Our First Hike

One of the really great things about Tajikistan is the hiking.  When we were here the first time, we did a lot of hiking.  I love being outside, and I love exploring, so hiking is the perfect excuse to be outside for extended periods of time while exploring new places.  There are endless hikes in Tajikistan - literally any creek or river has a path next to it - and the only limiting factor is how far you want to drive for a day hike.  

I have been warning my family for months that the hiking was going to resume once we got to Dushanbe, and they have been dreading the resumption of them for months.  Until this past weekend, they've been able to avoid hiking as life has been busy with social activities, Brandon's work, settling in, and birthdays.  But this weekend was free, and when asked if the children would rather stay home on Saturday or go out (and hike), they all voted to go out (and hike).  So we went for a hike.

I had heard about an abandoned amethyst mine that wasn't too far outside the city, so we decided to go there for our first hike.  William has developed (inexplicably) a passion for amethysts, so he was very enthusiastic about the prospect of going to an amethyst mine where he could find his very own amethysts.  

A friend in the community had done the hike a few weeks earlier with his five year-old, so I figured that it wouldn't be a particularly difficult hike.  The hike was about 2 - 2/12 miles with 1500 feet gain in elevation.  Easy.  No problem.  We could theoretically have driven all of the way up to the mine, but the road reportedly got sketchy after a certain point, and part of the point was to hike, not just explore an abandoned mine.

The evening before our hike, a dust storm blew in, but we decided to head out anyway in the morning as we had plans and weren't going to let a little bit of dust stop us.  The temperature had dropped to the upper fifties, so Sophia decided that if we pretended that it was fog, it would make the whole day feel more like fall, which hasn't quite yet arrived in Dushanbe.

The drive to the hike was straightforward and easy - which was a good way to start out a hike, and not always the way that a lot of our hikes have started in the past.  We found the parking spot right before the road started developing serious potholes and ravines, parked the car (making sure to set the parking brake), and started walking.  Up.

After about twenty minutes of walking, Sophia turned to me and commented, "Somehow I managed to forget that hiking means taking a walk.  Up a hill.  I forgot about the up part." Elizabeth asked when it would all be over, and Brandon commented that his heel hurt from the three-mile run that he and Sophia had taken together the previous morning.  We had left Joseph home as he was sick with a cold, so there was one less person to complain, which was nice.

A good thing about this hike was that it was along a road, so there was lots of room to hike and it was clearly marked.  The unfortunate thing about this hike was that it was along a road, so it just kept going up, and up, and up with no break at all.  Usually hiking trails have some up, then maybe a little down, then some up, then some flat bits.  This was just up.  For two and a half miles.

Two and a half miles doesn't sound like a lot of distance, and usually it's not so bad on a flat road.  But hiking two and a half miles on an uneven gravel road that just keeps going up - for 1500 feet - is a much different prospect.  By the time we reached the mines, every single member of my family on that hike was very Not Happy with my decision to haul them out on a hike that Saturday morning.  Very. Not. Happy.

Thankfully the mine was at the top, and once the children started finding bits of amethyst scattered around the opening, all was forgotten and hopefully forgiven.  The mine was abandoned so theoretically we could have gone in and explored the passages (which friends have done), but we forgot our flashlights and Brandon wasn't very excited about the idea of exploring an abandoned mine.  Something about safety, I think.  

So instead we looked around both openings (there were two) and thought about how much rock had to be hauled out to make those long, dark passages leading deep into the mountain.  There definitely was no room for trucks, so most of the work was done by hand, and there was a lot of rock covering the hillsides around the mines.  

Sophia commented on how much more fun it is to go somewhere like an abandoned mine in Tajikistan, where it's literally just a hole in the side of the mountain where anyone who feels like it can go in.  There aren't any signs warning of the danger, no ropes keeping people out, and you can do anything you want because you're the one who will have to bear the consequences of any stupid decisions you make.  There are so many experiences that my children miss from not living in America, but sometimes I think that doing things like exploring abandoned mines make up for them a little bit.

By the time we started down, the children all had various rocks with bits of small purple amethyst embedded in them, treasures to be lovingly placed in their various hordes and carried around the world with them as a memory of that time we went to the amethyst mine.  Everyone was in a much better mood, which was helped by going down for two and a half miles instead of going up for two and a half miles.

While driving home in the car, everyone seemed to have forgotten their earlier trauma and were happy about the fun outing we went on.  Which makes me happy, because that means more hikes for me.

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth!

This week Elizabeth turned six.  She has been waiting to turn six for quite a long time, and has been counting down the months since this summer, the weeks since we arrived in Dushanbe, and the days for the last few weeks.  It's been a much-anticipated birthday.  

She had a very happy birthday, which started with crepes for breakfast, followed by a trip to the embassy to pick up mail and pumpkins.  Thankfully the mail included her birthday presents (I misjudged exactly how long the mail takes to make its agonizingly slow progress all the way to Dushanbe), so it was an extra happy mail trip.  

The rest of her day was filled with whatever she wanted to do, with the exception of a Russian lesson, and ended with a delicious dinner of Kraft macaroni and cheese (her choice), vanilla cake with vanilla frosting (also her choice), and the thing she'd been waiting for the last six months - presents!

One of the great things about being the youngest of seven children is that all your older siblings have the money, inclination, and ability to give you presents.  It was a toss up between Eleanor's present - a handmade blanket and halter for her model horse - and William's - a whole entire kilo of candy - for the best sibling of the day award.  

One of the great things about being six is that there are so many things that can make you happy.  It's nice to have a child who is thrilled with things like candy, books, dresses, and watercolor sets.  I love the easiness of making Elizabeth happy.

I remember when Kathleen turned six - she was the oldest of four children and I felt like she was halfway to being able to vote.  Compared to the ages of my other children - four, two, and not yet one, she was the wise, ancient one who I depended as my right-hand girl.  Six was such an incredibly useful, mature age.  She was in first grade! She could read! And more importantly, she could read to her siblings! She could follow directions and be trusted to actually do what I asked her to!

Elizabeth can do all of those things also - and some things that Kathleen couldn't do at six (like ride a bike) - but they're no longer wondrous any more because six people before her have already done them at all.  So instead of being my right-hand girl, she's my just-stay-little-a-little-longer girl.  But Elizabeth is just as eager to get big and grow up as her siblings were before her, so I will have to snatch my cuddles and story time and opportunities to carry her one last time where I can.  

It is bittersweet to have my last child be six years old.  I love that all of my children are completely independent now.  It's beautiful to tell them all to bathe themselves and get ready for bed - and they do it.  When we go out, it's no longer the crazy monkey circus that it used to be.  Traveling hardly counts as work any more.  My life is much calmer and I get a lot more done now.

But I also don't have babies falling asleep in my arms in that soft, boneless, bottomless sleep that only a baby can fall into.  I can't fix all of life's problems with a kiss and a cuddle, and the height of happiness can't be found in a wild round of tickling.  

That part of my life has ended, and I will never return to it.  It felt endless while I was in it, but now it feels like it passed in the blink of an eye.  Time is like that - it plays tricks on you while you're not looking or paying attention and your seeming eternity of young children is gone forever.

However, Elizabeth is still only six and hasn't yet left me for good, so I intend to enjoy all of the sweetness of a six year old girl that still writes me love notes and wants a story (or three) every night.  There's no need to rush; she'll have time enough to grow up.

Using My Russian Skills

A decade ago, I started the long and difficult process of learning Russian.  We were living in Dushanbe the first time, and had already lived in Azerbaijan (where a lot of Russian is spoken) for the previous two years.  Brandon had recommended that I learn Russian, but I was resistant.  Life was busy, I was lazy, and learning Russian didn't sound like it would be any kind of enjoyable (spoiler alert: it wasn't).

But when we moved to Dushanbe, I finally got a tutor for the kids's school and reluctantly attended the three times a week hour-long sessions.  I spend three years learning Russian in Dushanbe and continued in Tashkent.  After three years more in Tashkent, I declared myself workably functional in Russian, and quit to spend more time painting.

When we were bidding on posts after Tashkent, we originally thought to get out of the region, as two posts in Central Asia is enough for most people.  But when we started looking around at other places, I realized that moving somewhere else meant that I was going to have to learn yet another language, starting again from scratch.  

After spending six years making it to functionally workable Russian, it was awfully nice to be able to get around all by myself and get stuff done without having to panic, ask for help, or resort to my phone for translation help.  I could read all the labels at the grocery store.  When someone asked me a question, I could not only understand what they were saying, I could also answer back (even if it wasn't gramatically correct, it was understandable).  I could hold a conversation, even if it was basic.  All of those skills make living in a foreign country a lot more doable.  You aren't constrained by your lack of language ability, and so you're not restricted to activities that limit your language interactions.  It's very freeing.

So instead we bid on Astana.  Astana, the second coldest capital in the world, was always on my anywhere-but-there-list.  However, when push came to shove, it turned out that my desire to avoid living in a country where I couldn't speak the language was greater than my desire to avoid living in a place that is below freezing for a third of the year.  

And after we were done with Astana, it made sense to just keep going with the whole Russian-speaking theme, so we bid on Dushanbe.  Because if you've done Tajikistan once, you can do it again - especially when they're paying you a whole lot of money to do it again.

Having done Dushanbe once with no Russian (gradually transitioning to very rudimentary Russian) and now doing Dushanbe with workable Russian, I must say that it's a whole lot easier to get things done when you can speak Russian, even if it is with incorrect cases and miming to fill in the blanks.  

When I got an orthodontist recommendation from a friend who has lived here for almost a decade, I didn't have to ask if he spoke English.  And when I went to the first appointment and he didn't speak English, I was able to have a functional conversation about orthodontic treatment, x-rays, and timelines all in Russian.

When we had to get x-rays at another clinic, I was able to get registered, pay for (thank heaven now for all of those painful drills with numbers), and follow the instructions at the dental clinic.  

I borrowed my friend's driver - who only speaks Russian and Tajik - this week to go and buy plants.  I was able to have conversations about the costs of plants, borrowing money, repotting plants, whether or not prices were reasonable, and what kind of plants I was looking for.

When I went to another plant shop, I was able to conduct all of my business talking about plants, choosing plants, discussing discounts, where my car was parked, and having to return to pay more money because I didn't have enough (it turns out that houseplants here are very expensive) in Russian - and I didn't even get flustered.  

We've hired a gardener to turn our clay-soil weed patch into grass, and he also speaks only Russian.  We've had lots of conversations about various things he has needed to get, how much it costs, when he'll be back, how to take care of the newly planted grass seed, and various other things around the yard.

It has been incredibly helpful to be able to speak Russian.  I will never sound amazing, and the finer points of what everyone is saying will probably always be lost to me, but my language skills let me get the job done.  And being able to get the job done has made my life here a lot easier, which is a nice thing to have when you're living in Dushanbe.

Barricade Runner

This week Vladimir Putin came to town.  He comes to Dushanbe from time to time, but according to Brandon, there are various levels of visits with various levels of protocol.  The visit this time was a state visit, which means that there is a lot of fuss (and a whole lot of flowers, judging by the media photos).  

He and President Rahmon went and saw a lot of stuff - factories, parks, government buildings - and they even dropped by the Russian school that is located next to our neighborhood.  I got to watch a little media clip about his visit, which included a long section about the school and how all the kids there are evidently quite excited about learning Russian.  My favorite part of the clip was when the camera panned over to the embassy (the next-door neighbor of the Yuri Gagarin Russian school), and the newscaster excitedly told his audience that they also speak Russian at the U.S. Embassy.  See - even the Americans want to speak Russian! 

Which, to be fair, is at least true for these Americans associated with the U.S. Embassy, as we're paying teachers a lot of money to teach all six of our kids three times a week.  So he's not wrong.  

All of these visits have caused complete chaos throughout the city for the past few days.  Because every time the whole entourage goes anywhere, the roads get shut down.  And they're not shut down for just a few minutes - they're often shut down for over an hour so that a few cars can spend a few minutes driving down them without having to be bothered by the cars and traffic caused peons driving on the road.  Schools have been closed, bazaars have been shut down, and half the employees at the embassy have been teleworking because they can't get in to work.  

The schedule for road shut downs might possibly be announced in advance, but if they are, nobody has been telling us.  Since Putin showed up on Thursday, our community chat has mainly consisted of people reporting the locations of closed roads.  These reports are often accompanied by a picture of stopped traffic, as the exact location of roads that are currently closed is unfortunately only known by getting stuck in the closure.  

Our family has been able to avoid all of these road closures because: 1. the kids are homeschooled and 2. Brandon walks to work.  A hermit lifestyle can be useful sometimes.  

On Friday morning, however, I had an orthodontist appointment for the kids.  It probably wasn't the wisest plan to schedule the appointment when I knew that roads would be shut down, but I found alternate routes just in case I ran into a road closure.  However, luck was on my side, and the road was not only open, but quite clear Friday morning.  The consult went well (according to the orthodontist, Joseph's mouth will be a 'complicated case'), and I was happy to find someone who could get to work on both Joseph and Edwin.  

During the consult, the orthodontist informed me that the boys both needed x-rays, which were not availabe at his clinic.  However, they gave me a referral card with a map, and told me that I could just walk in to the other clinic and get them done that day.  I looked at the map, noted that the clinic was much closer to the excitement than the orthodontist, and decided to gamble.

This time, however, I lost.  We made it to within a block of the clinic before coming a complete standstill.  Not one to give up with my goal in sight, I was able to make it through three lanes of traffic (Tajik drivers are much nicer than Kazakh ones), pull a u-turn, and park on a side street so that we could just walk to the clinic.  Which was, sadly, closed.

The kids and I hiked back to the car, hopped in, and then couldn't go anywhere.  Now both sides of the roads were closed and we were going to have to just wait until it opened up again - whenever that would be.  I turned off the car, opened the windows, and settled in for the long wait.  After about fifteen minutes, one of the drivers in front of me started making motions for me to back up.  He was quite insistent about it, so I started backing up, thinking that he needed to back up himself.  

After I had backed up, he started motioning for me to pull around all the other cars waiting to be released from road-closure purgatory.  Mystified and unsure, I pulled around the cars, but stopped at the truck that was blocking the road.  My Tajik friend motioned wildly - go around the truck he seemed to be saying.

So I went around the truck and onto the road, where there was a policeman stopping traffic.  I stopped when I saw him, but then he started waving at me.  But it wasn't to stop - it was to go.  Unsure why my diplomatic status entitled me to drive down a blocked road when everyone else had to wait, I hesitated.  "Go! Go!" he shouted at me in Russian, and so I went.  Red plates for the win.  I had no desire to see how much longer we had to wait, and a desire for equality rarely persists when you get the better end of inequality.  

Yesterday, we took the kids to the pool.  The current temperatures in Dushanbe are about on par with a warm July in Astana, so we're enjoying our extended summer immensely while chortling about the current sub-freezing temperatures that those in Astana are suffering.   It was a lovely day - warm, sunny, and cloudless, with the sky a deep blue.  The kids enjoyed the novelty of swimming in October - this exact same weekend a year ago saw Sophia pulling on snow pants to go walk a dog - and after about an hour we headed home.

Normally, we just walk to the embassy, as it's just about as quick to walk as to drive (the traffic patterns necessitate driving about three times the actual distance because we can't turn left), but not wanting to tromp down the road in wet swimsuits following our swim, we just drove.  Happy from having had a nice swim, everyone piled into the car, and I started pulling out of the embassy - only to be met by another policeman frantically waving his stick.

This time he was most definitely not telling us to go.  Unsure of how long this newest road closure would last, we sat and waited.  When the road continued to stay closed, we parked and waited.  When the road was still closed, we went back to the pool - it's always better to wait at the pool than in the car.

There was another family stuck at the pool also, so we waited together.  After awhile we were joined by other inmates who had been refused exit by the stick-waving man.  The waiting started patiently, but after another half hour, it started to get more impatient.  By the second half hour, it turned to grumbling.  And by the third half hour, plans were made.  

If we all went out together maybe our stick-waving friend couldn't stop everyone at once.  After all, what could one man with a stick do against a crowd of irritated American diplomats intent on escaping their containment?  We had cars.  He had a stick.  The stick always loses.  

So we all gathered up our things and our courage.  I hustled the kids into the car.  Everyone buckled up their seatbelts.  I scouted out the stick-waving man.  Still there.  The cars slowly backed out of their parking spaces and lined up while a local staff member looked on.  Would it work?  Would we get stopped?  What would they do?  What could they do?  

My hands were shaking as they gripped the steering wheel.  I'm an American.  Part of being an American is following the rules.  When the light turns red, you stop.  When the road says 'one way,' you don't drive down it.  When there's a line at the DMV, you stand in it.  Everyone following the rules is what makes the US functional - it's what is done.  Breaking the rules is, well, against the rules.  

But I was committed, and at the head of the line of cars.  I gunned the engine, headed for the exit, and turned right.  As we approached, our stick-waving friend jumped out and wildly started waving his stick.  I kept driving.  He added his whistle to his stick-waving.  I drove faster.  Seeing that the stick and whistle weren't deterring us, he started shouting.  Brandon waved at him as we blew past.

Having escaped the embassy, we roared down the road to our neighborhood, just past the now-infamous Yuri Gagarin Russian School.  Passing plainclothes men patrolling the sidewalks (this time not just the roads, but the sidewalks were shut down), more policemen, and several police cars, we pulled a hard left into our neighborhood - which was filled with more policemen, more cars, and more men in dark suits looking official and looming.  

We punched through and finally made it to our street, which was blissfully empty.  Pulling into our gate, I sat for a moment, calming down from my nerve-wracking experiment with rule-breaking.  I don't care what other people say - it isn't fun to break the rules.  

Shortly after, I read through our neighborhood chat and found out the reason for our containment - Putin and Rahmon had been meeting at a house one street over.  I can only imagine what all of those security people thought when they saw a red-plated American diplomatic car roaring past all their measures meant to keep the rest of the world separated from the two presidents having a quiet tet-a-tet.  Hopefully it only involved head-shaking for the arrogance of Americans and nothing more.

Thankfully Putin has left, the road closures have ended, and life (and traffic) can continue in its usual pattern.  But I've learned my lesson.  Next time any president comes to town for any kind of state visit, and most especially the Russian president, I'm not pressing my luck.  I'm not going to take my chances, I'm not going to flirt with rule-breaking, and I'm not going to try and drive anywhere.  I'm just staying home.  

Skip Ahead a Few Years

I have let this blog lapse over the past few years.  Writing in it had become a chore, I had become lazy, and it was easy to stop.  However, my children have begged me to recommence this blog because they love reading through the family stories.  They have been asking me for quite some time, and so with a fresh start in a new place I've made a resolution to pick the stories up again.  At this point, I'm pretty sure that this is just a public family record, but that's okay with me.

We are now living in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, back after a seven-year absence.  When Brandon was bidding on his next post while we were in Astana, I floated the idea of returning to Dushanbe.  Brandon doesn't care much for lobbying, we've been in Central Asia for a decade, it's not hard to get a job in Dushanbe, and they're paying us a lot of money to be here - plus extra R&R flights.  

Having enjoyed his economic job in Astana, he decided to bid on an economic job in Dushanbe.  As he speaks Russian, he out-year bid (bidding a year earlier than everyone else) in 2023.  And since Dushanbe is a hard place to get people to come to, he got to bid early, in May of 2023 (normally the bid season is in October) There were, surprisingly, three other bidders for the job, and they were all actual economic officers so Brandon was not Dushanbe's first pick.  

When handshakes were handed out, Brandon didn't get an email and we resigned ourselves to bidding again in October.  Meanwhile, we went on our usual summer pilgrimage (also known as R&R) and moved on with life.  We were at Brandon's brother's house in Idaho playing whiffle ball one afternoon, and I checked my phone to see if anyone wanted something from me.  Waiting on the phone was an email offering Brandon a handshake for the job in Dushanbe.  I'm pretty sure nobody was as excited to go back to Dushanbe as we were that day.

Skip ahead a few years, and here we are, back in Dushanbe.  We arrived on Monday morning at 1 AM, which was a vast improvement on the 6 AM flight arrival time that we used to have to endure here.  We are now living in a neighborhood that is walkable distance to the embassy, and Brandon is much enjoying not having to fight morning traffic to get home every evening.  

I can't say that Dushanbe itself has many charms that we have been missing - it's just bigger, dustier, and more crowded than the last time around - but I'm very, very happy to be able to swim in September instead of dreading impending death of another Kazakh winter.  I could never make my peace with cold so deep that it would kill you if you weren't dressed properly.  

I'm also happy that our favorite housekeeper we've ever had, Zarifa, is still working for embassy families and was willing to come and work for us again.  Her first day is Tuesday, and she has promised to come with pumpkin sambusas to welcome us back to Dushanbe.  Good household help makes life so much easier, and having good household help that already knows my preferences is amazing.  I may not be within thousands of miles of the closest Target, but I do have someone to come and clean my four-story house every week.  There are always compensations.

More than anything, however, I am most happy to be here, mostly unpacked, and not moving for another three years.  After our two-month sojourn in the US, I would be happy to be just about anywhere I could unpack my suitcases and not have to pack them up again shortly.  The diplomatic lifestyle reels that make it look and sound glamorous are truthful, but they only show a small percentage of the entirety of our lives - and a lot of it is anything but glamorous.  However, all those less-glamorous parts do help you to appreciate the small luxuries in life - like being in a place that is now home, if only for the next three years.

Summer Bedtimes

Astana is, by far, the most northern place we've ever lived.  Brandon and I have, surprisingly, spent a lot of our marriage hanging out around 40 degrees north, only dipping below when we in Cairo, at 30 degrees north.  Astana, by contrast is at 51 degrees north, about the same latitude as London and Calgary.  Each degree of latitude is about 69 miles, so we've moved about 700 miles north of our usual stomping grounds.

Being this north has the expected effect of making everything a lot colder.  Winters here are very cold, summers aren't that hot, and the cold lasts several months more than we're used to.  I was mentally prepared for the winter, but I wasn't prepared for the extended spring that really didn't give way to warmer days until the end of May.

I also knew that being further north would have an effect on daylight hours.  Because of Astana's place in the timezone, the sun rises pretty late in the winter.  At winter solstice, the sun wouldn't creep above the horizon until almost 9:30 in the morning, an hour into our school day.  It wasn't as bad in the evening, with the sun setting just past 5 pm.

What I hadn't considered about daylight hours is the effect it's had on the summertime sunlight hours.  I knew that it would make for nice, long summer evenings.  I love long summer evenings, those times when winter is a distant memory and it feels like the lazy days will last forever.  We live in a neighborhood that is pleasant to walk in, so Brandon and I will often take evening walks after the kids are in bed and enjoy being outside when it is both light and warm.  

I knew that the summertime evenings would be long, but I didn't realize exactly how long they would be.  I'm writing this around 8:30 in the evening, and the sunshine is still coming into my western-facing windows.  The sun won't set until just past 9:30 and the last vestiges of light don't leave the sky until around 10:30 at night.  We're still ten days away from summer solstice (the saddest day of the year as the light starts going away), so we haven't reached peak daylight hours quite yet.

Usually, I'm a pretty strict bedtime person.  Half of the house is awake by 5 am, so everyone needs to get to sleep reasonably early.  I still have younger children, and they're much happier when they've gotten enough sleep.  Also, I want to have a little bit of downtime before my own bedtime - and that downtime doesn't happen when children are still partying.  I even send my high schoolers to their rooms by 8:30 or so - they'll often stay up talking or reading past that time, but they're shut in pretty early.  I know that Kathleen is in for a huge shock when she goes to college next year and is introduced into the world of late night everything.  

But these long summertimes evenings have made me have to readjust my early bedtime policies.  It feels like such a criminal waste of precious summer daylight to make everyone bundle off to bed when the sun is still pouring in the windows.  The winter is so long and so dark that I feel like we have to utilize every opportunity we have to be outside and enjoying flip-flop weather.  

Even if I wanted to send everyone off to bed at their regular hour, it would be pretty hard to convince them all it was sleep time when their circadian rhythms were saying something else entirely.  You can tell them to sleep, but it won't do much good if they're not actually sleepy.

So I've decided that we have a more seasonal approach to bedtimes.  During the long, dark, cold winters, bed is the only reasonable place to be in the evening.  It's cozy, it's warm (although our house isn't anything like cold in the winter), and it's the logical place to be.  But in the summer, it's time to relax and enjoy the beautiful long evenings.  School is out, the kids don't have to get up so early, and everyone can enjoy summertime when the living is easy.  Winter will come soon enough, so we might as enjoy what we can while we can - and that most definitely includes long summer evenings.

Spring, the Best and Worst Season

Spring has finally arrived in Astana.  The nights are above freezing, and all of the trees have started leafing out.  We have our windows open all the time, and the city shut off the heating.  The sun rises while I'm exercising and sets after the time the children are put to bed.  The children have to mow the lawn this week, and I've put my tomato and basil plants outside.  

I love spring.  It's my favorite season.  I love the new, bright green color of all the leaves as they emerge.  I love the flowers.  I love the longer days.  I love the first strawberries of the season, leading into summer fruits and vegetables.  I love putting away my winter clothes, and wearing sandals or flip-flops every day.  Spring is the season where life, light, and warmth return to the world, washing away the memories of a time when they were hiding.

Spring here is even more wonderful than in every other place that we've lived.  After five months of continual snow cover, seeing green grass again feels like a miracle.  When going outside in the winter requires multiple layers of clothes, simply walking out the door with no thought at all is an unalloyed pleasure.  And enjoying the long, long evenings is recompense for all those short winter days when the sun didn't peek over the horizon until after nine in the morning.  

The entire city has turned green, and every time I drive somewhere, the bushes are a little more covered in new leaves, more trees have decided to come out of dormancy, and I've even spotted a few flowers peeking out.  All of the people have come out of hiding also, with the shrieks of children playing in the neighborhood playground floating through the warm evening air long past the time when our own children have been put to bed.  Eleanor has asked if perhaps they too could have a night or two a week when they could enjoy the long evenings.  Our neighbors can be seen outside, working in their gardens and yards, just as happy to be outside as the children are.  

The only complaint I have about spring here is that it is so late.  The city turned off our heating the last week of April - and we've still had several below-freezing nights after they turned the heat off.  The house is, ironically, colder now than it was in the depth of winter.  I remember when we regularly filled out pool in Uzbekistan during the first week of April - and I'm pretty sure the river was still frozen over the first week of April here.

I'm used to seeing the trees leaves start peeping out in March, not May.  I grew up in North Carolina, where daffodils will sometimes come up in February - here there are no daffodils, as the bulbs would all freeze and die over the winter.  I've seen a few irises and tulips - which I'm used to seeing bloom in March or April - but I think that I won't see any flowers from them until June.  Our neighbor's apple tree is just about to come into bloom.  In Uzbekistan, it's already cherry and apricot season.  Here, the apricot trees haven't even bloomed yet.

The worst part about spring being late is that it is something that we all want so desperately.  I've found that it's been easier to bear the cold winter months because they're winter months.  They're colder than any winter months I've ever experienced, but winter is always cold.  One doesn't expect to wear flip-flops in winter, because it's winter.  Even March wasn't too bad - we were so excited about the snow finally melting that the warmer temperatures (sometimes above freezing) felt like a gift.

But once I got to April, I was ready for spring.  April is never a winter month, it's a spring month.  It's the month where we can look forward to seventy-degree days and flowers and green.  April in Astana is not a spring month.  It's a month of teasing when the weather pretends that it's considering warming up before hitting you with the heaviest snowfall of the year.  The days get longer and the light looks like it should be warm and springlike, but it isn't.  Instead, it's an entire month of frustrated desire.

Brandon is probably tired now of all my complaining, but it kills me to see all the cherry blossom pictures when the trees outside our windows still look like dead sticks.  Even Brandon, who likes winter, had to agree that it's just wrong for the trees to wait until May to leaf out.  The months of warmth (temperatures above seventy) here are definitely shorter than the cool and cold months, so having those days take so long to show up just feels like robbery.  

Thankfully, we have finally, finally made it past false spring and into real spring.  When I think of winter, it's a bad memory that I shudder away from.  I'm looking forward to another beautiful, glorious Kazakh summer where it's hardly ever dark and I almost never have to turn on the air conditioning.  It's gonna be great.  And when the little voice in my head whispers that winter will return, I tell it to shut up.  It's finally made it to the warm and it's beautiful part of the year, and I intend to fully enjoy it.  

Edwin Wins the Prize

There are certain milestones that come with parenting.  Some milestones are good ones - first smile, first piano recital, first day of school.  And then there are the other kind - first time staying up all night with a sick child, first child in the hospital, first major home damage caused by a child.  I feel like we've been really lucky in the bad milestones, especially with health.  I've been especially grateful for this while living in countries where medical care isn't always well-equipped to deal with emergencies.  

I've always known that, statistically, one of my children would eventually break a bone.  With seven children, there's no way that I could escape that milestone.  Ironically, I was the first one in the family to break a bone in 2020.  But last week, Edwin took the prize for the first child to break a bone.

After I had gotten up from my Sunday nap, Edwin came and asked if he could get some ibuprofen.  Edwin never asks for any kind of medicine, so the warning flags immediately went off.  I asked him what was wrong.  "Oh," he casually told me, "I was chasing Joseph outside and slipped on some snow and fell down.  It's fine.  It just hurts a little.  But it's not broken or anything.  Definitely not broken.  I'm fine."

I gave him the ibuprofen and grabbed his arm for inspection, not trusting the judgment of a thirteen year-old boy who doesn't like to cause problems for adults.  I moved my way down his forearm until he started wincing.  I checked for swelling, which was already noticeable.  Then I had him move his arm.  

He waved it around in the air.  "See," he showed me, "I can move it just fine.  It doesn't hurt."  I looked at him and told him to stick his arm out and rotate his hand back and forth.  "Well," he hedged, "I'd rather not.  It's kind of uncomfortable."  When I moved it for him, his face was a dead giveaway.  I called Brandon to come and give a second opinion.

"I think that Edwin broke his arm," I told Brandon, "but I know that I tend to jump to the worst possible scenario.  Could you look at it?"  Brandon inspected it and agreed that yes, he'd probably broken it.  We called the local doctor that works at the embassy and told her the story.  Yes, she sighed, it would be necessary to bring him in and check on it.  

Brandon loaded Edwin into the car and drove him up to the embassy.  Roza spent about two minutes inspecting his arm and announced, "It's probably broken."  So they headed over to the government hospital that had a functioning after-hours emergency department (private hospitals keep 9-5 hours).  

When they showed up, Brandon told me later, the emergency room was filled with children cradling various broken limbs.  Evidently the first warm weather of the spring combined with a lot of melting snow made for lots of scenarios similar to ours.  The doctor took a cursory look at Edwin's arm, announced that it was broken, and sent him over for an X-ray where they confirmed what everyone knew - Edwin had indeed broken his arm.  Ironically, his break was in almost exactly the same place that my own break was three years ago.  It wasn't as bad as mine (which wasn't too bad either), so he was quickly casted up and sent home.

Edwin has taken everything stoically and figured out how to do his life one-handed.  Thankfully spring has finally decided to stay, and he can wear flip-flops everywhere and doesn't have to get help to put on socks and shoes.  He also doesn't have to try and pull a coat over his cast.  It was good timing for breaking an arm.  

There have been some benefits for Edwin.  He has shed no tears over having to take a break in piano playing, and doesn't mind having to hand his dishwashing job off to another sibling.  Although he's still going to taekwondo three times a week, he doesn't have to do any pushups - but that won't be so great when we has to get back into condition after the cast comes off.  

As a whole, having a child with a broken arm hasn't been particularly stressful.  It helps that Edwin is old enough to figure out how to shower and dress himself and isn't inclined to whine anyway.  As a first broken bone, it's been very un-dramatic.  I'll be happy if he stays the only one with a broken bone, but I'm not holding my breath.  Statistics usually catches up to you in the end.

Thailand

This year for spring break, we went to Thailand.  We've enjoyed our spring break trips for the past two years, and so I've decided to make it a family tradition.  I'm enjoying having children that are old enough to travel fairly easily after so many years of always having babies to make things difficult.  We don't have that many years left in the Foreign Service and so we have to take advantage of travel opportunities when we can.

After making it through most of an Astana winter, our spring break this year was especially welcome.  I've decided that the first week of March is the best time to travel.  The anticipation and planning helps us make it through February and January, the coldest months, and by the time we get back in March, winter is nearly over.  

We decided to invite my parents to come and join us, and they eagerly took us up on the offer.  They're thoroughly enjoying their retirement and had just finished a trip to the Caribbean a week or so before crossing half the globe to come and join us.  The children were happy to have the undivided attention of the grandparents, and we were all happy to have an audience that kept us from getting too grouchy with each other.

After doing some research, I settled on Koh Samui, an island south of Bankok that isn't as heavily developed as Phuket.  I found a nice house on the south side of the island with an incredibly helpful Englishman as the host.  He booked all of our excursions for us, found and hired a chef, and even did all of our grocery shopping.  We were within walking distance of two completely deserted beaches, and the walk was through fields of coconut palms.  It was very nice and quiet.

We spent a lot of our time at the beach and in the pool.  When I asked the children about how many excursions they wanted to do, they all told me that too many would get in the way of our beach time.  The beach provides endless entertainment for everyone, and I'm perfectly happy to sit on the beach and watch them enjoy themselves.  

While we were not at the beach, we managed to fit in a tour of the island.  We saw two waterfalls, fed bananas to elephants, ate a delicious seafood lunch at a beachfront restaurant, visited numerous wats, a large Chinese statue, had fresh coconut ice cream, and visited a night market.  

My parents are I are all scuba certified, so we took a diving trip with Sophia, Edwin and Joseph.  The scuba sites were two islands up, so we had a speedboat all to ourselves with two dive instructors and crew.  We did two dives with lunch in between before heading back to Koh Samui.  All the children really enjoyed their first experience with scuba diving, and I had a nice time diving after an eighteen-year break.

We took the whole family on a boat trip to the Anthong Marine Park, a group of islands to the west of Koh Samui.  The trip was on a big boat with a lot of other tourists, and we visited two different islands on the trip.  Some of the family (not Elizabeth, whose legs were too short), climbed to the top of one island and enjoyed a lovely view.  Eleanor and I took a 'hike,' which consisted of scrambling up slopes with the aid of ropes, to a limestone cave.  We all got to do some kayaking and then hike up incredibly steep stairs to see an emerald lagoon at another island.  When I asked all the kids about their favorite part of the trip, they all said that the boat trip was their favorite part.

My favorite part of the trip was the chef.  Every day he spent five or six hours preparing amazingly delicious dinners.  When our host first sent us the menu, it was list with eight different dishes on it.  I asked him if I had to choose what I wanted, and he replied that those were the dishes for just one meal.  Every night we would have at least one curry, a salad, several meat dishes, some kind of rice, and dessert.  He cooked so much food that we could never finish all of it.  I knew Thai food was good, but I had no idea of the variety of dishes.  The kids all agreed that Thai food is the best food in the world.  I'm inclined to agree.

My other favorite part of the trip was the mangoes.  I love mangoes inordinately, and was overjoyed that Thailand's mango season had begun when we arrived.  I had mangoes every day, and smuggled several back in my suitcase so that we could enjoy them later.  I shouldn't have bothered trying to smuggle them, however, as just about every other passenger on the plane carried plastic crates of them on with them for the return flight.  

But even more than the mangoes and the food, I enjoyed having a lovely week with my family in a lovely place.  I don't have many more years left before the children start leaving me to start their own lives, and so these times together are even more precious.  These trips will be memories that we will all enjoy together for many years to come.  We are so blessed to have them.

Halfway Done With Winter

We are now halfway through our first winter here in Astana.  I have been afraid of winter ever since we got this assignment back in 2021, so it's a bit of a relief to have the first one halfway done.  Thanks to this first winter, I now have a new definition of winter - the time of year when the temperature stays below freezing nonstop.  So according to that definition, I've never actually experienced winter before.  

Surviving winter in Astana requires the same mental mindset as surviving nine months of pregnancy and 24+ long days of international travel.  You can't think about how much time has passed and you can't think about how much longer you have to go.  One has to exist in the eternal now, accepting your unpleasant situation as something that is endless.  "I have always been pregnant (or flying, or cold), I will always be flying (or cold, or pregnant), and there is not an existence where I am not cold (or flying, or pregnant)."  I've realized that the real pain comes from realizing that it's only been 30 minutes since you last checked on the flight progress and that you still have twelve more hours in the same cramped economy seat next to a restive toddler.  If time doesn't exist, the frustration and longing don't exist either.

Winter here is so long that it's more of a geographical location than a season.  Four and a half months sounds like a long time, but it's a much, much longer time when you're living through it.  At first the snow was a novelty, but now it's just an ordinary part of the landscape, as eternal as sunlight, the blue sky, and the progression of days.  In Astana, you don't live through winter, you live in winter.

All the children have been disappointed with the snow here.  We've had two or three decent snowstorms this winter, but there is less than 18 inches of snow in the flat places, which isn't enough to make anything fun with.  But even if we did have enough snow, there wouldn't be much to do with it as the snow never clumps - instead it has the texture of sand.  This is because the snow is too cold to adhere to itself - if you want to make snowballs, you have to wet the snow with water first.  

We've discovered this winter that cars won't start when it gets cold enough - usually below zero fahrenheit.  Thankfully the temperature usually stays above that most weeks and Brandon doesn't have a problem driving his Fit, which doesn't fit in our very small, heated, one-car garage, to work.  However, there are occasionally weeks when it gets really cold and the temperature doesn't get above zero for a week or so.  Our last moroz, as the locals call it, got down to -31 one night with a high of -20 the next day.  After those weeks are done and the temperature climbs back up to 'reasonable' temperatures, we have to jump his car as the cold has drained the battery.  

But even worse than the the cold is when it gets above freezing.  This has happened once this winter and we're still paying for it.  In an extremely bad sequence of weather, it snowed for a week and half.  The city does a good job of clearing the roads, sidewalks, and gutters with an amazing array of bulldozers, snowplows, skid steer loaders, people with shovels, dump trucks, and snow conveyer belt trucks, but they only have so many people and so much equipment, so the snow was still being cleared up when the temperature got above freezing for about 18 hours.  All of the piles of snow in the gutters and on the sidewalks and on the sides of the road got slushy.  The packed snow on the sidewalks and driveways melted partially.  Then the temperature dropped quickly below zero and further into the negative twenties and everything froze into mirror smooth sheets of ice.  All of the rutted slushy piles of snow turned into rutted piles of ice.  Thankfully I was checking weather, so after church Brandon and the boys spent two hours scraping off all the half-inch thick sheet of ice from our driveway and front walk before it froze solid and we couldn't get the car up the driveway.  But we were about the only ones in the entire city who did this, and I've seen videos of people ice skating down sidewalks.  Then it didn't snow for weeks and weeks on end, so the ice sheets just stayed ice sheets.  Gradually the sheets are being chipped and scraped off the sidewalks and roads, but it's still not all gone yet and everyone has to walk very carefully.

The children are enjoying the winter, which is good as they get kicked outside to play every afternoon.  We've had to make a sliding scale of how long they have to stay outside.  If the temperature is from zero to twenty degrees, they have to stay out for 90 minutes.  If it's below zero, they can go outside for an hour or stay in and run on the treadmill for twenty minutes.  If it's below negative fifteen, they don't have to go out at all.  

Our neighborhood has constructed a big sledding hill, about fifteen feet tall, complete with steps and wooden railings.  The children enjoy sledding down in various formations and doing tricks.  There is also a fenced-in soccer area that gets turned into a hockey rink in the winter.  To smooth the ice out, the groundskeeping crew just puts a new layer of water on top of the ice and it freezes to a new finish.  The children have enjoyed learning to ice skate, and that seems to be more popular than sledding.  I never thought that I would own multiple pairs of ice skates, but so far we have four and probably need another pair or two.  

Edwin and Joseph's favorite past time is digging in snow piles.  Our neighborhood doesn't plow the roads, but every now and then when the line between the road and the sidewalk becomes less distinguishable, the groundskeepers bulldoze the top layer of snow into large piles.  This was the snow that they made the sledding hill out of.  Some of the snow piles they trucked out of the neighborhood in dump trucks, but some they just left.  So Edwin and Joseph enjoy digging snow caves, spending hours tunneling them out.  

I still don't like winter, but I'm the one who stays inside for days at a time, so I can survive it.  It's like living with a constant, low-level noise in the background that you can ignore if you're focusing on something else.  I try not to think of summer or flip-flops or green grass, but instead just accept winter as my current reality.  I don't mind the cold so much in the day when it's sunny, but once it gets dark I have no desire to leave the house and will go to extreme lengths to avoid it.  I will be happy when the snow starts melting and I don't have to holler at children whenever they go outside and don't shut the door.  I'm not regretting having extended to a three-year tour, but I won't be sad to be done with Kazakh winters when we leave.  It will be pretty easy to find a post that has less long winters, as the only capitol with colder winters is in Mongolia.  

The upside of these winters is that I can live in a great many of the 'colder' places in the US and be perfectly fine.  I have no plans to move to North Dakota or Maine or Wisconsin, but it's nice to know that if I had to live there, I could always comfort myself with the fact that the winters aren't as cold, long, or dark as the ones in Astana.  It's always good to have a new low to compare things to.