Normal life is taking all my time

“What have you been up to this morning?” Mikes asked me via Skype from Bangkok.

“I didn’t even get online until 10:45 today,” I told him, still stunned. “I’ve been changing diapers and emptying trash cans and replacing toilet rolls and tidying up rooms and making beds and cooking breakfast and doing laundry and hanging out laundry and … normal life is taking all my time!”

“There’s a post title,” Mike said. (Apparently, not only is normal life taking all my time but the events of the past months have taken all of my creative energy, so Mike has started to point out things I could write about here and elsewhere. You know, if I had time. And energy.)

“Also,” Mike continued less helpfully, “you should dedicate that post to all your blog readers who’ve rolled your eyes during the past year when you’ve talked about being short on time in Laos where you had a housekeeper and a week-day babysitter.”

“Hey!” I said. “I did not take that for granted. Whenever anyone asked me how I could be so productive work-wise I always told them it was due to the maebaan and the babysitter.”

“And your mikebaan,” Mike said. “Where’s my affirmation?”

“OK,” I conceded. “You did your fair share. More than your fair share, even.”

Here in Australia, where Dominic and I are just settling in now, my parents are doing more than their fair share too. Mum took the baby monitor last night and got up to my sniffing, coughing little boy six times. Dad’s currently taking him up the back to feed scraps to the chickens. I thought I’d snatch fifteen minutes to throw together an update before normal life demanded we prepare, eat, and then clean up after lunch.

Preparing, consuming and packing away food three times a day really takes a shocking amount of time.

So, the update.

Mike’s surgery went well, we think. It was shorter than last time, and this initial recovery period has been easier than we’d hoped. He still has a long road ahead of him – lots of resting and very low-level core strengthening work now, ten weeks before he can lift anything significant, and serious lifestyle changes around incorporating core strengthening, pilates, and yoga into his schedule – but there has so far been less post-operative pain than we’d feared. Now, for the nerve pain to disappear entirely and stay away for good …

The better-than-expected surgery experience all made it easier to leave him to continue recovering alone at the hotel in Bangkok, and on Wednesday night Dominic and I flew to Australia with my father (who’d been in Thailand helping out the week of Mike’s surgery).

We had ten free seats between the three of us on the overnight flight. Thank goodness, because we needed all of them. Dominic spent a good portion of the night wandering up and down the plane wanting to pat other sleeping passengers, pull the exit door lever, and get in the galley to see how things worked.

Despite the complete upheaval of his world, Dominic has settled down quite well so far here in Australia. It’s been really fun to watch his excitement at things like riding in supermarket trolleys, seeing seagulls, and feeding chickens. He’ll try to open the door of any car he toddles up to, and still points to big trucks with evident amazement. In the toy-aisle of K-Mart he raced around for a while, pulling one toy after another off the shelf, until he suddenly sat down in the middle of the aisle and refused to move. Guess that’s the toddler version of reverse culture shock.

Dominic has also taken to biting me and thinks it’s all very funny to suddenly sink his teeth into some part of my body without any warning. Don’t know quite what to make of that one.

Now, for the question I’ve been asked at least six times recently by concerned Zulu lovers … what’s going to happen to our little dog?

He’s being very well cared for by Sam, house-sitter extraordinaire, right now. Zulu loves Sam so much he practically pees with excitement every time she appears at the house. We’re hoping to find a house in Vientiane that will allow us to take him with us. If not we’re hoping that we’ll be able to find a really great home for him in Luang Prabang. Fingers crossed he comes with us.

OK, that’s the update – finished piecemeal over the course of the day in between grocery shopping, visiting the pharmacy, weathering several toddler temper tantrums, and … the list goes on.

I’ll end with one beautiful moment, though. I was reading Dominic a new story tonight called I Am A Big Brother. Halfway through the book, when it appeared that he was hardly even paying attention, Dominic suddenly grabbed his plastic cup of milk and tried to pour it onto the book.

I was about to scold him when I realized what he was doing. The last line of the previous page had read, “Baby likes to drink milk”.

He was trying to feed the picture of the baby on the page his milk.

Dominic can’t yet be bothered to talk and only makes his two reliable animal noises (elephant and mouse, weirdly enough) on command if he feels like it, but he understands a remarkable amount.

Now, since I haven’t had anything approaching a decent nights sleep in ten days now, normal life is suggesting I go to bed. Think that’s probably a good idea.