dinner for him. Far from being upset, your child will think this is all great fun.

9. Share with the dog. While we’re on the topic of the dog … I have, on occasion, let Dominic feed the dog some of his dinner. I’ve noticed that Dominic will usually feed the dog a couple of handfuls, and then eat one himself. (Yes, using exactly the same hand. Mum, I warned you not to read past number 8).

10. Let strangers feed him. Sometimes when we’re in a restaurant or a public park, Dominic will toddle up to total strangers who are eating and gaze at them as if he is a starving foster child who hasn’t seen a decent bite in months. If they offer to feed him some of what they’re eating I let them, because here’s the thing … he will almost always eat it, especially if it’s other children who give him food. I will even admit that once or twice I have given a strange child food and encouraged him or her to feed it to Dominic.

11. Feed the chickens together. Buy four chickens. Put them in a pen way up the back of the garden. Make a daily ritual out of taking the scrap bucket up to feed the chickens, and let your toddler throw the food into the pen. There’s a good chance that during the process he’ll decide that the half-eaten banana or a piece of buttered toast he wouldn’t touch with a ten food pole at breakfast will do quite nicely for an impromptu snack. Let him eat it; it’s not that dirty. There are mostly just vegetable scraps in that bucket. Mostly. 

12. Put bread out for the birds. Yesterday we got some stale bread, ripped it into pieces, and tossed it out onto the lawn for the magpies to feast on. Twenty minutes later, no magpies had appeared but Dominic had found and eaten at least half of those bread pieces himself. Winner. We’ll definitely be doing this again. (Note, don’t try this if you’ve recently put chemicals on your grass. It’s also best not to do this if you’ve recently mowed the lawn or if the bread is, you know, actually moldy instead of just stale).

There you have it. As we’re not out of this phase with Dominic yet, I’m sure there will be more to add to this list later. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you.

Have you done things to encourage your toddler to eat that you never in your wildest, well-educated dreams thought you’d stoop to doing before you had a child? What?

Below the excerpt I’ve added some photos from that trip to Viengkham. Looking at those shots now is a bit surreal. It hasn’t yet been three years since this trip. It feels longer. It looks longer .

***

Three weeks after I arrived in my new hometown of Luang Prabang, Laos, with my newish husband, Mike, we traveled to the district of Viengkham to witness a handover ceremony for a gravity-fed water system in a remote village.

Mike hadn’t warned me how basic our guesthouse accommodations would be, and he smiled as he watched me take in the lack of hot water, dirty squat toilet and lumpy bed covered with one filthy blanket.

“Do you love me?” he asked.

“I should think that the answer to that question would be perfectly obvious,” I replied, “considering that I am here, with you. But just in case there’s any doubt, then, yes. I love you.”

This trip to Viengkham was my introduction to life outside the tourist mecca of Luang Prabang, and it didn’t take too long after leaving town before I started to see a little more of what the development statistics for Laos really mean when they make bland pronouncements, such as: 27 percent of the population here lives on less than $1 a day. Or, 67 percent of the population is rural. Or, more than 40 percent of the rural children under age 5 are undernourished.

It is five hours by land cruiser up to the community we are visiting, and the road twists through village after village of flimsy bamboo huts. Landslides block half the road in a couple of places, sections are unpaved, and we frequently have to slow to avoid flattening the chickens, ducks, pigs, water buffaloes, cows, dogs and little kids making use of the only paved surface nearby. The thick lace of trees covering the mountains is patched by slash-and-burn fields — rice, growing on the slopes at impossible angles. Everything looks fertile and fecund — the glowing rice fields, the coppery swamp of red dirt souped up by the rains, the greedy green clinging to the slopes.

But these months, while everything is busy growing so furiously, these are the hungry months …

to read the rest of this essay click on over to Notre Dame Magazine

“I didn’t even get online until 10:45 today,” I told him, still stunned. “I’ve been changing diapers and emptying trash cans and replacing toilet rolls and tidying up rooms and making beds and cooking breakfast and doing laundry and hanging out laundry and … normal life is taking all my time!”

“There’s a post title,” Mike said. (Apparently, not only is normal life taking all my time but the events of the past months have taken all of my creative energy, so Mike has started to point out things I could write about here and elsewhere. You know, if I had time. And energy.)

“Also,” Mike continued less helpfully, “you should dedicate that post to all your blog readers who’ve rolled your eyes during the past year when you’ve talked about being short on time in Laos where you had a housekeeper and a week-day babysitter.”

“Hey!” I said. “I did not take that for granted. Whenever anyone asked me how I could be so productive work-wise I always told them it was due to the maebaan and the babysitter.”

“And your mikebaan,” Mike said. “Where’s my affirmation?”

“OK,” I conceded. “You did your fair share. More than your fair share, even.”

Here in Australia, where Dominic and I are just settling in now, my parents are doing more than their fair share too. Mum took the baby monitor last night and got up to my sniffing, coughing little boy six times. Dad’s currently taking him up the back to feed scraps to the chickens. I thought I’d snatch fifteen minutes to throw together an update before normal life demanded we prepare, eat, and then clean up after lunch.

Preparing, consuming and packing away food three times a day really takes a shocking amount of time.

So, the update.

Mike’s surgery went well, we think. It was shorter than last time, and this initial recovery period has been easier than we’d hoped. He still has a long road ahead of him – lots of resting and very low-level core strengthening work now, ten weeks before he can lift anything significant, and serious lifestyle changes around incorporating core strengthening, pilates, and yoga into his schedule – but there has so far been less post-operative pain than we’d feared. Now, for the nerve pain to disappear entirely and stay away for good …

The better-than-expected surgery experience all made it easier to leave him to continue recovering alone at the hotel in Bangkok, and on Wednesday night Dominic and I flew to Australia with my father (who’d been in Thailand helping out the week of Mike’s surgery).

We had ten free seats between the three of us on the overnight flight. Thank goodness, because we needed all of them. Dominic spent a good portion of the night wandering up and down the plane wanting to pat other sleeping passengers, pull the exit door lever, and get in the galley to see how things worked.

Despite the complete upheaval of his world, Dominic has settled down quite well so far here in Australia. It’s been really fun to watch his excitement at things like riding in supermarket trolleys, seeing seagulls, and feeding chickens. He’ll try to open the door of any car he toddles up to, and still points to big trucks with evident amazement. In the toy-aisle of K-Mart he raced around for a while, pulling one toy after another off the shelf, until he suddenly sat down in the middle of the aisle and refused to move. Guess that’s the toddler version of reverse culture shock.

Dominic has also taken to biting me and thinks it’s all very funny to suddenly sink his teeth into some part of my body without any warning. Don’t know quite what to make of that one.

Now, for the question I’ve been asked at least six times recently by concerned Zulu lovers … what’s going to happen to our little dog?

He’s being very well cared for by Sam, house-sitter extraordinaire, right now. Zulu loves Sam so much he practically pees with excitement every time she appears at the house. We’re hoping to find a house in Vientiane that will allow us to take him with us. If not we’re hoping that we’ll be able to find a really great home for him in Luang Prabang. Fingers crossed he comes with us.

OK, that’s the update – finished piecemeal over the course of the day in between grocery shopping, visiting the pharmacy, weathering several toddler temper tantrums, and … the list goes on.

I’ll end with one beautiful moment, though. I was reading Dominic a new story tonight called I Am A Big Brother. Halfway through the book, when it appeared that he was hardly even paying attention, Dominic suddenly grabbed his plastic cup of milk and tried to pour it onto the book.

I was about to scold him when I realized what he was doing. The last line of the previous page had read, “Baby likes to drink milk”.

He was trying to feed the picture of the baby on the page his milk.

Dominic can’t yet be bothered to talk and only makes his two reliable animal noises (elephant and mouse, weirdly enough) on command if he feels like it, but he understands a remarkable amount.

Now, since I haven’t had anything approaching a decent nights sleep in ten days now, normal life is suggesting I go to bed. Think that’s probably a good idea.

Mike’s list has 36 items on it. I haven’t read them yet, because I figured that might be cheating.

I thought briefly about just posting his list and being done with it, but regretfully decided that was also probably cheating.

So here we go. Things I will miss about Luang Prabang .

Those magical months after the rains have come and gone. The rivers are swollen, the mountains are dense jungle green, and palm trees rustle in air that is improbably, bewilderingly, crisp.

Walking around town in the evenings. We’re only a ten to thirty minute walk from pretty much wherever we want to go. We can stroll into town beside one river, home along another, and debrief the day while Dominic chills out in his stroller. For the most part, I’ve actually enjoyed not owning a car for these past three years.

The night market. It is a riot of colour and craft, and (again, improbably for Asia) you don’t get aggressively hassled to buy.

The cost of living. We can buy a dozen bananas for sixty cents, and pick up fresh mangosteens, mangoes, dragonfruit and pineapples during much of the year.  At one of our favorite tasty local joints we can order three mains, three fresh fruit shakes, and a nutella crepe all for under $10.

And food. There is a lot about Lao food to love. Steaming sticky rice in bamboo baskets. Minced chicken in lemongrass with peanut dipping sauce. Char-grilled pork with tamarind and coconut (you must dine at Tamarind if you visit). Whole roasted fish. Fried pork spring rolls. Tangy sweet noodles packaged in coconut leaves. Apple pastries at the real-thing French bakery in town. Fresh lime sodas. Icy mango and pineapple fruit shakes. There’s more, but I’ll stop.

Our wonderful housekeeper who does all our laundry, cleaning, dishes, and also plays with Dominic for an hour in the morning. I really wish we could take her with us.

Our patient afternoon babysitter who comes between 3 and 5ish every weekday (a great luxury for which we pay her slightly less than $20 a week). The sound of Peak’s motorcycle coming in the gate at 3pm is always one of the highlights of my day. Some days I am so happy to see her it’s all I can do not to kiss her the minute she walks in the door. This same babysitter, incidentally, has taken it upon herself to clip Dominic’s nails regularly. How she gets him to sit still while she does it is a complete mystery to me, as it is a task I can never accomplish while he is awake.

The lantern festival. We were here in Luang Prabang for this festival this year and it was mystically beautiful. The sight of the whole town turning out to release the burdens and wrongs of the past as they set their lanterns loose to the sky and on the rivers was visually and figuratively stunning.

Our house. Four bedrooms and a silly number of bathrooms. Tile and hardwood floors. Teak ceilings. Wooden shutters on the many, many windows. Mike and I joke that it’s the nicest house we’ll ever live in.

Time with Mike. We live a five minute bike ride from Mike’s office. When he’s not out in the field, he’s usually home from the office by 5:15, and he comes home between noon and one for lunch most days.  

That’s a pretty good list, huh? It’s probably not cheating now for me to jump over to Dropbox and see what Mike’s written down. Please hold …

Not surprisingly, there was a lot of overlap in our lists, but Mike did put down some things I didn’t name.

1. Sunset on the Mekong River.
2. The colors. Monks in bright orange and saffron robes, bougainvillea, frangipani.
3. UNESCO World Heritage protection that means guest houses and hotels have classy wooden architecture and décor, which all equals … charming.
4. Elegance. Silk tapestries. Women wearing colorful sinhs (skirts adorned with woven silk patterns).
5. The morning market.
6. Sunrise bike rides and runs. Fog lifting from the rivers. Gentle morning sunlight at the start of a scorching hot day.
7. Sunrise morning alms procession of the monks. Standing at a corner listening to the monks chant while a line of kneeling women pour out the symbolic blessing water.
8. Rainy season storms.
9. The gentleness of the Lao people, and how often you see Lao men carrying babies and taking care of them.
10. Kuang Xi waterfall.  Swimming in the light blue water with all the tropical foliage surrounding.
11. Tad Se Waterfall. Another virtual Eden.
12. The feeling of safety. Walking around town at night with no fear of violent crime. Safe place for kids to play.
13. Moon dust at the National Museum.

The moon dust is, in my opinion, way over-rated (I mean, dust is dust whether it comes from the moon or from the garden) but I totally agree with the rest of his highlights, especially Kuang Xi.  

Because I am a balanced individual (and also because I need to remind myself that there are going to be some benefits to leaving this small town Mekong paradise) I feel I must also mention several things I most decidedly will not miss.

Construction noise. It’s endemic to any growing town, and this town is growing. If I never heard another planer or metal grinder, I’d be a very happy girl.

The heat. About seven to eight months of the year it’s just too hot here for me to be comfortable.

No hot running water downstairs, and an external kitchen. External kitchens make sense from a tropical-design standpoint, but they’re hard work with young kids in tow.

Lao music. I love and admire many things about Lao culture, but their music is not on that list. Lao karaoke, in particular, is frightful. It is also played at ridiculous volumes and can go until all hours. 

Lack of good medical care. We’ve had too many medical dramas (broken bones, herniated discs, nasty food poisoning episodes, and recurrent ear infections) for me to rest comfortably knowing that we are a two hour plane ride away from the nearest good hospital.

Big spiders and tropico-cockroaches. There is at least one big specimen of each of these creatures in our bedroom right now, but I don’t exactly know where. They keep disappearing on me right before I find a lethal weapon. I don’t enjoy getting up in the middle of the night and wondering if I’m going to step on something live and … icky.

Also, while I’m on the topic of creatures … ants. Tiny red biting buggers. They get in everything. Once I picked 54 ants out of one of Dominic’s diapers (before I put it on him, not after I’d taken it off, in case you were wondering). There was an ant in bed last night that left two welts on my leg before I found it.

And mosquitoes. They’re annoying. Also, some of them pass on undesirable presents like dengue fever.

The entire month of March, when the farmers are slash-and-burning their rice fields. The air is so smoky you can’t see the mountains some days, it gets hard to breath, and ash falls from the sky and coats everything a filmy dark grey.

I could write thousands more words on all the memories we’ve made here, but I’ll stop. By the time this post goes up tomorrow we’ll be on our way to Bangkok, and there’s still plenty to organize and do before then. I need to take advantage of my remaining babysitter time this afternoon (right now Dominic is sitting happily on the front step while Peak carefully hand-feeds him a fresh chocolate chip cookie bite by bite – I’m not the only one who’s in for a jolt with this upcoming change). Catch you from Thailand with (we all desperately hope) a good progress update after Mike’s surgery.  

But now it’s April. I still need to do all of that, and Mike’s birthday was in the beginning of March.

I’m taking a deep, soothing breath and telling myself that this is to be expected when you live in a small town whose slogan is “Timeless”.

Granted, in Luang Prabang’s case I think the word timeless is really supposed to conjure up a majestic blend of old-world royal and shabby-quaint French colonialism. In this household, however, timeless could just as easily refer to the nebulous blur that settled in after Christmas when all of us were sick with bad colds or laid low with food poisoning and/or pregnancy nausea. Then there was (finally) the making of big decisions about what’s next. And then, sadly, Mike’s latest medical drama that has compressed moving and separation deadlines that already felt too imminent. 

Timeless means that I haven’t set any New Years Resolutions, or blogged much lately, or crossed off half of the things that were on February’s to-do list. It means that the major project on long distance relationships I’ve been investing time and energy into is going to be delayed yet again. It means that sometimes, when I’m scurrying around after Dominic, I pause to wonder what day of the week it is.

That’s usually the moment when Dominic throws the watering can into the neighbor’s fishpond and tries to dive in after it, or stuffs some unidentifiable berries into his mouth and swallows. 

I’m spending much of my days carrying around one baby on the inside and one baby on the outside. I’m helping Mike pre-pack our house in preparation for the move to Vientiane so he has to do as little as possible by himself post-surgery, I’m prepping Dominic to spend the next six months in Australia. Once we’re in Australia I’ll be very pregnant, parenting without Mike, and I will also (gasp) have to do my own laundry as well as a variety of other tasks that I vaguely remember are somewhat foundational to running a clean and functional household.

There just isn’t near enough time right now to do everything I want to be doing, and so this means that I have to make choices.

Do I play with Dominic or put him in front of the television so that I can write a blog post?

During precious baby nap times do I work on packing up our house, writing, consulting work, answering dozens of emails, or doing pregnancy yoga? Or do I listen to what my pregnant body wants to do and lie down on the bed?

With regards to the bigger picture, do I continue working as a consultant or put a pause on that to focus more on creative endeavors? Should I be trying to write another novel? Do I push hard to launch the Modern Love Long Distance website that I’ve been cooking up before the baby comes, or delay it until January 2014?

That last decision has been on my mind a lot during the last two weeks.

I really want to see Modern Love Long Distance launched and growing. It’s already been almost a year in the planning, and the only major creative project I’ve invested in lately. I want to grow something that doesn’t need me to read the same story, take the same walk, and say the same thing over and over again. I also think there is a growing community of long distance lovers out there hungry for thoughtful information about the joys and challenges of their particular situations.

But.

I’m not sure I want to set in motion a project that could well take on a life of its own and demand more of my time and energy for writing, editing, liaising with contributors, and programming than I want to give right now. Not when I’m parenting without Mike. Not when I’m the size of a Shetland pony and being regularly kicked from the inside. Not when I’m also wanting to spend precious free time sleeping, or cooking, or chatting with my parents, or (sigh) doing laundry.

And then the new baby will arrive in August and my brain will disappear entirely for at least three months. This I know. Do I want to juggle breastfeeding a newborn and soliciting contributors? Or do I want to relax into this season that will probably never come again and give it, and myself, a little more room to breathe?

I really don’t know. I haven’t yet untangled whether my current desire to launch Modern Love stems mostly from the cosmic creative spark that’s worth sacrificing for, or from my own posse of inner “shoulds” that are whispering faster, better, and more.

I know that worthwhile passions and worthwhile tasks sometimes demand we show up when we don’t feel like it – when we’re tired, or overwhelmed, or pregnant. But I also know that sometimes I get “worthwhile” confused with “what’s best” – best for me and for the other big and little members of team McWolfe.

What’s best for me to focus on in the next two weeks is clear. Packing. Sitting by Mike’s bedside. Trying to tempt a Dominic to eat, and keeping him from pressing any “Code Blue” buttons in the hospital or dashing into Bangkok traffic. Not losing my cool when our little autocrat loses his because I have said no to riding the escalators for the 238^th time in a row.

But after that … we’ll see.

What sort of timeless choices are you making right now?
What helps you distinguish “worthwhile” from “best” when it comes to how you spend your time?

Because of the lack of quality medical care in Laos, it would be less than wise for me to give birth in this country. Because I have a chronic health condition called lymphedema that makes enduring hot weather heat difficult and damaging, it would also be less than wise to stay here, heavily pregnant, through the worst of the hot season and then make a late-date dash to Thailand to deliver. So the plan for months had been for me to leave Laos with our toddler in mid-May when I hit the third trimester, and go home to live with my parents for five months around the delivery of baby number two.

Given that I am now 37, I am sure that my poor parents thought they were at least a dozen years past any chance that I would turn up pregnant and alone on their doorstep needing sanctuary, much less do this twice within three years. Just goes to show you never know in life. It also goes to show that when you raise third culture kids who choose to continue on as global nomads, you run a serious risk of being permanently pegged as their home base. Parents, take heed.

So Mike and I had it all planned, you see. But in the past two weeks all our carefully stitched-together plans have come unraveled …

Jump on over to A Life Overseas to read the rest of this post.

 There are several posts I’d like to write at the moment, but time is tight so philosophical musings about conflicting wants in life and that sort of stuff will just have to wait for a while. An update on what’s going on, however, I can manage. So let’s start with the good stuff first.

The great news is that everything checked out perfectly normal and healthy for the new baby … including his little penis.

Yes, we’re having another boy!!

I am much less shell-shocked by this news than I was last time. It’s funny how even repeat experiences can be so different. With Dominic’s twenty-week ultrasound I remember being mostly focused on finding out the gender of the baby. This time I was mostly focused on whether everything would check out OK. I didn’t have a strong preference either way regarding gender.

We’re thrilled and relieved about the “all clear” on the scan. Also, the baby waved at us while simultaneously doing a headstand on my bladder. We could count all five fingers curling and uncurling on that tiny hand. It was a trip.

Good news next. The surgeon who set Dominic’s leg last year examined him and seemed pleased. He said both legs looked to be of equal length and alignment looked normal. He did note that the area above the right knee was slightly larger than the area above the left knee, but they didn’t even take an X-ray this year. They will next year, but because Dominic is still growing and changing so rapidly they wouldn’t actively intervene at the moment even if slight differences in bone length and formation were starting to show up.

Now, the bad news. A disc in Mike’s spine has slipped badly in the same site that he was operated on six months ago, and is now protruding and pressing against nerves. The surgeon said that the slippage and the compression is even worse than it was last time, which makes sense given the level of nerve pain Mike’s been experiencing down the back of his legs during the last couple of weeks.

 We’re seeking a couple of additional professional opinions on the topic, but it seems pretty clear that a “let’s do physiotherapy and wait and see” approach won’t be of any use and that this is a situation that requires more surgery.

And on that front, there’s more bad news. This surgery won’t be a repeat microdisectomy, it will be a hemilaminectomy, which is a step up on the involvement scale. It means a bigger incision, a longer surgery, and the removal of some spine bone to get at the disc material that needs to be excised.

And … even more bad news. This surgery has long-term implications. Mike will have to be careful with lifting for the rest of his life (the doctor recommended no more than 15kg if he can help it, even after he’s recovered from surgery). This means no more helping friends move. It also means no more backpacking with heavy packs, riding mountain bikes on bumpy roads, running as a sport or spending long hours in badly-sprung vehicles bumping over dirt roads. In short, this will mean some painful lifestyle changes and annoying limitations.

What to do? Well, we have some complicating factors at play.

 For starters there is our super-mobile toddler who is demonstrating great determination when it comes to getting exactly what he wants, a great capacity for creativity when it comes to devising new and interesting ways to get into trouble, and a great disinclination to eat when there is anything more interesting to do. This is particularly problematic when we travel, since in the last week he has demonstrated that pushing elevator buttons, perusing every single item on a breakfast buffet, riding escalators, turning on taps, throwing glasses onto the floor to watch them shatter, banging on plate glass windows, running away from us as fast as he can manage, and just sitting in his chair screaming all count as more interesting activities than eating anything except ice cream. He will usually deign to sit still and open his mouth for ice cream. Usually.   

 Other complicating factors? Well, there is my rapidly increasing girth and my body’s inability to tolerate hot weather gracefully at the best of times. My mother’s recent surgery to replace a damaged thumb joint (which means that she can’t lift Dominic). The fact that we are supposed to move to a new city in two months, and that Mike is starting a new job in ten days …

 I think that about covers it.   

 I was planning on heading to Australia with Dominic and bub-in-utero mid-May anyway, but given that Mike will be completely out of commission for lifting Dominic for ten or more weeks following surgery, we’ve decided to move my departure date up to coincide with Mike’s surgery.

Because Mike’s surgery needs to happen as soon as reasonably possible this means that everything’s been fast-tracked.

 As of now, Mike is scheduled for surgery for Friday April 12^th. It’s likely that my Dad will meet us in Bangkok to help out, and sometime in the week following the surgery, we’ll leave for Australia. Mike will stay in Bangkok until about the 26th of April, and then return here to Laos alone to continue recovering and to oversee our house pack-up and move down to Vientiane.

 So we’ve got some busy times ahead during the next two and a half weeks pre-packing and organizing this house, saying goodbye to people here and this little town that’s been home for three years now, and preparing to go to Australia.

 Then we’ll have some quality bedside time in our favorite hospital – you know, when I’m not scampering around making sure Dominic doesn’t yank on any weights and pulleys that are attached to broken bones.

 And then Mike and I will have a looooooong time apart, but I don’t want to think about that just yet.

 One step at a time.    

We’ve rented a small two-bedroom townhouse for six nights that shares a lovely pool with its neighbors. We’ve spent the week introducing Dominic to boats and beaches, catching him as he jumps off the pool’s waterfall, and eating good Thai food (mango and coconut-soaked sticky rice, mmmmm). Today Mike’s braved the sticky midday heat to go rock-climbing and I’m stuck with the indefatigable little monster alone all …

I mean, Dominic and I get to have some quality together time for most of the day.

Looks divine, right? And it has been. It’s been a lovely treat to have some lazy days together with Dominic, and for Mike and I to have evenings and early mornings to talk without the busyness of daily routine to distract. It has been a lovely little holiday – truly restful and relaxing.

But that is not the whole picture. 

Before you open a new browser and start looking for jobs in development, here is the other side of this sun-burnished coin.

The reason we get this extra leave twice a year while we’re based in Northern Laos, is mostly because there isn’t yet any good medical or dental care up in Luang Prabang. We live at least one international border and an hour’s flight away from the nearest good hospital.

So the day we left for Krabi, we woke up at 5:30, flew to Bangkok, cleared customs, collected our luggage, caught a taxi to Bumrungrad hospital, and made our first medical appointment of the morning with a good ten minutes to spare.

It’s been almost eight months now since Mike had his microdisectomy surgery there to repair a badly herniated disc in his spine. Healing was apparently progressing well, until the sciatic nerve pain mysteriously returned four weeks ago and has gotten steadily worse. So, on Saturday Mike had his second MRI of the last year while I took Dominic to the children’s clinic to get some vaccinations and his first check up in eight months.

We reconvened in time to have a quick lunch, stopped at the pharmacy to pick up some nerve medication for Mike, and hopped a taxi back to the airport to fly further south to Krabi.

Whereupon we collapsed, exhausted.

And what have we spent most of our spare time talking about this week – in beaches, on boats, and by pools?

How on earth we’re going to manage another spinal surgery for Mike, the demands of Mike’s new job, packing up our house for the move to Vientiane, our active toddler, and getting me (plus Dominic) back to Australia before I hit the high-risk third trimester of my pregnancy on May 18th.

Oh, we’ve also talked a little about the fact that Dominic’s growth curves are diverging on the charts. He’s gaining some percentile in height (although still below the 50^th) and simultaneously dropping percentile in weight (now well below 25%). We try and try, but we cannot seem to get him to eat enough food. We aren’t seriously worried yet, but we are starting to wonder if he has picked up a parasite.

Those first two appointments at Bumrungrad last Saturday were just the beginning. This Saturday, on the way back to Laos, we’ll do it all in reverse. Tomorrow afternoon we fly back to Bangkok, and first thing on Saturday morning we head back to the hospital. We have two appointments with specialists to check on the healing and progress of the leg Dominic broke last year. I will have my 20-week ultrasound. We’ll meet with Mike’s spinal neurosurgeon to find out what he recommends and discuss dates and options, and we have a couple of other appointments besides.

Promises to be a great day.

But that’s what this week of leave is for – not just holidays, but hospitals as well.

We’re living a life of extremes at the moment. The good can be strikingly good – incandescent and unusual. Pad thai from street stalls. Soft white sweeps of beach framed by limestone cliffs. Warm waterfalls falling into tropical pools. All the best parts of living in a tourist mecca nestled by the Mekong River.  

But the bad can be similarly extreme. It’s likely that the outcome of these recent hospital visits will mean us scrambling to pre-pack our house in the next couple of weeks, more surgery for Mike within a month, and Dominic and me leaving early for Australia. It will mean our longest separation yet, Mike recovering from surgery mostly alone, and me solo-parenting Dominic for months (with the help of my own parents) while I am the size of a Shetland pony and being kicked from the inside by baby number two.     

Extremes. They add spice to life. They also add exhaustion.

Here’s hoping the rest of our medical appointments on Saturday don’t add any more spice to life just right now, because I’m not sure the system could cope. I’ll keep you posted.

Love At The Speed Of Email is a memoir – the story of how I met my husband while he was in Papua New Guinea working for a humanitarian organization and I was in Los Angeles working as a stress management trainer. It’s more than a love story, though, it’s a recounting of my struggle to find an answer to the question “where’s home” after being raised five different countries and then embracing a career that kept me perpetually on the move. I suspect that this struggle to define home is one that those of you who were raised as third culture kids (or who are raising global nomads yourselves) will be all too familiar with.

The section that I chose to share comes from a chapter called Airports and Bookstores. I was twenty-six years old, in Hawaii, and having the time of my life at the first creative writing workshop I’d ever attended when I realized for the first time that I might have a real problem when it came to this concept of home …

***

Borrowing inspiration from the tale of the prodigal son in the Bible, our instructors had told us to write a “coming home” story. We should, we were told, write the prodigal who was us as an adult, coming home to ourselves as a child.

“Pick the clearest recollection you have of home and use that,” they said.

Everyone else reached for a pen or a laptop. I just sat there.

I was still sitting there ten minutes later.

Eventually I went up to the front of the room, to the giant leather-bound book of synonyms that was sitting on a podium, looked up home and wrote down these words: Birthplace. Stability. Dwelling. Hearth. Hearthstone. Refuge. Shelter. Haven. Sanctum.

I went back to my seat and stared past the book of synonyms, past the palm trees standing still under a blanket of midday heat, and out into the hazy blue of an ocean that promised a horizon it never quite delivered.

The list didn’t seem to help much.

Birthplace conjured Vancouver, a city I’d visited only twice, briefly, since we’d left when I was one.

Stability then. Unlike my parents’, not a word that could be applied to my childhood. In stark contrast with their agrarian upbringing, I’d spent an awful lot of my time in airports.

Maybe that was it, I thought, wondering whether the sudden spark I felt at the word airport was a glimmer of inspiration or merely desperation.

There was no denying that as a child I’d thought there was a lot of fun to be had in and around airports. More than one home movie shows me and my sister, Michelle, arranging our stuffed animals and secondhand Barbies in symmetrical rows and lecturing them severely about seat belts and tray tables before offering to serve them drinks. When we were actually in airports, we spent many happy hours collecting luggage carts and returning them to the distribution stands in order to pocket the deposit. We were always very disappointed to find ourselves in those boring socialist airports with free trolleys.

In Hawaii, I was tempted to start writing my story about home but didn’t.

“Your clearest memories of home as a child cannot possibly be in an airport,” I scolded myself, still staring past my laptop and out to the white-laced toss and chop of cerulean. “Home is not a topic that deserves flippancy. Work harder. … “

To read the rest of this post
and find out how to enter to win a copy of Love At The Speed Of Email
follow this link to find my post over on A Life Overseas.

Have a great weekend!

Lisa