Completing the Cycle of Life

This Memorial weekend marks the end of the first two weeks that I am in full "house dad" mode.

How much shopping can YOU handle?

Now that Samantha began full-time nursing school it's my job to:

                    get the boys up                                                  feed them breakfast

                    make sure they're dressed                                  and ready for school

                    make lunch for Patrick                                        cajole Patrick to finish his homework

                    walk Patrick to the bus                                       walk Isaac to his school

                    bring Isaac home from school                              entertain him for the afternoon

                    pick up Patrick from the bus stop                        clean the house

                    wash the clothes                                                cook dinner

                    put them to bed                                                  (after bath and tooth brushing)

                    tell them to stop horsing around                           and "go to sleep already!"

                    melt in parental bliss over their cute slumbering forms

Down the Hill. click image to watch video

One of my joys is bike riding. As a teenager my bike was my transportation and I rode pretty much everywhere. At age 12 our family moved "up the hill" so I learnt quickly that a hill was really no obstacle. Moving to the US I wanted to be a careful steward of the environment and limit the fossil fuel usage. This meant, most likely, riding a bike.

With two kids in tow it becomes a different challenge. My solution: the trailer bike!

Not only does it enable me to ride with one of my children, it adds load bearing capacity on trips to Trader Joe's. I can now carry almost a full shopping trolley (cart) full of food home (see picture above).

Yesterday I rode 5 miles there and 5 miles back from Pendle Hill to Linvilla Orchards. Doesn't sound too bad until you see the elevation change along the route. We made it and here's Isaac enjoying the ride behind me.

I just need my morning coffee

After all these years ordering a coffee still gets me in a pickle.

To get an iced coffee with milk is quite a trial in the morning. To start I'm barely conscious without the ante meridian infusion of caffeine. My communication skills - in any language - are severely hampered. My patience for stunned waiters and waitresses at a foreigner speaking khmer is very low. And then I try to get the order out as fluently as possible. It rarely works. But I'm usually so desperate for my fix that I take whatever caffeinated beverage they decide I asked for - usually NOT what I thought I asked for.

For several naive years I asked for iced coffee incorrectly. One is supposed to say, 'coffee, milk, ice' in that exact order. It doesn't help that the khmer phrase is a tongue-twister at the best of times, the difficulty level upgraded by the lack of current caffeine supply in the blood-stream.

Once I realised I'd been saying, 'coffee, ice, milk' and not the correct order, after a kindly khmer friend corrected me, I thought my troubles would be over. Not so.

I would say my chances of a correct order have increased twenty per cent. But no more. There are mornings where I forget the correct order, or my tongue refuses to operate under direct instruction from the cerebral command center. There are plenty of times when my servers refuse to believe I'm even speaking a language they understand. And so I get a blank stare, then a polite shake of the head and a softly spoken, 'I Don't understand' to which I reply, 'you don't speak Cambodian'? Another smile and shake of the head. I repeat myself. This time my interlocutor turns around to find his/her eldest child who is studying English at school from a Cambodian teacher who learnt English from a non-native speaker. Then there is a brief tussle over who's second language skills are better than the other. If my Khmer is better we finally discover together that I really do speak Khmer and I want an iced coffee with milk, thanks very much.