Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
From today, Monday’s my only day off – and I’ll take it, because until now I didn’t have one (I was teaching at least TOEFL prep night classes every day, but they finished last week). I figure I’ll spend the morning drinking cafe creme and playing on the computer, clean the Crown’s spark plugs before it gets too hot, and go in to the office in the afternoon.
Max is staying home because there’s only one teacher at school (one quit and another’s at a seminar) today and he’s coming down with a cold or something. It’s easier to make sure he gets enough liquids and sleep at home… BUT HE AND MINA ARE FIGHTING EACH OTHER AAAAAAALLL THE TIIIIIIIIIME!
It doesn’t feel like a day off.
Even though I swore it’d never come to pass,
her first pair of shoes are ones that squeak.
Max is going through a long phase of clinginess and separation anxiety. In order to get him to go to school without crying, Nam tried taking Mina and P’Kaew (our nanny) in the car when she took him to school. That was over a month ago, and besides one time when he was in a funny mood and let daddy take him to school all alone, it’s how he has insisted on going to school every day since then. Oh, well.
Max hoards his safety cloths (“safety,” as in, “safety blanket”) a lot less than he used to, but has instead taken up the habit of changing clothes several times a day and showing them off. Before he went to bed, he was wearing his school uniform (which he never wears to school), but after Nam put him to sleep I noticed he was wearing street clothes. Hmmm.
His new favorite drink is chocolate milk (he’s been weaned from Ovaltine and Milo) with a giraffe illustration on the box, and his favorite food is anything that daddy or grandma makes.
He is super artistic and can sit and draw or paint for hours. He drew a recognizable face (a painting recognizable as a face, that is) in watercolor the other day and it really blew me away. Then he made me draw one and he complained there was no nose (I told him it was a picture of Michael Jackson). He also plays all kinds of music and is a great dancer (he did not get that from me).
He pretends to love Mina in front of other people, hugging her and smothering her with kisses. At least some of that is real. He’s our big boy now; we can give him complex commands and he usually does them ([A.] if he feels like it, or [B.] there is a sugary bribe involved).
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Mina is a big girl – she is smart, strong, and super advanced for her age. She makes other babies seem SLOW and FEEBLE. She is eleven months old and just this week started walking across the room of her own volition. She’s been able to take a few steps for a couple months, but now there’s no stopping her. For quicker applications, she still uses this crazy scrambling on all fours that I’ve mentally dubbed the “white wiggle tank.”
More than a few times, I’ve seen her fall and hit her head and maybe cry if it surprises her or she wants attention. Speaking of attention, when she wants it, she can get it instantly. She has a kind of mind control thing going. I saw her playing with my phone today, and she was pretending to talk into it, except that she can’t speak yet, so she was deeply concentrated on getting it to work through telepathy.
And yet, the most endearing things about her are the innocent baby parts. For instance, she thinks that our clay animal statues are alive (probably because I was treating them like they were alive in front of her by pretending they were biting me and so forth), and actually ran away crying when I chased her with one. Okay, maybe that’s not so endearing so much as me having fun being a dick to a baby, but still… Come to think of it, I’ve been pretending that many things are alive just to keep her away from them.
Like today, there was half of a dinner roll on the counter and I wanted to eat it, but I knew if Mina saw it, she would claim it first. So I cut a slit on it for a mouth, and pretended it wanted to eat her nose. She thought that was funny until it started munching on her ears, too, and then she didn’t want anything to do with it, so daddy took care of it for her and ate that bread monster right up. 😉
If I had time to watch a Zato, it might be this one. My tube time is currently divided between Baby Signing Time, Your Baby Can Sign, The Wiggles, Mickey Mouse (Motherfrakkin’) Clubhouse, Yo Gabba Gabba, and specially selected Sesame Street Episodes. I’ve found that many children’s shows/series get progressively worse with each season they are continued. Yo Gabba is the best example of this, but not the only one. Sesame Street followed this pattern for decades, until they started doing genius musical episodes again.
We did this for hours. At least I didn’t have to cut bait all day.
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Yesterday I came home for lunch and Mina was having a nap, so I decided to supervise. Pretty soon, we were snoring and drooling together. She gets super hot when she sleeps, just like me.
When I woke up, I smelled her head and thought about how long babies retain that newborn milky smell. My best guess is until six months or so. It may linger a bit longer than that, or it might just be your imagination.
Her escape technique is always the same: She looks cute and somebody picks her up in no time.
He will do anything to avoid going. Once he’s there, it seems that he has a great time, but he just hates going (this is how I felt about school at his age, too).
He is clever enough to say he is sick, and determined enough to say that he wants to go to the doctor and get a shot (!).
He will refuse food for over an hour, and then suddenly eat with gusto just as we’re about to go out to the car.
Once in the car, he will say he wants to eat this or that from a roadside vendor, or suddenly want to visit a specific place.
My favorite, though, is when he offered to stay home and clean his room:
Yes, I made him go when he was finished.
Getting rid of Bitty turned out to be a mistake. Max demanded to know where his pet had gone. Upon learning that Bitty had been returned to the pond (“to be with his friends…”), he threw an epic fit. It was so incredibly heart-rending and long, we all piled in the car. Destination: Pet store.
The main pet store in Maha Sarakham is five minutes from our house, but it seemed like ages with Max screaming the whole way. The last time I’d been there was a few years before, to buy charcoal for my DIY air/water purification project (mission status: Incomplete). I had been horrified to see the neglect of the fishtanks on display; a couple of them were filled with the black, rotting corpses of goldfish bobbing violently as the pumps merrily bubbled away. This time, there were no such horrors. We bought Max the smallest possible tank (ten inches by six?) with gravel and a pump, and decided on two attractively striped little bitties. We didn’t know it at the time, but this tank contained an anomalous zone with Strange Occurrences.
The best way to describe the Occurrences is with a timeline of the less than one-month span the aquarium was actually in operation, plus the follow-up period:
So the main mystery is: What happened to the fish? The simple explanation is that the crabs ate them. However, although this is perhaps a reasonable explanation for the second fish, the first fish was nearly as big as the small crab (the big crab wasn’t yet in the tank when the first fish disappeared). And there are other questions/factors as well:
The other major possibility is that the fish jumped out of the tank, but I never found them. The area around the table the tank was kept on was cluttered with baby seats and toys and whatnot, but I looked around everywhere more than once and still didn’t find anything.
Not having a satisfactory answer and not knowing eventually led me to consider alternative explanations:
I fear I will never know.
Does anybody out there have a better guess?
