The happenings

It’s boat racing day here in Luang Prabang and all is beery, cheery chaos out on the streets. Boat racing day is sort of a fair cum rowing festival. The entire town closes down for the day. Stalls selling everything from ducklings to helium balloons line the street and the length of the Khan river is packed with families out cheering on their favorite teams.

We were out walking the streets with Dominic yesterday on market day (a shopping warm-up day for the main event), and today we walked him down through the crowds to show him the boats.

He wasn’t that enthralled, actually. The local crowds were far more interested with the little red-headed foreign baby in their midst than he was with the boats. All he wanted to do was carry poke at the dirt with a stick, spin bike pedals on their axes, and point at other babies.

Oh, and he liked the baby ducklings once he warmed up.

What else has been going on around here?

Mike continues to improve, although last night he tried our soft bed again for the first time since the surgery and that didn’t go so well. It didn’t go so well for his back (which has been hurting again today more than it has in a while) and it didn’t go so well for us on the sleeping front. I do miss the companionship of sharing a bed with him, but I must admit that there’s also a certain silent luxury to sleeping alone.

Silent in the sense that every couple of hours (or less) the monitor alerts me to the fact that His Royal Babyness has:

1. Lost his dummy;
2. Woken up to find himself alone in his room and decided that this just won’t do;
3. Had a bad dream; or
4. All of the above.

I have had a couple of nights undisturbed between 10 and 5, but it’s still far more common to be up a couple of times.

I love not that part of parenting. I do love the fact that he gives kisses and dances on command, though. I also love that we’ve recently hired a babysitter to look after him between 3 and 5pm. She speaks Lao to him and takes him out to … well … I think they play with other kids in the neighborhood. A couple of days ago she bought him home stark naked (because, she said, he was hot) and carrying a large blind goldfish in a plastic bag that one of the neighbors had given him (because, she said, he cried when it was time to leave – apparently here in Laos if you’re a cute one year old and you do that you get given live animals out the neighbor’s fish pond to ease the pain).

As for me, it’s been a couple of months since I launched Love At The Speed Of Email, and I am now emerging from the creative wasteland that I wandered/fell into immediately after sending the book out into the world.

Seriously, people, it was weird. The minute the project was done and the book was launched it became a huge struggle to find the energy to write a blog post or do my guest posts or journal or do … anything. People would ask me what I’d been doing and I’d say, “Oh, you know. Not much. That mothering-thing,” and Mike would gently remind me that I’d just published a book and I’d be like, “Oh, yeah. I did that. That was cool I guess.”

I have not even started planning a book launch party. I really do want to do that because, hello, this town is a great place to host a kick-ass party and what better excuse than publishing a book. But every time I think about it I get that weird, awkward feeling that comes whenever I think about being the center of attention at a party, so I stop thinking about it. Surprisingly, this means that a book launch has not yet actually been planned.

Sidenote: I rarely feel weird and awkward during those moments when I actually am the center of attention, just when I’m thinking about being the center of attention. Does anyone else get that?

Also, do you want to see a picture of a gazillion ducklings? If so, it’s your lucky day.

What have been your happenings lately?