My Family Moves to India

That about sums it up. Here's a funny tidbit though.

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Well, we have had such a busy time of it with my sister visiting that I haven't had a lot of energy left to blog! I thought I would do a quick catch-up for people who want to know the latest and greatest.

E arrived home last week....full of sass and energy, as always. In the manner of youth she recovered quickly from jet lag, and has already picked out her next love interest here. She had a good visit home, and now her focus is once again on graduating from AISC and getting accepted into a US college.

A new family with our company arrived in Chennai on the same day as E, and we are excited to have them here! Welcome!

School starts tomorrow for the kids. (Whew!) The break has been a good one since A has been visiting, but I'm ready for the routine to start again. It will be nice to have some quieter time with my sister.

J has been growing a fairy garden, making a book (it's getting quite long and involved!), playing with Raeshma, and doing a lot of swimming. L has been swimming, biking, running, swimming....you get the picture. He has decided that black is a "soldier's color" and so wants to wear nothing but his black jeans (often caked with mud up the back, when he has been biking through the puddles). The other day he put two entire sets of clothes on - pants and T-shirts - so he would "look bigger". Ah, boys.

We decided to get rid of two of the guards, as we just had too many people around. The guards don't do anything anyway except open the gate and keep L from leaving the compound. S made the call in the morning and by afternoon, the two we designated were gone. That's the fastest anything has ever happened in India!! We're betting that the guard company sent them to the new family who moved here, since we know that they are always short of guards (on purpose).

We're going to Thailand at the end of the month and meeting up with S's mother and stepfather, as well as sister and brother-in-law, and then his mother and stepfather will join us in Chennai for a week. After that we have a week in Coonnoor (hill station) scheduled when the heat strikes, and then after school ends in June we are planning to visit my family. Lots of travel to put together.

I spent Saturday night "worshipping the porcelein God", as Bill Cosby puts it, and am still resting up, although I feel much better. Poor A has it now. We had planned on gardening today but I think we will take it easy instead.

Speaking of gardening, with A here my interest in re-doing the hodgepodge affair that I've got in the back yard has regenerated. We spent Saturday at various nurseries - plants are SO CHEAP here! Now we have some nice specimens to put on the various patios and the rooftop terrace. Next we tackle the vegetable garden and the mish-mash of plantings in the yard. More on that to come...

The list of broken things around the house is once again growing - currently on it is the washer (mildew smell ); dryer (shocking people ); Airtel card (I'm borrowing S's); and one of the landlines (yeah, we just got one fixed and the other goes down.... ). Still no high-speed cable line out here for the internet - even though we are going on 9 months of promises ("10 days, Madame" is their favorite time frame). Yeah right. So I have lots of phone calls to make - better get started on some.

Thursday was J's 8th birthday, so Saturday we had a party for her. As she and S have birthdays only a day apart, we held the celebrations together. This year, there was no argument about having Barbie on or in the cake, as there has been in the past. (One year Barbie had to ride a motorcycle to satisfy both of them. ) We seem to be over the Barbie cake fetish, on J's part anyway.

Despite my annual stress-out festival the day before the parties, this year's gala went well. We kept it relatively simple. Here in Chennai the current trend amongst expatriates is to hire a party coordinator, and then have custom-printed balloons, catered food, a magician, face painter, mehendi (temporary henna tattoos, usually on the hands) painter, and a bouncy castle. Although it's quite cheap, being in charge of all that hoopla kinda freaked me out. Besides, we live so far out I could anticipate many difficulties (and extra expense) getting people out here. So we elected to do the traditional Mitchell party: pinata, cake, and then games - in this case, swimming. (Using my assets, here.)

I did cave on the number of invited guests though. In the past we've always limited it to 8, the logic being that that's how many invitations are usually in a packet. (ha ha. You gotta love being a mom sometimes. ) The real reason is that 8 is usually all I feel up to handling. But, J's teacher gave her some pressure about inviting the entire class, and in such a multicultural group, I didn't want anyone to feel left out. (Because naturally, J had invited mostly native English speakers.) So we did invite everyone. We also invited a couple of friends from church, so it wound up being about 20 kids all told.

For his party, S wanted to have the young single adults out to play basketball, pool, and ping pong, so the two of them (J and S) worked out a schedule where the two groups would be here at the same time but not have overlapping activities. That's the beauty of this large house - it's so designed for parties that you can actually have two at the same time. Amazing. It also helps to have two maids do all the cooking and cleanup.

J asked for a heart-shaped pinata and Mexican food (her favorite - kinda funny to have a Mexican themed-party in India when we're not even Mexican). As I mentioned before, the pinata was mostly done by our head guard, Rajamanakkam. I finished painting it and added the candy (bought in France at the wonderful hypermarket ) this morning. For the food, I dug out one of our precious Taco Bell enchildada-in-a-box kits and just gave each child a tiny portion - I knew that most of them would not like the Mexican spices. I told them that they had to eat one bite but not finish it. One of S's guests (an American) finished all the rest.

The cakes were a part of my stress-out day. With so many people invited, I figured we needed about 3 cakes. At the last minute I decided to buy two of them , so that meant that they had to be ordered and then picked up today. Thankfully one of the young singles volunteered to do that, so that load was off my mind. The third I made myself, partly because I love the birthday boy and girl, and partly because I don't love Indian-made cakes. They're the same as American store-bought cakes - all looks and no taste. Only they are also greasy. Gross.

So, with two perfectly decorated store-bought cakes and one imperfectly-decorated homemade cake, we had enough. We had some of the store-bought ones left over, so I guess others share my theory about the cake here.

The pinata was the most fun - I sure wish I had charged the camcorder - the kids are old enough now that they can really whack it. In the end, it was almost broken open and S just ripped it the rest of the way because it was fruitless trying to keep the children far enough back so they didn't get their heads in the way of the bat. In fact, one Korean boy did accidentally hit a British boy's head, thinking that it was the pinata (remember, they were blindfolded). I have to admit that it sounded exactly like the pinata when it was hit. Thankfully, we used kid's bats (plastic) and the boy that got hit, W, is absolutely the perfect Brit - phlegmatic and stoic to the core. He didn't even blink.

(I love W. Last year as I sat at school, day after day, hour after hour, with the Queen of Hysteria (J), I would watch W calmly trot off to class and think "It can't be as bad as J thinks it is. Look at W!" W is just always calm and polite. He is the quintessential English gentleman. Where do you get kids like that??? It must be genetic.)

In keeping with Indian tradition, J didn't open her presents during the party. They feel that is rude. I'm OK with it because J agreed to ask for clothing for the orphanage kids instead of toys, so there wouldn't be much fun opening white shirt after white shirt anyway. Besides, with the pool calling, no one really wanted to stick around inside after the cake.

With so many nationalities represented, it was interesting watching the different parenting styles. The Indian parents mostly sent their kids with nannies and drivers, or they stayed themselves. They seem a bit leery of dirt and swimming, and insist on their kids taking complete showers and drying their hair after swimming. (Not a bad idea given the various parasites indigent to India.) The one nanny didn't even know her kid's name - we had quite a bit of confusion until we sorted that out (she was a new hire). But aside from that, they let the kids roam and play, without interfering. Most of the Indian parents applaud L for his "spirit" and are always counseling me not to "crush" it. Like that would be possible, ha ha.

The Korean parents definitely resemble the "helicopter parents" that you read about in the American media. They are constantly hovering and immediately intervene if anything goes amiss. They are never more than an arm's length away, and none of their kids were swimming.

The American parents were the drop-and-run type. Most of them know us pretty well, so that's what we expected. One of the American kids (older) played some kind of bucket game in the pool - he taught the younger kids how to go underwater with their heads in a bucket of trapped air. I was glad that I had two guards watching the pool....

And W, our Brit kid, his driver just dropped him off and picked him up. I think I've talked to his father once, briefly. He was definitely the most polite, the most self-assured, and one of the more independent types.

Anyway, when most of the younger guests had gone, we rounded out the day by going to the beach. The weather is absolutely perfect right now - about 80 F with a nice breeze. Despite our cleaning it up for FHE a couple of days ago, the beach was littered again - Cyclone Sidhr pushed a lot of waves and trash onto it. Ah well. Better trash and strong waves than a direct hit.

It seemed as if everyone enjoyed themselves - even S said it was a nice birthday. Look for pictures on Flickr.com soon. On to pizza and a movie with the singles.....it's my time to relax.

We do, but not as bad as Danie! http://earthtodanie.blogspot.com/

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Today we had our first, and only, primary program practice. The program is next week. Generally you work the entire year on it, but hey, this is India; two week's notice ought to be enough, right? Thankfully, the two orphanages that church members run must teach hymns incessantly, because the older children (who are mainly from these orphanages) know most of the songs. So I threw a program together, directly from the outline, and off we went. My husband acted as "primary bouncer", asking gawping onlookers to leave us in peace (everything in India must be done accompanied by a crowd of uneccessary onlookers) and keeping the two wildest boys controlled. Somewhat. Of course one of those boys is our son. Next week, he is soley in charge of those two boys. Poor S.

Speaking of everything in India being an (unecessary) group effort, I wish that I had video of my guards and I planting a couple of pot plants last night. I enjoy gardening very much and so was hoping that I could convince them to let me do it myself, but apparently Madame with her hands dirty is just too much. Plus two of them are former farmers/gardeners, so of course they had a non-stop argument (well it sounds like they are arguing, but I have discovered that one of the features of Tamil is that you must talk loudly over each other and repeat yourself at least six times, so it really wasn't an argument. Just normal communication.) One insisted that the dirt that I bought (remember we live on the beach, so I wanted something more nourishing than sand) was too rich and needed mixing with some sand. The other didn't like the way that they were putting the plants in the pot.

I couldn't help it. At one point I started imitating them, flapping my hands around and saying "ile! ile!" ("No! No!") repeatedly. They took the ribbing well; we had a good laugh. Seriously, when they get going, it resembles a three ring turkey circus.

So at long last the pots were finished, and despite their efforts, I DID get my hands dirty. ha ha. But I noticed that no one bothered to water the poor things, as I instructed. Ah well. Guess that's something that I can do.

J also bought a little plant, and we bought a small rose bush for her friend R. Plants are tremendously cheap here. Amazing. I'm very excited to see how they do.

L....well, books could be written about L. He demonstrated to me last night how he uses he mini-tramp to catapault between the marble benches that line our driveway. Hmmm....no wonder his shins are covered with bruises! Last week he got into major trouble because he started the van and tried to drive off. Major, major trouble. This was after the experimenting with fire incident. sigh.

Meanwhile, he continues to do moderately well at school. He made a hilarious picture the other day, which I will try to post sometime this week.

J is happy, although she didn't want to go to our first ever Indian wedding this last week. My driver's brother got married. It was sheer chaos. 800 people were there. Only 200 would fit in the wedding hall, so they had the ceremony 4 times over, and fed folks in shifts. The ceremony itself was unintelligible, but did involve yellow string and garlands. It was a Christian Tamil marriage, so the Bible was also involved. Oh, and someone sang a Christmas hymn at the end. We sat and smiled and dripped sweat and had our pictures taken like we were celebrities. Then we congratulated the bride and groom (more pictures) and went down to eat. My considerate driver had ordered pizza and pop especially for us - which of course my picky children wouldn't touch, as it was spicy pizza - but we guzzled down the biryanhi with the best of them. (Except J, who wouldn't touch even the bananas. But that's J.) We brought our own water and stuck with the cooked foods, and amazingly, we were NOT SICK the next day! (Except for L, who of course ignored his mother's instructions not to drink the local water. Being L, all he got was a short stomachache.)

If it hadn't been a two-hour drive through traffic and extremely hot, we might have taken some pictures. But as it was, photography was too much effort.

E was our cultural guide during the event. She wore a beautiful blue sari and looked wonderful, although I heard later that the maids (who helped her dress) thought it too plain and wanted to laon her one of their silk ones.

E finished volleyball this week, on a disappointed note, as she doesn't qualify to play in the international tournaments because she is over 18. So her coach quit playing her in the local games too. She has decided not to do soccer, and is going to concentrate on her SAT studying and homework. The big news is that she DID get her tourist visa to return home to GA and see her family over Christmas. She is one happy girl.

S works. Work, work, work, work, work...........what can I say?

And I run around and have fun, although I am a bit stressed by the house these days. Two major things have broken in the last week (leaky window and an electrical breaker). Plus, we are still not unpacked! I can't believe how long it takes to get that done when you face constant home maintenance issues! Our food shipment came last week, which added 13 boxes to the unpacking, and our emergency kit got left on the roof (blog about "Tsunami Warning" coming up) and rained on, so it had to be unpacked, dried, and re-packed. (One of those times that you really appreciate having maids, even if they can't do the dishes properly. ) I just finished re-packing the emergency kit tonight. Three steps forward, two steps backward. Ah well.

Also I have had a relief driver, and let me tell you, only another expatriate woman in India would understand the stress and hassle that involves. If Arul, my regular guy, had been here, L NEVER would have had access to the car keys!!

But Arul comes back tomorrow, and Sir has declared that He Shall Have a Raise. (Sir is tired of me having the come-aparts about the relief drivers. One of them even tried the old commission trick on me, driving me to a store instead to the school to pick L up.) Lucky Arul. That ought to make up for all of the repairs that are stacked up for him to take care of.

The wonderful news is that two new American families have moved in, and I am so enjoying their company. A just got here with her 4 kids, and P has been here a few weeks - P works with me in primary, and thanks to here, the children have a shot at singing decently! I'm so excited to have them here.

I've also started to treat myself to a weekly massage. I'm having back pain - I need a chiropractic adjustment badly - but there are no chiropractors here. So I figure the next best thing is a massage. It's amazing how good it makes me feel, mentally as well as physically. After 33 sessions of baring my breast to a handsome radiology tech, lying perfectly still while they poured nuclear poison into it, it's sooooooo nice to have something done that isn't going to bring me more pain. Cancer really does change your perspective. It's erased a lot of my negative body image feelings, as well as some of my modesty. I'm just happy to be alive, and not in constand pain.