Abandoning My Husband and Children

A few weeks ago I started having joint pain in my hands and feet, elbows and hips and knees.  It hasn't cleared up and all of the tests available here in Dushanbe have been inconclusive, so I'm flying to London this week to see what the tests and and doctors there can tell me about it. 

This means, of course, that Brandon and all six of the children will be left here in Dushanbe to fend for themselves.  I have done this to them before, when my brother got married, when Joseph and I went to London, and when I went myself, so they're pretty used to the drill.  Our housekeeper is coming daily to come help out and we just got in a new supply of cold cereal so I'm pretty sure that nobody will die while I'm gone.  The children are happy because they have reduced school work and Brandon might even look forward to a little easing of the routine, even if it comes at the cost of his personal magic fairy being gone.  William, who is weaned and so not coming with me, will probably forget that I existed until I return.  When I do he will be so happy to remember that he does in fact have a mother and she didn't mysteriously abandon him. 

I little not-so-secret part of me that I wish would be a little more secret is looking forward to a little time by myself.  I'm conflicted because this time off is purchased by with Brandon's increased work load (he's already the acting section chief of two sections at the embassy, so the last thing he needs is more work when he gets home) and the children being left without a mother.  In order to sleep in, eat out at delicious restaurants, and shop, I have to shuck my very real responsibilities to seven other human beings whose lives depend a lot on me.  So even the thought of enjoying, much less openly planning all of the fun things I'm going to do myself feels very, very selfish. 

Because, well, I am going to do a lot of fun things.  We have foreign service friends from our very first time in Cairo living London, who I've planned a trip to Warwick Castle and an opera with.  My brother- and sister-in-law moved to London this summer and I'll catch up with them.  And as long as I'm childless, I'm going to go and take a family name to the temple and do every single ordinance, something I've never had the time to do.  I've done my research and found a stable to go riding at.  And of course, all of the food and shopping.  My hotel is, after all, right off Oxford Street, one of the biggest shopping districts in London.

Hopefully my visit will only last a week.  Even with all of the playing and fun, anything more than a week away from my family really does get to be unpleasant.  I do, after all, love them and enjoy their company.  And I'm pretty sure that Brandon will be counting down the days even before I get on the airplane.  I am, after all, his very favorite person in the whole wide world.  It's good to know that I'll be missed.  And it's also nice to have the chance to be missed.

Living in Dushanbe: Fall

Today is October 15th, which must mean that it is fall.  I used to hate fall when I was younger and time moved more slowly.  I didn't actually mind fall itself, I just hated that it meant the end of summer and the transition into cold, dark days that lasted a month or two longer than they should.  Fall was the end of the good times and the beginning of the bad.

Now that I'm older and time moves more quickly, I can appreciate fall for it's beautiful, crisp self.  The sunshine turns thinner, not smothering you with summer heat.  Light slants through the leaves on our afternoon walks, and evenings begin to promise hot chocolate and warm blankets.

Fall is a time that begs for a walk in the forest.  The yellow leaves turn the sunlight golden, and you can crunch through the fallen leaves, kicking up the spicy smell of leaf mulch from the forest floor.  I love to collect brilliantly-colored leaves, finding endless ways of combining yellow, orange, red, and brown into an infinite of intricate patterns.  After the walk, when your cheeks are tingling and your fingers chilled, a cup of hot cider warms you up perfectly.

That is how I remember fall being in America.  That is not how fall is here in Dushanbe.

I'm sure there are some forests in Tajikistan, but they're mostly in remote mountain tops where nobody can get to them with a saw to cut them down.  There are some parks with trees in Dushanbe, but they are planted mostly with sycamores, and sycamores never turn yellow, only slowly fading into a rusty brown before falling off.  The air might be crisp, but it's filled with the scent of burning cow dung and coal as everyone burns whatever they can to keep their houses warm.

But, we can warm up apple juice and pretend that it's cider.

To tell the truth, we've never lived in any country (other than America) that has those picture-perfect forests that beg for a fall walk.  Egypt has never seen forests, and Azerbaijan had a few, but they were a bit of a drive away.  But when all my friends in nice countries that see rainfall on a regular basis post pictures of their lovely fall walks, I can't help but eat my heart out.

And of course our next post in Uzbekistan won't have anything much better.  But I suppose that is the way of life.  One day I'll have my fall walks again and I'll remember the long years where I didn't have them and I will enjoy those walks even more for the contrast.  But until then, I'll just have to be patient.

William, the Cutest Baby in the World

William is a very cute baby.  He has reached the enjoyable age where he smiles and gurgles and kicks and squeals and makes loud squealing noises that are hard to talk over.

I've always found my babies to be cute, but since William is my current baby, he is official the cutest baby in the world.  Every time I see him I want to pick him up and give him a squeeze and about twenty kisses.  It makes it hard to put him down to bed. 

And now that William can crawl, he can return that affection by following me around the house and crying to be picked up.  That's mostly cute.

He has found his favorite toy, a pair of red silicone kitchen tongs that he will chew on endlessly while watching me cook dinner.  As he is the cutest baby in the world, it's very cute to watch.  Especially when he is in his diaper.

He also likes to sleep crammed up against the side of his crib and occasionally sticks one or several limbs through the sides of the crib.  Again, very cute.

Sleeping babies are very cute, and William is the cutest sleeping baby of them all.

William is pretty okay with just about anything that anyone does to him.  His siblings love to buckle him into the stroller and run him around the yard at top speed and at various angles of incline.  He is also perfectly happy with being carried in a basket of fresh laundry.  Which is, of course, cute.

And of course he smiles a lot.  Because that's what cute babies do.

Often when he's crawling around he will stick a toy in his mouth, just for something to crawl with.  Or something.  But because this is William doing it, it's very cute.  If anyone else did it, I would take the toy out.  Because that's gross.

William's the first baby that I've been happy to keep as a baby as long as possible, probably because he's the cutest baby in the world.  And because he's so cute, none of the other children mind his status at all.  In fact, they agree that yes, William is the cutest baby in the world.  Because he is.

When the Cat's Away

Brandon is in America right now.  His grandfather passed away recently after battling Parkinson's disease for twenty six years.  Brandon, who bears his grandfather's name, flew out for the funeral.  When you live on the same continent 'flying out for the funeral' means taking a flight (or two) on Friday night, attending the funeral on Saturday, and flying home to return to work on Monday.

But as all of you are very well aware of, we don't live on the same continent.  Technically we are the next continent over, going west over the Pacific.  So 'flying out for the funeral' here means that, first of all, you have to figure out if the plane flights work out to get you there in time.  And then if they do, you have to cobble together a hodge podge of different airlines so that you miss as little work as possible.  For this trip, I used frequent flier miles (60,000 + $200 in fees) on United and bought Brandon a one-way ticket there on Turkish airlines ($911) and a one-way ticket back on Somon ($326).  Our credit card companies have gotten very twitchy about flights on sketchy airlines to sketchy places, so we ended up purchasing the Turkish ticket through a third-party website and the Somon ticket we had to buy in person at their office.  I guess it's less suspicious when you run the actual card.

Once the tickets are bought, then you actually have to get there.  Brandon left Thursday morning on the 5 am flight.  We got up at 3:15 and I dropped him off the airport at 4.  Then he flew to Istanbul, waited seven hours, flew to Houston, and got a hotel for a sixteen hour layover.  The next morning he flew out of Houston and arrived in Missouri at one in the afternoon.  He got to sleep in the same bed on Friday and Saturday nights.  Today he goes back to the airport at six in the evening, flies through Chicago, spend the night in Istanbul, and then I pick him up Tuesday around dinner.  If I've done the math, that is eighty hours of traveling for fifty-three hours of time in Missouri.  That's pretty bad math if you ask me.

So, while Brandon's been winging halfway around the world the children and I have been hanging out in Dushanbe.

It turns out that Brandon is a pretty good influence on our household, because things haven't exactly run the way they do when I have someone other than the children to be accountable to.  I don't like cooking dinner even when Brandon is here, and it turns out that when he's gone I just don't cook dinner.

Thursday night we had cold cereal.  Since we didn't have any milk, the children ran to the store and got some.  Friday night we had friends over for a movie.  I thought briefly about making it and then ordered instead.  Saturday night I went out to dinner with friends, so the children had leftover pizza and leftover soda.  Today my housekeeper brought over sambusas so we had those with carrot sticks.  Because you should have vegetables at least every four or five days.  I'm thinking that tomorrow could probably be left overs.  Or more cereal.

I finally swept the kitchen floor today when I could see drifts of crumbs and cereal pieces starting to form mounds underneath the kitchen table, and I'm not sure who threw finally away the pizza boxes, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't me.   The children have watched multiple movies and we've all gone to bed a lot later than we're supposed to.

But other than the disarray, we've been able to make the rest of life happen pretty well even without Brandon coming home to make sure that all the children survive until the next day.  The children are helpful and I have been doing this mom thing long enough that I can do it reasonably well on my own.  The children even got bedtime stories tonight.

This is not to say that we have any plans to be separated for any longer than is absolutely necessary.  The kids love their father (who is the fun one in this arrangement), I love my husband, and shockingly, he loves us all back.  So we'll be glad when he comes back to us this week.  Even if it does mean that I'll have to start making dinner again.

A Whole Decade

I am a creature of habit.  Every week day I wake up and exercise.  I started running in college and still run.  After Joseph was born I added a strength-training routine to my workout and still do the exact same routine every Tuesday and Thursday.  We eat the same thing for breakfast every week day - oatmeal and eggs - and have been eating it since Brandon and I got married.  Every afternoon I take a nap and every evening I cook dinner at five, cooking the same twenty dinners over and over and over again.  I have kept a journal since I was eight, and with the exception of a four-year break at the beginning of my marriage, I write in it almost every Sunday evening.  I like routine.  It's easier than trying to mix things up.

Over a decade ago blogging became cool and I, several years late (as always), jumped on the bandwagon ten years ago, in 2007.  And although blogging is so early 2000s, I'm still plugging away because hey, habit.

When I first started blogging, Brandon and I lived in an eight-hundred square-foot duplex in Springville, Utah.  He was working at the local Stouffer's frozen food plant and I stayed home with Kathleen, who was ten months old.  He was working on employment for State, but it was only a dream.

Over the years we've added five more children, lived in six different houses, bought two more cars, been to seven more countries, and are on our second set of diplomatic passports.  I am on my sixth year of homeschooling that baby who could only crawl when I started blogging.  Ten years doesn't sound like that long until you start looking at the differences.  In another decade, my oldest will be close to graduating from college.

My motivations for blogging have changed over the years, too.  When I first started, it was simply to keep family up to date on all of the excitement of our lives.  Back before blogging, there were group emails and I switched to blogging to stop clogging up relative's inboxes.

But when Brandon joined State, our life got a little more exciting, and with the Arab Spring our life got a lot more exciting and I had a brief brush with fame and imagined that I could be one of those well-known bloggers that write funny, begging-to-be-reposted entries.  But then I realized that those sorts of people are 1. talented and 2. have a lot more motivation to do something more than just rattle off a few posts once a week.

But I keep blogging, even without the lure of fame to motivate me, because it's become a habit.  I tell myself that one day some of these stories will be interesting to my children and maybe my grandchildren and so I keep writing.  And also I know I have a few friends and family members that keep up with our (right now very boring) life.  But mostly, habit.

So here's to ten years.  I'll check in again in ten more!

Kathleen the Babysitter

One warm August night eleven years ago when I was terminally pregnant, Brandon came home from work.  It was a Tuesday and he wasn't on shift the next day, so we went to see a movie.  I still remember driving down ninth street in Provo with the warm wind blowing through my hair and thinking to myself that this would probably be the last time I just walked out of my house with my husband and no children to go and watch a movie on a whim.

And I was right.

This past Tuesday night I walked out of the house without any children, picked up Brandon, and went to a garden party.  The evening was almost as warm, and I chatted with friends, ate appetizers, and enjoyed wearing makeup, a dress, and my favorite hot-pink heels.

At home the children were taking baths, dressing themselves, feeding William and putting him down, making sandwiches for dinner, cleaning it up, and getting ready for bed.  When Brandon and I walked in the door around eight, the kitchen was clean, the children were fed, and everyone was ready for a story.

After I came through the door, I shut it.  I didn't look for money, calculate hourly rates, ask someone how the children behaved themselves, or awkwardly say goodbye after handing over a fistful of bills.  Instead, I shut it, took off my heels, and read Eleanor a story.

And it was fabulous.  

After eleven years of waiting for my freedom to return, it has arrived.  If I need to run to the store, I don't have to take six children with me.  If one of them has to see the doctor, five of them don't have to come with me.  If Brandon and want to go out on a Friday night, we go out.  No babysitter required.  

And the best things about this new reality is that it will last into perpetuity.  Never again will I have to hope that a sitter is available or worry about taking my housekeeper away from her family on a Friday night or pay fifty dollars just to go to dinner with my husband (not that I a pay that much here).  If a friend wants to go out to lunch, I can go, even on days where Zarifa doesn't come.  If I want to get a pedicure all alone I can do it.  The prospects almost make me giddy.

Those eleven years were very, very long while I waited to home-grow my own babysitter.  But now that the day has arrived, it seems long it wasn't that bad after all.  However, I'm never going back.  Ever. Again.  Hallelujah.  

William Becomes Mobile

I love babies who crawl.  Most people I know hate babies who crawl.  Babies who crawl can get into things you'd rather have left alone.  One minute they're happily playing with their toys and the next they have managed to fish five dusty Cheerios and one rotting grape from under the cupboards and are happily munching on them, having discovered a new place to find secret snacks.  Babies who crawl can investigate fascinating things like power cords, kitchen cupboards, and trash cans.  So I understand my friends' dislike of mobile children.

But I am a lazy parent.  I never have been good at entertaining children, even back when I was paid good money to do it.  If the parents of my babysitting charges told me that bed time was at 8, I usually had them tucked in by 7:45 and was down on the couch by 8 with the treats I'd found in the cupboard, watching Nick at Nite.

So one of my least favorite babyhood ages is that gap between when my children are awake for more than forty-five minutes at a time (six months old) and when they start crawling (usually nine to ten months).  I will set up a ring of toys all around the child, everything within reaching distance, which usually buys me twenty minutes of peace before they push all the toys away and then have a fit because there aren't any more toys to play with.  Then I have to run back over and push all the toys back for twenty more minutes of peace.  I have experimented over the years with all sorts of toy-containment devices to buy me ten or fifteen extra minutes, but none of them have worked very well and in the end I just have to patiently wait until they can learn to crawl.

Because when they can learn to crawl, their entertainment needs are met into forever.  Bored of the toys you're playing with?  Well, just go find some more!  See something interesting off in the distance?  Go and find out what it is!  The world is your oyster when you have the power of mobility.  This continues on until adulthood when you have the cash and ability to go anywhere in the world you want.  And truly it is fantastic.

Usually my children start their adventures in mobility with the backwards push.  It works particularly well on hard-surface flooring and inevitably ends in the child being jammed underneath a piece of furniture, crying for someone to come and release them.  After awhile the backwards push morphs into the army crawl, the child not yet having realized that those things hanging off the bottom of their torso are for anything but kicking mom when she's trying to change their diaper.  And finally, full crawling emerges and if it's winter, the jeans can never be used again for the holes.  Or if they are Edwin's jeans, one leg has holes and the other is perfectly intact because he only ever realized that one leg worked.

William has been different from my other children.  It started in the womb, where he would hold hours-long dance parties in the middle of the night, often kicking his father in the back.  When he came out he never stopped, wiggling constantly for seven and a half months.  I'm hoping this will translate into some amazing athletic ability, but I'm not researching sports scholarships yet.

So it was no surprise when just at his sixth month birthday he skipped the backwards push and army crawl, pulling himself up on his hands and knees to rock back and forth endlessly.  Rocking is one of his favorite activities.  It took him awhile to figure out what advantage this new ability gave him, and for awhile he would get up on his hands and knees, lean forward, and then collapse.  He could inchworm his way across several feet of carpet to snag an appealing toy or electronic gadget, but he hadn't yet realized what it meant.

But this past week he has finally put everything together and will take off across the floor the second I put him on the carpet, usually in the direction of the transformer.  This afternoon I was sitting on the second floor while the children were rowdily playing upstairs.  Intrigued, William took off towards the third floor and stopped forlornly at the stairs, clearly wishing he could join the fun.

There are no endpoints in child development, so William will soon learn the magic of climbing stairs (and have to learn the hard lessons of going down the stairs), pulling up on furniture, and finally walking.  Then he'll join the herd and never be bored or lonely again.

Hooray for mobility!

Settling Back In

Our life has been kind of crazy for the last ten or so months.  Not too crazy, but more crazy than I would like.  It started with the Christmas season, ran through three months of medevac, had a small lull until R&R, and finished up with summer travel followed by the beginning of school.  I really haven't had more than a month or so to settle down before something started back up again.

I'm very much a schedule person, and so this has been low-level stress in the back of my mind - not enough to notice when it's going on, only enough to notice when, after almost a year, it has finally ended.  Kind of like that annoying sound of the computer fan an overheated room, or the split packs running all day every day.  Not enough to run out of the house screaming crazy-town, but enough that the comparative silence is blissful.

We have reached that comparative silence.  And I had almost forgotten what it was like.  This past week we had school.  Every morning around 8:30 I started by grading Sophia's math lesson, handed it to her for corrections, and then graded the rest of her school work.  Then we went over her corrections and we did our work together while Edwin did his math drills on the iPad (because technology is definitely something that should be used for drills).  I graded Kathleen's work, handed it to her for corrections, and then worked with Edwin on his school.  We finished that around 11 or 11:15 and I did Joseph's reading lesson to him, followed by lunch and naps for me, Eleanor, and William.

And we did it every single day.  Nobody came over.  I didn't go anywhere.  We just did the same things four days in a row and then on Friday I worked on other Mom tasks.  All of the children knew what they had to do and (mostly) did it.  By the time I woke up from my nap, everyone had done their school work and was ready to go outside and play.  Every morning the kitchen was clean.  Every evening the toy room was clean.  On laundry day all the clothes got washed and put away.  On bath day the children were washed.  Dinner was on the table around six.  It was cleaned up by seven, followed by stories and bed time.  All I needed was two little lines and we could have been something out of Madeline.

I know that eventually I'll get a little tired of the routine because that's the nature of being human.  Too much of a good thing becomes a little boring after awhile.  But the great thing is that I have a nice long stretch - almost seven months - to get nice and fully tired of such a wonderfully regular life and schedule.  I can revel in my life and children moving (mostly) seamlessly in the paths I've spent so much time, tears, and stress banging them into.  We can all enjoy the utter predictability of our lives and have the luxury of thinking that a little excitement would be nice without actually getting any of it.

And then it will all go up in smoke when we embark on our next move.  But until then, I'll enjoy it.

Rotavirus

During our time in Dushanbe, most of us have taken our turns having medical issues.  Sometimes it feels like these issues are happening constantly, but I suppose if you add up the number of people in our house (eight) times how many medical incidents one single person averages during the year (one or two), it averages out to more than one incident a month.  And if you ignore Joseph's stitches, two MRIs, and trip to London, everyone has limited themselves to only one incident for the entire time we've been here.  So it really hasn't been that bad, it just feels that way.

William has only been in Dushanbe for less than six months, but he decided that this week would be his time to monopolize the med unit here at post.

Diarrhea is a constant here in Dushanbe, so when William started having issues, I wasn't very worried.  After all, it's so much easier to deal with an infant's diarrhea than a toddler's diarrhea.  Potty training does have its occasional downsides.  But when he started vomiting, I began to pay attention.

On day seven of the diarrhea and day four of the vomiting, I decided that I probably wouldn't be overreacting if I brought him in to see the doctor.  Seven month old babies don't have a very wide margin of error and when you live in a place where serious medical attention is several time zones and a couple of plane rides away, waiting isn't the best idea.

Pretty quick we agreed that IV fluids were going to be helpful, but it turns out that dehydrated infants have very difficult veins to put IVs in, especially when the nurse is used to working on adults and not babies.  So instead we tried oral rehydration, but it didn't go very well and three or four hours later William got to have another attempt at the IV.  It's amazing how tiny baby veins are and how much they don't stick out when they're incased in layers of baby fat.

For awhile after the second attempt, William seemed to be doing better, but he took a turn for the worse in the late afternoon.  The wonderful doctor, who was only filling in because ours has left with no replacement, spent most of the afternoon on the phone consulting on the best way to get fluids into a rapidly declining baby.

There was some discussion of an intraosseous infusion, but the nurse, doctor, and four medics available had never done one on an infant.  In the end, we packed up an IV kit from the embassy and headed to a local hospital.  The doctor managed to get an IV in his head, after attempting one on his foot, wrist, and vein.  Once the needle was finally in, the rest was easy and William slept peacefully in my very (very) tired arms while he got juiced up with 225 mL of IV solution.  We made it home by 8, twelve hours after William and I had left the house that morning.

Saturday was better than Friday, but by 2 this morning, William was in a bad state again.  Brandon, who had been awake and trying to feed William the entire time, got to take him in to the embassy where he got another IV infusion through the same vein that had worked so well Friday night.

After a lot of discussion and test ruling out other possibilities, the doctor decided that William had probably come down with a rotavirus.  He has been vaccinated, but only once (he was supposed to get his second dose this week, but that didn't happen), and it turns out that vaccination doesn't necessarily prevent infections, just makes them less severe.  Rotavirus vaccination are pretty recent, only being just over a decade old, and have cut down on hospitalizations for infants tremendously.  I remember getting the fact sheet about rotavirus when Sophia was getting vaccinated (Kathleen didn't get vaccinated for rotavirus) and wondering why she needed that particular vaccination.

Now I know why babies get vaccinated.  If we had been in the US, William would have been in the hospital.  If we had been living in a remote village in Tajikistan, William would have been in the ground.

Instead, it was somewhere in the middle with some very sleepless nights and a lot of good work done by the medical staff here at the embassy.  Once again, I am grateful for the blessing of modern medicine.

September, the Month of Disappointed Hopes

Right now it is eighty-nine degrees outside.  I forgot to water my plants this morning and my four o'clocks are draped over the sides of their pots, leaves hanging limply.  The children are playing on the third floor with both air conditioners going full blast so that the toy room is inhabitable.  Everyone will turn on the air conditioners at bed time tonight so they can sleep.  Yesterday we spent three hours at the pool and nobody got cold.

Yes, it is September in Dushanbe.

After my first long, hot summer in Dushanbe, I figured that we would find some relief in September.  After all, the first day of fall is in September, so one could reasonably expect something resembling cooler or at least cool-ish weather in September.  And there is cooler weather in September because ninety-degree weather is cooler than one hundred-degree weather.  But it isn't exactly the type of fall weather that one usually drinks hot chocolate to or starts making things like pumpkin bread (which will be happening here a lot this year as we use up our stores of canned pumpkin).

Every year I'm thrown by September.  I attended school long enough to associate September with Not Summer, the month where carefree summer days at the pool turned into long slogs of school, homework, and increasingly shorter afternoons.  All of my cute summer clothes would, after the first few weeks of school in August, be retired in favor of jeans and jackets and crisp fall mornings.

But here in Dushanbe we're still rocking summer, finally dipping into the upper eighties - temperatures that send countries like England into panic - halfway through September.  I haven't even thought of breaking out jeans in months (I think I wore some in April, maybe) and I'm pretty sure I'll be caught flat-footed when the children finally need shoes and somebody has grown out of theirs.

September is the month of stale summer, unwelcome summer, summer that has stayed just a little too long.  We were all happy to see summer back in May, when winter had bleached our skins paper-white and our diet had been reduced to mealy apples, stringy oranges, grainy greenhouse tomatoes, and soft potatoes for too many months to count.  Summer was welcome, the season of abundant fresh produce, endless sunshine, and flip flops - every mom's favorite shoes.  All of the flowers were in bloom, the swimsuits new, and trees full of bright, green leaves.

But summer has been here for months and everyone is ready to move on.  The children's swimsuits are bleached and faded from months' use.  The flowers are faded and dusty, plants tired of life.  I groan inwardly at yet another afternoon hauling the children to the pool because it's still too hot to take a simple walk down to the park.  A cup of hot chocolate is nice, in theory, but still oh so out of place.

But still September drags on, taunting us with shorter days, cooler nights, and slanting sunshine.  It looks like it should be fall, it feels like it should be fall, but still you broil every time you step out your front door at noon.

I feel that I am looking a gift horse in the mouth and know that I will kick myself for wanting a day more of cold when I am in the depths of February, months from anything resembling flip-flop weather.  I know that friends in places where September means the first frost are wanting to kick me right now.

But I suppose it is the nature of humans to never want too much of a good thing, and too much of a good thing is summer in September.

But it is not October yet, and so I will wait, holding my breath, with everyone else in Dushanbe for summer to finally die and fall to make its welcome appearance.  Until then, however, you can find me at the pool.