Different city, same bacterial infections...

Here we are in Bangkok. It is much the same as we are anywhere, involving swimming, watching DVDs and fending off tummy bugs (my fault for eagerly suggesting we had satays off a street stall to eat in the park for supper last night - I assured Hubby that it would be fine, because street food is always freshly prepared; however, today three out of the five of us are ill, so it looks like I was wrong). Anyway at least we managed to find a park, which is a real novelty after Kathmandu. Actually Kathmandu does have one park, Ratna Park, but you would not take your kids for a stroll and a picnic there in a million years, so the whole play park, pedallo and ice cream thing is a real novelty. This morning we went to a snake farm. Twins pretended to be scared, and Son pretended not to be scared, and I annoyed Hubby by forgetting which button to press on the camcorder and thus missing the moment when he had a Burmese cobra round his neck.

This afternoon we had a right old monsoon downpour and didn't feel guilty at all for staying in and watching Narnia, followed by Treasure Planet. Well, that's what Son did, whilst clutching a casserole dish, in case he suddenly felt the urge to have a chat with Uncle Huey.

Tomorrow the plan is to go to the aquarium, so long as we are all safe to go for more than twenty minutes without needing the loo!

the fantastic three

I promised Hubby he could have a lie-in this morning: being on leave is really wearing him out, it seems. He got a bit huffy when I said it was no bother, as he doesn't contribute very much to our mornings anyway, other than making me a cup of tea. Unless you count spending forever in the bathroom listening to the World Service as a contribution to family life, that is.

The kids decided not to do their naked dancing this morning. Instead they are having a meeting of their secret society (pronounced sauce-ity if you are Son, and don't think of trying to correct his pronounciation, he won't have it), cleverly called the fantastic three (the alliteration only works if you are young enough to be unable to pronounce 'th' properly!). They have already made up a secret sign and secret password. I think it's only a matter of time before they start solving mysteries involving sinister-looking gypsies camping in the orchard, or something. Not sure what the 21st century nepali equivalent to 1950s Enid Blyton land is - maybe finding some Maoists and preventing them from having another bandh?

naked dancing in the mornings

Kids have taken to wowing us with 'naked dancing' first thing in the morning. They rush into our bedroom and whoop with glee as they prance about in the altogether. They think it's hilarious. What they fail to understand is that nothing is hilarious at six in the morning. No, not even that very funny scottish comedian with the beard whose name suddenly escapes me because I'm developing early-onset dementia. What is his name? You know the one - married to the woman who used to be in Not the Nine O Clock News. Deary me, I am useless these days.

Later this morning, when I was capable of functioning, Twin 1 drew me aside for a private word. "mummy," she said, "d'you know what? sometimes I pretend I have a willy."

"Oh?" I replied, thinking we should perhaps start funnelling her child benefit into a trust fund for gender-realignment surgery.

She took a breath.

"Yes, and sometimes, I pretend I have a mermaid's tail."

"mmm, really?" I said, relief coursing through my being.

That's okay then. I suppose. Unless in fifteen years time, or so, she says, "I just always felt like a mythical aquatic-human hybrid trapped in a small girl's body..." and we have to spend the trust fund on having a tuna-tail grafted onto her waist...

more summer stuff

Sorry, it's been over a week, which is a bit rubbish of me. A week in which I have mostly been admiring spaceships and princesses. I almost wrote something the other night but made the big mistake of posting some of my profound thoughts about the God Delusion on the Richard Dawkins website. Turns out I'm a moron, and my musings are the unedited tosh of someone bordering on insanity. Or at least that's pretty much what the other people in the forum said. I'm too scared to go back and see what else has been written recently. So, anyway, I wasted one spare slot of time feeling stupid and demoralised, and the rest of the week has been busy with stuff.

I have been vaguely trying to continue the book, but that too has suffered from the all-engulfing morass that is summer holidays.

One night Hubby insisted on taking me to 'movie night' on camp. This consisted of sitting next to the padre, watching a pirated copy of Star Trek on a not-very-big screen. The sound quality was dreadful, and something in what looked like Russian kept popping up on the screen. Hubby told me there would be ice-cream, which was true, but you had to wait until the very end to get some, and it was only vanilla or chocolate. Also, I was under the misapprehension that Star Trek would be a comedy, because it had Simon Pegg in it. Well, he was quite funny, but the rest of it really wasn't. There were, however, lots of boys being sweaty and macho, and lots of explosions in space. Remind me never to watch a film that has 'Star' in the title ever again.

So, Hubby was officially starts his summer leave today. It's a Saturday, and he is on leave, so of course he went into work. Luckily Son and Twins were too busy making a royal palace out of the sofas this morning to notice.

Hubby also says he will have to go into work on Monday as well. This is because he has to 'populate his Ojar'. No, I don't know what that means, either. I think it's to do with filling in a form to say what job he'd like next. But of course it wouldn't be the army if you actually used a language people could understand to explain things. 'Populate' apparently means writing, although it does leave me with the image of Hubby drawing lots of stick men and their houses all over a big piece of paper in blue crayon and sending that to someone important behind a big desk somewhere.

Anyway, he is at least off tomorrow and I have booked transport to take us to Bouddha, a big buddhist stupa on the other side of town (which also handily has lots of nice shops and cafes around it, so we can pretend to be culturally-minded, whilst actually doing what we normally do, which is drinking coffee and eating cake).

Anyway, must go, Hubby is turning the sitting room back from a royal palace into a sitting room and he keeps shifting me off various chairs and sofas, so I think I'll have to get out of the way and let his inner interior designer hold sway for a bit (I have to say the big sofa does look much better under the standard lamp, but I'm less convinced by the crown and ballet shoes placed artfully in the centre of the rug).

Cheerio x

ps - I ate sheep's stomach today, and it was quite nice. A bit like pork scratchings, but soggier.

I am the Queen of 1980s music triv!

I have just taken a 1980s pop quiz via Facebook and got a score of ninety per cent. And because I live a vapid and spiritually denuded existence, I am actually quite proud of the fact (although gutted that I got Ah-Ha's origins wrong - I always thought they were from Sweden, but no, apparently Norway, who would have thought? Not me, obviously. And incidentally, if you take the quiz now and get more than 90% I will assume it's because I've just given you the Ah-Ha answer, and so that counts as cheating, so you really didn't beat me at all. No, you didn't, okay).

Today the Darlings left (sob). They were a very nice family with about a million children (well, okay, four), including a set of twins the same age as mine. I will miss having them around, not just because they were v.nice, but also because it was good to have someone else around who understands the whole chaotic extreme parenting thing. Farewell then, Darlings!

I'm sitting here blathering on to you, waiting with baited breath for Son to finish making his Star Wars Lego Droid bomber. I'm not sure if I can write any more as the anticipation is killing me, and my hands are shaking too much to type. This is almost as exciting as the day I received my fat-busting shoes in the post. But not quite.

Will write more details of my thrilling summer holidays very soon x

yakult and immelda marcos

Right, I’m really sorry. I know it’s been a whole week, but it is the school holidays, and I have been busy looking at ever more complex and impressive Lego spaceship designs, and putting dresses on Barbie dolls, amongst other important things.

On Monday I took Twins on a playdate. Their little friend has the best-ever dressing-up wardrobe (well, if you’re a four-year-old girl), which includes a Snow White costume, complete with headband, and an Ariel-the-mermaid one as well as many, many others. She is surely the Immelda Marcos of nursery, and Twins will be keen to stay in her good-books so they can spend hours floating around looking utterly beautiful, gracious and princess-like.

Talking of good books, Son has been hoovering up books at a scary rate. Luckily I have found a bookshop that does cheap Secret Seven books, as well as Roald Dahl (although he’s read most of those now) and Harry Potter. They even have a childrens’ book club, starting this week, which is fab, and doubly fab because the bookshop is right next to a very nice café. It is always nice to combine a good book with a large latte and perhaps a chocolate brownie, I find. The bookshop owner also says they are thinking of starting a creative writing club too, which I will have to join, even though it’s very scary having to read out your own work to other people. I’m so excited about it all, and equally so depressed that we’ll be leaving here in a year’s time, and will probably be posted to some godforsaken army camp where the closest thing I’ll get to culture is a pot of Yakult.

Happy Holidays

So, today being the last day of term, I spent a pleasant morning in the spa, in anticipation of the stress to follow. Thus I ended up late for the end-of-term assembly, and in a state of blissful stupefecation. This is the best way to approach the end-of-term assemblies, I now realise, as they tend to be a strange combination of tedium ('so-and-so came third in the primary table tennis championship, so lets give them a good clap') and high emotion ('it's just been such a privilege to teach at a wonderful school and I will miss you all so very much'), topped off with the whole school singing 'Give me one moment in time (while I'm racing with des-tin-y!)...' Most parents therefore started the school holidays red-eyed and wrung-out, with kids stir crazy from having to sit still for a full hour-and-a-half through the proceedings. But not me, no siree, Bob! (By the way, does anyone know who sang the original of 'Give me one moment in time'? It's really bugging me. I keep thinking Beverley Craven or Oleta Adams, but it's not, is it?)

So, now in my serene post-spa state I am well able to cope with having two of the kids' friends over for a sleep over this evening. At the moment the twins are running about outside in their pants, and Son and his friends are playing some complicated game involving climbing the mango tree and zooming about on bikes and scooters.

Eventually I suppose I will have to be evil mother and announce bed time - but maybe I'll wait until the wailing, falling over and head traumas start.

Happy holidays! xxx

goodbye Vasu!

As I've mentioned, Hubby is a right old teacher's pet when it comes to our Nepali lessons (the teacher, who is a well-known local writer says he plans write a short story about Hubby). However, it turns out that Hubby is not everyone's favourite. Yesterday the teacher asked our cook who she liked best, me or Hubby and she chose me, hurrah. When asked why, she replied that I was always happy and he was always angry. The teacher tried to play this down, saying it would have been culturally inappropriate for her to say she liked the husband of another woman. This may be true, but I'm not sure that the cultural appropriateness extends to her adding that he's always in a huff. Oh, yes, and this conversation took place in Nepali, and I understood it, so I am learning something. Ah, how my self-esteem is soaring at the moment. And another thing, I sacked Vasu and it was totally painless. Although now I'm left with the problem of grumpy taxi drivers (two of whom I have exited their cabs before the journey even started, for various reasons), and motorbikes zooming through monsoon puddles and splashing me. But I can cope with this, just so long as I'm not saddled with paying a grumpy teenager to make me feel uncomfortable and apologetic about asking him to do his blooming job.

School holidays are looming, and the rain is falling...

Tomorrow is my last full day of child-free freedom, as they are only doing a half-day on Friday (and, yes, I do plan to spend that last precious morning in the spa, since you ask!).