Happy Birthday, Joseph!

Last week, Joseph turned fourteen.  Joseph's birthday is just over two weeks after Elizabeth's birthday and it always sneaks up on me.  I spend so much time making sure that I've got everything in order for her birthday that I forget about Joseph's coming up very soon afterwards.  The mail situation here is significantly worse than it was in Astana (it could sometimes get to Astana in ten days, and here in Dushanbe it takes a month at the fastest), so that has only made the consequences of my inattention worse.

Thankfully, Joseph is an incredibly low-key child, and didn't mind that we forgot it was going to be his birthday until a day of two before his birthday (it didn't help that it was on a Sunday this year).  He was very happy to have cold cereal for breakfast, and was fine when Sophia baked him cinnamon rolls instead.  And when the grocery store didn't have any bacon for BLTs (one day I will live in America where every single grocery store has bacon - and at least five different kinds!), he was just as happy to have tuna fish sandwiches instead.  His cake was the same as Elizabeth's had been - vanilla cake with vanilla frosting.

When it came time to open presents, there was only candy that some siblings had bought him and a duplo construction with the name of his present taped to it.  But he was still happy and grateful.  Joseph really just is a happy kid.  

It's funny to think that it has already been a year since we celebrated Joseph's thirteenth birthday in the hospital in London.  It feels like that much time shouldn't have passed already.  But when I look at the pictures from that birthday, he looks very much different.  Last year he was a big boy and this year he's a small young man.  He has grown about five inches, and the suit that fit him just fine for Kathleen's wedding in April now looks like he's trying to wear something that belongs to a younger brother.  His voice is toying with the idea of dropping, and his face is stretching out.  He is just an inch short of joining the taller-than-Mom club that will eventually include everyone in the entire family (and will grow larger as more in-laws join the party).

It's strange to have this happening again - my little boy turning into a young man - especially on the heels of Edwin's doing the same thing to me.  I only have one little boy left, and that is also for a limited time.  I really enjoy watching my children grow older and seeing who they will become.  It's fun to see the beginning lines of who they will be adults and imagine what that will look like when the process is done.  

Joseph will enjoy the status of 'most changed' when we leave here in less than three years.  He will have started out as a gawky thirteen year-old with horribly messed up teeth and will leave as an almost seventeen year-old with (hopefully) normal teeth, most - if not all - of his adult height, and one year left before he leaves us for good.  It feels like they take forever to stop being little children and then they turn into adults nearly overnight.  

Thankfully Joseph is still happy to have me hug him, kiss him, and do all of those affectionate Mom things that teenaged boys cringe at.  He will talk my ear off if I sit still long enough to listen to all of the things that fill his ever-churning mind and awesome things that he has planned.  He still loves to be the ringleader for his younger siblings and whatever visiting children are present to join in his amazingly inventive games.  I hope that he never grows out of those things, even if he gets taller.  For those are some of the things I love best about him.

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.