A force to be reckoned with...

It's been a tough and interesting few weeks, and I am continually grateful for the wee one and her funny / frustrating / fabulous antics to take over our focus.

If you really know my sweet-faced little kiddo, you know that beneath the silly jokes and kitten alter-ego there is a streak of ferocious. For example, this week she has both been complimented on how well spoken she is ("delightful") and she has struck fear into our panga (machete)-wielding gardener.

She's either melting you with sweetness or making you want to run the other way, that's our girl.

Household help haiku

Laundry, floors, bathrooms

Does it need to be this clean?

I can't find my socks

Saving the world, one PowerPoint presentation at a time...

Exhibit A: I have always, always, been grateful for my job. I can't think of another job where I could have survived 9 months of morning sickness, several state-to-state moves, and one (so far) country-to-country move, and kept the same job, provided health insurance to our family through my husband's job-search slog, and worked with the same talented and wonderful people. Despite many things in life not going the way we would have planned, I see this job, being able to work from home and take my job wherever we go, as a true God-given blessing.

Exhibit B: I have always, always felt my job is worth doing. What I produce goes to train front-line public health workers and epidemiologists. I have received, on rare occasions, face-to-face praise the work of our Center and for projects that I gave my heart and soul to - expressions of how much our content has helped or how far our content has reached across the globe. Awesome.

The surprise: I'm the effective room mom for my kid's class. I didn't even know this until yesterday, when someone from the parent-teacher fellowship (our school's PTA) contacted me about teacher appreciation week. Now that I think about it, I'm the one who shows up, on occasion at least. I only have the one kid. I can build flexibility into my schedule and it's a 5 minute walk from my front door to the classroom. I don't do it often - after all I do work full time.

The other moms? Keeping in mind there are only 11 kids in the class...of the ones I've met, one is stay-at-home for now, has multiple kids, and is extensively involved in everything school already. Several others have save-the-world jobs. And here, I mean, really, seriously, they are out there saving the world. As in Save the Children, World Vision, and UN Somalia program.

Me? I work on PowerPoint about 80% of my day. I fuss about the best verb to use for learning objectives and capitalization for bullet points. I explain how to use epidemiology. I could almost do it in my sleep by now.

I think I'm going to step up the room mom effort.

Summertime...

I can't deny that the living is easy. We may be at risk from robberies, carjacking, and terrorists, but we sure do have a nice pool and playground. The kiddo and her buddy played full out Saturday, and my kid at least had to give it up by 6:30 that night.
It was a warm day, as they have been, reminding me of late spring in New Mexico. Also like NM, it hasn't rained in a long while. Last week, upon coming out of the auditorium used for church services, it was cloudy. Not just clouds in the sky, but actual overcast-ness. You would have thought there was a giant shooting star up there, given the murmurs that rustled through the crowd, hands gesticulating upward. It's been a long time since there was potential for a rain drop! It cleared up shortly, though, and the weather has remained stubbornly pleasant since.

Nairobi haiku

Bump, swerve, hold on tight

That one was ten inches deep

Nairobi pot holes

Home is where the....

Home is where the Super Bowl party starts at 2:30AM.

The romance of Cheerios

Yesterday was one of those days when the power just did not want to stay on. I'm reminded of this, because the same is true today. I was merrily typing along and all of a sudden the screen went blank. Not so bad, since I'm working off my laptop. But the infernal beeping from the circuit panel can really drive one off of one's rocker.

At any rate, yesterday things seem to have settled out by late afternoon. Something also went haywire with the Internet. It was probably driven crazy by the beeping and ran back down the LAN line as soon as it entered our house. I did, however, smartly write down the phone number for my evening conference call back to the States. (How embarrassing when you miss a call cuz your Internet went out and you didn't write down the number previously delivered via email so you could use your cell!)

We had spent the early evening making noodles - that's for another post. Silly us, we didn't realize we were frivolously wasting our power. My talented husband agreed to cook so I could spend some face time with the wee one. And alas, the power went back out. Only now it was getting dark. And we were using the stove. And there isn't a single thing we can eat in this house that doesn't require power to be edible, with the exception of PB&J (not that good...how I dream of soft, American store-bought bread!) or cereal.

So we set the dining room table with candles, silverware, place mats, and cereal boxes. The kiddo was thrilled. The grownups were hungry. We did get the juice back later in the evening, and had a late dinner sans child. She had homemade noodles for breakfast today.