Revelations

We saw some pretty spectacular things in 2008 -- age-old rock paintings, unparalleled monuments to love, mountains that were larger than life. We saw the counterplay of predator and prey in the battle of life, and we were touched by kind strangers in countries all over the world. But -- you already know this.

All of that, though, positively pales in comparison to what we saw this week.



It looks like we're going to have to buy another backpack.

How do I describe this feeling? That overwhelming heart-swelly feeling? Watching our baby cross and uncross its tiny wee hands, try to put its teeny thumb in its teeny mouth, flip over on its side in response to prodding by the ultrasound tech, and turn back to show us its perfect little profile, complete with a real nose and a chubby belly? How do I explain that I look at this picture every day in wonderment, that this little baby is ours, that it's with me all the time? How do I tell you that I put my hands in my coat pockets and spread my fingers over my almost-belly think to myself, "Do you know me? Can you feel me?"

Am I making you barf yet?

Updates to follow. The blog has been revived again, and we're traveling down a path that we know nothing about. Join us!

Happy Anniversary to Us!

How many people can say they woke up in the back of a minivan on the morning of their sixth wedding anniversary? A few, probably. However, how many can also say that they drove up to the world's highest salmon farm, where the fish thrive in the glacial waters of the hydroelectric dam, fed the fish, and then ate them as sashimi so fresh it was practically still quivering? How many can say that they did something called "tramping the Hooker Track"? How many spent the evening lounging in front of a fireplace, warm and toasty inside, but then went outside in the frigid cold and got back into that damn minivan to go to sleep?

I'm guessing not many... just us. The few. The proud. The crazy.

Remember Remember Remember

• The kids showing me a red, swollen sting on Joom's face and telling me, "Bee boxing. Joom and Bee boxing."
• The baby bath time production line, where they are back in the nursery in under five minutes: tooth brushing, diaper and clothing removal, bath, powder, diaper, and re-dressed again by six different people.
  
• Watching one little guy piggyback himself on the backs of the other crawling babies because he couldn't be bothered to walk on his own.
• "Boy" and "Joe" in our English class drawing skeletons instead of stick figures for all of the new words we taught them: "Run", "Dance", and "Jump".
  
• The sign language phrase for "BG": a "B", plus a symbol for a very pointed nose.
• Learning that elastic pants keep cloth diapers from falling down, but not from leaking.
• Learning that pinning all three corners of said cloth diapers is very important, but not as important as not pinning the baby too.
• Sticky rice and mango. Mango smoothies. Mango milkshakes. Mango.
• Jackfruit. Just -- jackfruit.
  
• Re-learing how to play Tic-Tac-Toe, make paper dolls, and fold endless paper cranes.
  
• The look of wonderment on 30 little faces when the bubble solution comes out.
• Taking Auntie and Mr. Lee ("The Old People") for walks in the morning.
• Cappucino cocktails at the Cocktail bus.
• Condo's bike getting run over by the pickup truck.
• The transsexual cabaret show.
  
• Garfield and Poon learning to walk.
• Realizing that BG actually cannot blow soap bubbles.
  
• Leslie's story that her 94-year-old mother asked for a six-pack of Heineken and a box of straws because, "You get a better buzz if you drink beer through a straw."
• Andrew and Mike getting into religious and philosophical arguments over lunch.
• All of our wonderful fellow volunteers, the nannies, the teachers, and our wonderful, wonderful friends. Never in my life have I been surrounded by so much kindness and love.
  

School of Hugs

I can't believe we have only one week left. This makes me so sad.

People tell us we're doing such a good thing, making such a sacrifice, but it honestly doesn't feel like that at all. It's been fun. Every single day has been amazing. There have been less-than-stellar times for sure, like when BG had fertilizer pellets sprayed at him with homemade pellet guns, or when surly teenagers make wise-ass comments at us in class, but I figure that's just karma coming around again for all of the jerk-faced things we (I) did in high school. (Let's face it, no way did BG ever do anything bad.)

Babies greet us with outstretched arms. Our classes chorus together, "Good MOR-ning, TEA-cher!" at the beginning of class and "THANK you TEA-cher! See you again to-MOR-row!" at the end. The kids at the Drop-In Centre come running when we show up. We've gotten hugs, and manicures, and back massages, and more hugs. Every day I get to make a baby laugh, inhale that sweet baby head smell, piggy-back a kid, laugh at ridiculous antics. They cluster around us when we give them a little treat, and press their hands together and nod their heads in thanks. They squeeze our hands when they leave class, sit on our laps during story time, rest their heads on our shoulders. At every moment they want to be near us. We spoon food into baby mouths, one after an other. We tickle baby tummies and feet, and dress an endless production line of infants after bath time. We rub away the bite marks, wipe runny noses, and play airplane. We've watched so many of them come to the baby room for the first time, terrified by the noise, the commotion, the people. We see them settle in until they're at home in a matter of days. We've seen them go from rolling to crawling to walking to running.

Every day we leave exhausted, but know that we only want to come back again the next day. This has been perhaps the best thing I have ever done in my life, and I'm sad beyond words that it's coming to an end.

Pause

I haven't seen anyone in my family for five months. We talk every few days, over a staticky and disjointed internet phone line, or via Google chat, meaning the content of a ten-minute conversation can take up to an hour. On Christmas we used the webcam, and we saw everyone all together and felt our distance from them even more strongly. The cheerful smiles we painted on our faces were pained and determined. I grinned and laughed, but wanted to cry. Every day I wish I had my sisters and mom with me. Sometimes I'll be sitting at breakfast and I'll burst into tears in the restaurant, leaving BG struggling to wonder where that came from.

The five of us always had an awesome relationship, but I never knew how much I depend on their support. I never realized how they understand me like nobody else; they can cheer me up like nobody else, and when I understand that I am acting totally crazy, they sympathize.

I wish they were here to help me braid my hair now that it's long enough. I wish they were here so we could laugh in unison at the exact same tempo and rhythm until we cry and take goofy self-portrait photos like we always do. I wish they were here to go shopping in the markets, to share the weird street snacks, to pose for crazy pictures, to talk. I wish somebody would borrow my mascara. I wish that they could see all of the amazing things that we've seen because they deserve to be astounded too.

J, K, C: Remember when Mom used to yell at us to not fight when we were little because we were all that we had and we were going to have each other forever? And we thought it was a threat? I realize now that it was a promise.

Already?!

I can't believe it's already here. Today is my last day at work.

Before I continue I have to apologize for my emotional mushiness as of late. I swear I'm not normally this bad, and I won't continue to be a wreck forever. Just indulge me and my sappiness one last time. I hope to be back to my normal, caustic self in a few days. In the meantime, my waterproof mascara has been worth every penny.

When I started here two years ago I swore I wasn't going to make any friends. It was too hard to say goodbye, and besides, my dance card was full. I was going to come in every day and be civil, but keep my head low, do my work, and go home at the end of the day isolated and safe in my tiny bubble world.

It didn't happen that way. People made me laugh and invited me for lunch. I saw that coworkers and colleagues here actually cared about what was happening to one another outside of the hospital. People laughed and cried and laughed, and laughed, and laughed. Somehow I got pulled into the circle and found myself joining in on the bitching, the laughing, and the sharing. I'll always remember the limbo contests, the tap-dancing, the cartwheels... and the work. Right, the work. On the craziest days, on the best days, and on the worst, someone has always been able to make me laugh. In two short years I have made some of the closest friends I've ever had, friends that understand me better than anyone, friends that could be my sisters.

Today, I was honoured by the thoughtfulness that my coworkers extended -- a farewell gala, a million tear-inducing messages, and a donation to the Pattaya Orphanage in Thailand. I am stunned into silence and feel undeserving of such generosity.

Forming close relationships is hard when you have to leave their safety, but the rewards are well worth it.

Thank you, guys, for everything. Really.

Admitting my Weirdness

Over the next 15 months, we're probably going to be spending an inordinate amount of time in airports all over the world. This doesn't bother me as much as it should. I secretly love going to the airport. I don't necessarily enjoy the lining up or the security anal probes, but I love almost everything else. Being in an airport is like being in a dream-like place where reality doesn't exist. You can eat things you normally wouldn't eat ($6.00 ham sandwiches and cotton candy?), read trash you wouldn't normally read (hello, celebrity gossip rags), and buy ridiculousness that you would never buy otherwise, and it's all okay because you're at the airport. There's nothing better than a package of bite-sized individually wrapped chocolates or a two-litre bottle of duty-free liquor -- except maybe a package of miniature perfume bottles that you'll never use.

Really, though, the reason I love the airport is that it's the best place for people-watching. In departures, I like to make up trips that the passengers are going on -- exotic vacations? Trips to Disneyworld? Business trips? My favourite place ever, though, is the arrivals gate. It's always full of happy people -- people arriving at vacation destinations, people returning home after a long absence, and most happily, people who are being reunited with loved ones after a long time apart. You can see the joy and emotion on their faces as they rush towards each other: parents and children, grandchildren and grandparents, husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, boyfriends and boyfriends. They can't reach each other fast enough, and when they embrace, you can feel that it's like their world is complete for the first time in a long time.

We live in a wonderful world that's so full of love, and the airport is one of the best places to realize this.

An Ending and a Beginning

It's been a rough few weeks.

We moved out of our first home this weekend after spending the last few weeks surrounded by mounds of cardboard, bubble wrap, and free local newspapers that we pinched to use as packing material. My fingers were permanently stained with black ink rubbed from the pages of the Canadian Tire flyers and were permanently chapped from being exfoliated with pieces of packing tape.

We stayed up aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallllll night on Friday night packing the last few boxes. The last few are always the hardest, because they are the ones full of the random stuff you've been ignoring for weeks because you don't know what to do with them. I mean, how do you pack a bouquet of sugar flowers or a canoe paddle? At 3:30 in the morning, the witching hour, these questions can be difficult to answer.

On Saturday morning the movers arrived armed with... nothing. They had nothing to pack us into a storage locker for any length of time, nor were they prepared to pack us to move once our stuff came out of storage. We had plans, people, and they were rapidly being deconstructed. Our original plan was to be all packed and moved into our storage locker on Saturday. On Sunday we would drive to my mom's place to drop stuff off, and then drive to BG's mom's place to drop even more stuff off (we have a lot of stuff.) Then we'd relax.

The revised schedule became: Movers arrive, movers leave empty handed. Val drives to airport to pick up sister. Movers return with packing supplies after an angry BG calls and swears at the manager. Furniture is wrapped and prepped. Val, Karen, and BG drive to BG's mom's place to drop some things off. Stop at Dairy Queen. Drive home, have dinner, fall unconscious. Sunday morning: Movers return, start moving furniture. Spend 45 minutes trying to get bedroom dresser down the stairs. Lower bed box spring over side of house to get it down. Val drives Karen back to the airport. Stuff gets moved into locker which is way smaller than we paid for and has holes in the wall. Val and BG drive two hours to Val's mom's place, drive back, go to lawyer's to sign papers that were supposed to be signed LAST week for house closing but were lost by lawyer's assistant. Crash.

But -- it's done.

We're homeless. Emotionally, leaving the house was hard. We spent our time in the van on the way home reminiscing about all of the great things we have experienced in the first house we ever owned. We loved evenings on the rooftop patio with a bottle of wine. We loved eating dinner with friends and hanging out on the couch. We loved "fondue nights", Thanksgiving dinners with family, and baking Christmas cookies. We loved sleeping in on Saturday mornings or staying up late on Saturday nights. We loved our giant two-person bathtub. We adored coming home every night to our house. Our little cramped townhouse drove us crazy, but it was ours and we loved it. And now it belongs to another couple, and it's going to be as great for them as it was for us -- I just know it.

The Countdown

We're departing in three weeks. We've done so much, but there's still so much to do. Bah.

One of the most important things was to throw a party. For one thing, we had a TON of alcohol that needed to be consumed. Also, we wanted to see lots of friends that we wouldn't get to see before we go, and this was a fun (and efficient!) way to do it.

True to form, I made too much food. I think everyone had a good time... I know that we did. Still, the evening was somewhat bittersweet for us, because as much as we enjoyed seeing our friends and loved ones, the idea that we won't see most of these people for the next year and a bit... well, it sucks.

We have some great friends. My cousin and his wife graciously allowed us the use of their condo party room and helped tremendously in the set-up and take-down. My sister showed up early and helped with food prep. My sister-in-law also helped with set up (and both lovely ladies stayed the next day to help us pack.) The other friends that honoured us by showing up on Saturday have been there with us through all stages of schooling, our wedding, through long weekends, through camping trips, at work, through deaths and relationship troubles and in-law dramas and family sagas... we've gone dancing and drinking, to movies, to dinner, to shows... we've discussed all manners of intimate details of life, have shared our thoughts and feelings, have fought and made up, have laughed and cried and talked, and talked, and talked.

I see now that friends are more than random atoms that you occasionally meet up with in the universe. We rely on their presence more than I ever knew. My friends and family are the web that holds my life in the happy place it is right now. They're the firefighters that save us from sheer disaster when we fall or jump, and they're the ones who love us for who we are, regardless of snide bitchy comments that one might direct at them on occasion. It took me a long time to realize that I didn't have to feel obligated to repay kind gestures with material rewards, because they're not expected. Friendship isn't about that.

To my friends and family and everyone that I love: Know that I leave you reluctantly. Giving up my job, my house, and packing up all of my material possessions (even the boots) were the easy parts. Saying goodbye to all of you is going to be the hardest thing I will ever do. I will miss you like crazy and will think of you all the time; I love you all and wish only the best for you. I acknowledge and appreciate all of the support you've ever given me and I want you to know that it is here for you in me as well if you ever need it -- all you need to do is ask.

Wah.