We hates steps with overhangs, preeeecious!

Daddy took Max to work today and Max tripped on the marble steps to the main building because there are 1″ overhangs on each one… there is no apparent reason to have overhangs on steps, other than to make people (especially children) trip on them. Max hit the lip of the next step with his face and his canine tooth cut the inside of his mouth… Tears! Pain! Much sadness and shock!
Luckily, daddy had milk ready in the car. Milk makes everything better.

Max loves bitter melon (bitter gourd)

How very, very strange. We’ve never heard of a child liking this stuff. Bitter melon is called mara in Thai, and nigauri in Japanese (goya in Okinawan). It’s much the same in both countries, although we’ve found the Japanese variant (the one used in famous Okinawan dishes such as chanpuru) to be more bitter and astringent. The Thai version is a paler green than the Japanese ones.
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Basically, in all three cultures it is recognized as having beneficial medicinal properties (hypoglycemic effect and antioxidant activities). To be quite honest, the Japanese variety was too astringent for my taste; the ones we are getting here in Thailand (about 16 inches long and almost as thick as a baseball bat) are just bitter enough to be interesting but not overpowering. Nam likes the full smack-you-in-the-face flavor of the Japanese version. I’ve noticed that more girls than guys seem to like bitter melon, in Japan at least.
Nam made a nice soup with pressure-cooked pork short ribs and bitter melon tonight, and Max couldn’t stop eating it! We’re very happy and amazed that he often chooses sour/bitter foods over sweet ones. Sometimes it’s just mimicking behaviour, but other times he’s chosen, say, to lick a lemon multiple times even though it makes his face pucker up like an imploded fugu!
P.S. Only the darker outer ring of the melon is eaten, the pale inner flesh and seeds are thrown away.

Getting Musical (Thai Ranat Xylophone & Toy Snare)

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The Doraemon snare is a $5 cheapie we bought at the bicycle/toy store in Kalasin where we went to buy a baby seat for the nanny’s bicycle a month ago. The wooden xylophone is called a ranat (or more specifically, a ranat ek) which was donated to the Yoshida Instrument Collection by Tanaka-sensei, a close friend who is leaving Sarakham at the end of the month. The ranat is tuned by placing wax lumps along the underside of each wooden slab; all of these have fallen off and we need to find somebody who knows how to tune it. Hopefully there will be someone at Nam’s university since they have a big music department.
His majesty’s wooden throne was obtained separately but it’s like the coolest chair I’ve ever seen. I really want a bigger one since my big ass won’t fit in this one.

The fever has passed… (Dimetapp flashbacks kick ass)

But I felt strangely drawn to reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez as strongly as I usually feel like watching TV after popping heavy duty cold medicine. I realized that reading 100 Years of Solitude in Spanish is quite manageable after having read it in English before (at university), even not having spoken more than a couple lines of Spanish since high school. But maybe I was just fever-hallucinating, who knows?
A kind of trippy thing happened though. After the fever passed this afternoon I went shopping and bought ingredients for chicken soup, including a whole chicken. I bought it at the supermarket so it was cleaned and gutted, but when I tore off the package wrap and took it out of its styrofoam coffin I saw that the head was still attached and tucked under the body. It was Pinky, come to visit Daddy from the grave!
Believe me, it was quite hard to cut off the neck from the body and then the head from the neck with a pair of kitchen scissors. I kept expecting a Pet Sematary scene with dead eyes suddenly popping open and pale beak pecking at my hand… It was soon all done, however, and the soup is delicious.

RIP Pinky

I was away on a scouting trip for our upcoming International Camp all today and seem to have come down with something nasty, hopefully not the piggy flu.
The worst news today, though, is that a stray dog came into our yard, snapped Pinky’s neck, and carried him off. Nam saw the carrying off part and knows which dog it is. Vengeance will be mine…

The second baby kicks harder

I’m not even sure if I ever really felt Max kick or not when holding my hand up to Nam’s belly. I thought I did, but I can’t be sure. No such thing with the next baby, though – she’s in there jumping up and down every day and night. It seems as though specific poses or actions set her off; when Nam lays on one side, the baby gets really active for some reason. Even Max has felt her kick now, which brings me to my second point: It seems that Max now thinks that all even slightly plump women are PREGNANT. This has turned into something of an inside joke, usually ending when the girl asks, “why are you kissing my belly, Max?”
Well, he thinks there’s a baby in there!