Lao music, launch parties, and other elegant celebrations

What a whirlwind! Love At The Speed Of Email had a great launch day yesterday.

Scores of people visited the launch announcement and a bunch of you clicked on over to buy a copy (thank you!!). I spent some thrilled moments watching you all help me share the news on facebook and twitter (again, thank you!!) and feeling overwhelmed by that happy sort of embarrassment that comes when you’re a bit the center of attention and you realize how many people care about you.

And then there was the rest of the day.

Because, you see, launching a book from Laos over the internet is a very abstract sort of process. And the neighbors having a party for their new baby is, unfortunately, not abstract at all.

A month after Dominic was born I was just starting to feel OK about leaving the house again. My ideal celebration would have involved me: (1) in bed, asleep, or (2) eating brie, pizza and ice cream with Mike in a quiet kitchen while some trusted soul held our sleeping child.

Needless to say neither of those scenarios played out as often as I would have liked during the first two months of Dominic’s life.

They way they celebrate birth here in Laos looks nothing like my ideal scenarios. Here, when your child is born, you throw a party for hundreds of people. It starts at 10am and goes until the beer runs out. There is food and beer, and more food and more beer, and endless karaoke played at a volume that can deafen a construction worker wearing his safety equipment.

And, as our neighbors have just had a new baby, yesterday this all played out right outside our house.

This is Mike and Dominic standing on our front step at lunch, just about to show our faces at the party. Can you guess how Dominic felt about the music?

So, yeah, I spent some of my launch day limping up and down the dirt road outside our house in an effort to escape the music and ensure that Dominic got some sleep. I was not completely successful in either endeavor, which meant that when we went out to dinner last night somewhere nice in a dual effort to celebrate and escape the music (a recurring theme, yes), we got five minutes of smiley baby before an hour of inconsolable baby.

Here is smiley baby:

And here is mama’s face (sweaty, dusty, and trying hard to hang onto some small sense of appropriately elegant celebration) when papa was trying to take a “launch celebration” photo and said baby dropped and broke that nice ceramic salt-shaker.

Sometimes you try. And sometimes babies (book and actual) just don’t make “elegant” all that easy.

So thanks again for all the online loving (in the elegant G-rated sense, of course) you’ve sent my way about Love At The Speed Of Email so far. I appreciate it! Please keep it up. And check out the launch post for giveaway details if you haven’t seen them already.

You’ll be hearing a lot about book and launch this week, but I promise to be back to talking other things soon. In fact, there’s a fun post coming up later this week that has nothing to do with book baby. In the meantime … may the soundtrack of your day be a quiet one, may all your babies smile, and may all celebrations be unmarred by broken pottery.

Love from Laos,

Lisa