Special Moments with Family and Friends

My 3 daughters and I have made it back to Bali after our 6 week annual 'girls tour' to the UK.  We had a terrific time renewing bonds with family and friends. It was a good feeling being able to pick up from where we left off and was well worth the effort of travelling a 14 hour flight to keep in touch.

When I first moved to Asia 11 years ago, I re-assured my Mum that even though she wouldn't see us often, when she did, we would have quality time together. For both lots of Grandparents, three weeks each of putting up with our belongings strewn around the house, no matter how much running around I did to clear up after ourselves (the biggest challenge for me was keeping up with flushing the toilet, particularly as my 6 year old seems to think that because the Green School has non flushable, environment friendly toilets that everywhere should be the same); mass food shopping and eating as though we're about to hit a food shortage; using the washing machine until it wears out the mixed colours cycle to breaking point; sabotaging the TV so that it only plays children's programmes in constant repetition and a mass siege of every computer in the house, can affect the quality side of things but both Mum and Dad and my in-laws continued to show remarkable skills of patience, resilience and tolerance to put us up and put up with us for a long stretch and all in one go. They took us to theme parks, the seaside, crab fishing along the sea front (kept the girls amused for hours), to shopping centres, out for lunch, dinner and picnics, cooked us wonderful food and dropped all their commitments to be there for us. While we created chaos and disruption like a tornado that comes and goes, special moments were created that last a life-time for all of us.

Being referred to as 'gypsies' by our friends' 12 year old son made me think to myself  'he's absolutely right' as we travelled the country looking for a place to stay, our bulging suitcases jam-packed tightly in a hire car, and causing a backlog of vehicles behind us due to our heavy load. We were fortunate to have friends and family welcome us warmly, regardless of us temporarily hijacking their homes. Our friends in London, Sharon and family, even let us extend our stay with them by offering their home for a weekend, while we fed their 3 black cats and they went on their first mini camping break in Southern England. Judging by their reports of being extremely uncomfortable and freezing cold at night, (Sharon's husband had his broken arm stiffly set in plaster cast at the time which is especially not recommended for first timers) and in spite of having a deluxe tent which they could stand in and had a fancy awning, they clearly got the worse deal. While cat and house sitting, we attended an emotional memorial service for a dear Mum and Grandmother of one of our closest ex-patriate friends, Kim. Sharon and her family knew the female vicar who was conducting the service (small world) and the vicar beamed at me as though she had known me for years when she realised who I was in response to her question 'are you local?' and I said that we had flown in from Bali. Although I had never met this lady before, we were instantly connected by having mutual good friends.

At the gathering after the funeral, we were welcomed with open arms by Kim's family and relatives, some of whom had travelled to London from overseas. Kim's Mum emigrated to London from Guyana, the north-east edge of South America in her twenties. As a result, we learned about Guyanese culture and thanks to Kim's relatives finding a Guyanese take-away in London, we experienced tasty Guyanese food, including curry, dumplings, pepperpot (beef stew), roti, cookup rice (similiar to the Caribbean rice rice and peas) and my favourites were the beef patties and pineapple tarts.  Over an extended family weekend, we joined their big family picnic at Dulwich Park in London, playing rounders and enjoying a beautiful British summer's day as the relatives, friends and children bonded together - a fond memory that will always be with us.

Our good friends in Thame, Oxfordshire, rolled out the red carpet for us as they let us take over a wing of their home and welcomed us with my friend Fiona's fabulous English cottage pie followed by a scrumptious apple pie made by their 14 year old daughter.  The next day they fired up the barbecue and we sat out in the cold, as we stoically didn't let the predictable, unpredictable British weather get in our way and we laughed our way through the afternoon while reminiscing and talking about our latest adventures. Further down south in Oxfordshire, near Goring-on-Thames, our long-standing and loyal friends whom we hadn't seen for 3 years, invited us to their impressively renovated home and my dear friend Kate made me feel extra special by treating me to her delicious cheesecake - I never used to be a fan of cheesecake until I tried Kate's cracking cheesecake many years ago when we lived together in London - the only drawback was that I now had to share this best ever cheesecake with all our children who asked for seconds and devoured it like a pack of hungry wolves.

In Wales we were lucky enough to visit my Welsh friend Alison, whom I got to know in Singapore. She now lives in Dubai, but happened to be spending her last night in her renovated house in Cardiff, so we popped into see her. Alison welcomed us with afternoon tea, cakes and sandwiches and even though we hadn't since each other for a few years, we quickly picked up on all our news and gossip. We also met up with my faithful, old school friends and their children and I gate-crashed on an entertaining girls' evening out with their cousins.  We shared fun moments catching up on the news, while our children swam in the river (my girls jumped in fully clothed) and apart from the odd shivering moment, they seemed oblivious to the cold. It was a much wiser decision to sit in my brother and sister-in-law's hot tub that they generously let us use and was quite an experience going from hot to cold as we left the hot tub and made a quick dash to change back into some warm clothes at their house.  My younger brother took time off work to be with us and walk his fun loving Alsataian dog in the woods, as well as picking lots of blackberries, which when we got into the swing of spotting ripe blackberries, became addictive. My 6 year old loved seeking out blackberries and judging by the purple stains on her clothes and face, she relished this fruit that was to be found hanging from briars among the hedgerows.

Make time and effort to be with your family and friends .  It's a wonderful way to deepen bonds and remember special moments. As Cesare Pavese puts it so well:-

"We do not remember days; we remember moments."

It's these moments that make a difference in our life and when we become close so that:-


"The best part of life is when your family becomes your friends, and your friends become your family."
---Danica Whitfield
 
Enjoy your time spent with family and friends.  Life is too short not to.

Janet

Nitpicking

Have you ever found yourself feeling glad that you haven't had to deal with a certain situation and then it happens to you? No matter how many precautions you take or how you manage to avoid something (whether you take great pains for prevention or you think / hope that it won't happen to you), inevitably you have to deal with it. My daughters were not totally amused when they found out what I was blogging this time. I would have felt this way a while back, before it happened to me and these facts of life can happen to us, so now I want to proudly say, I've mastered it and know how to deal with it and there's a funny side to this learning that I want to share with you too. Enjoy this life lesson! 

When my family and I moved to Bali, I was given two pieces of advice that stand out in mind. The first was to hire a chef. The second was to be equipped with head lice solution and fine tooth metal combs purchased from Singapore. It is impossible to buy this stuff in Bali and according to my children, head lice love living in the bamboo at Green School (I have no evidence to verify this and head lice were prevalent in their old school in squeaky clean Singapore). The challenge of Bali is that with no proper combs or solutions, infestations are hard to control. Now, I must tell you that you do not get this kind of advice when looking up websites on living in Bali.  No, you have to be connected with the Bali underworld to understand the finer and more practical details of living on a paradise island. I chose to ignore the first piece of advice as it felt far too decadent to employ my own chef. I did, however, take note of point number two, as my family had managed to avoid these wretched things while living in Singapore, in spite of notes being sent home from school warning parents of outbreaks. Determined not to be 'caught out' in Bali, I raided many chemists in Singapore. Like a soldier ready for war, I was armed with all sorts of head lice paraphernalia ready for any kind of attack in Bali.

It wasn't until nearly two years later, when I had to deal with head lice and we weren't even in Bali when the outbreak occurred! The long summer break had started and my children were staying at our Singapore office. I had just returned from a great, start to the day coaching session, when my children soon brought me hurtling back down to earth. As I opened the office door, I was hit by the suspicious smell of freshly bleached toilets. The team in the office were head down, quietly getting on with their work but something strange was going on at the far end of the office.  I suppose you can call it a mother's instinct but I knew my girls were up to no good when I found the three of them huddled in the small office bathroom. My youngest daughter came out to greet me, her hair looking as though it had been dipped in a bowl of cooking oil and proudly announced 'We have nits Mummy', as though she had won an award for academic achievement.  Luckily the word 'nits' is a common UK term used to refer to head lice, so my Singaporean team wouldn't necessarily understand what we were talking about. Extremely embarrassed, I quickly scooped up my daughter into the bathroom, gesturing to my children to be quiet and hoping that nobody had heard in the office. Somehow all four of us managed to squeeze into the small bathroom, the smell of bleach strongly wafted past my nose and my other two daughters' blonde hair had turned dark with oil.

"You haven't put bleach in your hair have you and why does your hair look so greasy?" I whispered alarmed.

"No Mummy, we've used the bleach to kill the eggs and nits and we've put baby oil in our hair so they slip out" my middle daughter rationalised intelligently and led me out of the toilet towards the sofa, where she showed me a lid off one of the toiletries that was filled with bleach.  As she tried to hand over the evidence to me, I jumped back in fright, wanting nothing to do with these blood sucking things.  The lid fell straight onto the navy blue sofa, instantly changing its colour to blue with a big streak of white and we had just sold it to the next tenants because we were moving office at the time. What had happened to my good start to the day?

After a full investigation, it transpired that all three daughters had head lice and because we had all been sleeping together in close proximity, my middle daughter who seemed to know what she was doing found four eggs in my hair too!  On this news I freaked out and the whole office discovered our plight.  Curious to know what these nits looked like, my daughter took on the role of a National Geographic Correspondent and demonstrated with a magnifying glass to the office what an egg looked like (a miniscule brown dot) and what a head louse looked like (tiny creature with little legs that ominously moved). As all my head lice stuff was in Bali, I ran out to the nearest chemist.  It seemed that every chemist in Singapore (well that I visited) had stopped stocking metal combs, so all I could do was buy solution and hope for the best.

I thought I had put the whole episode to rest, when a month later, there was a resurgence of head lice on one of my daughters. These troublesome things were still persistently hanging on. This time though, I knew what I was doing, I had mastered the art of 'nitpicking' and was ready to deal with those annoying bugs that so easily camouflaged themselves. Like an obsessed monkey, I picked out every little egg until we were officially nit free (I also found the use of a head lamp worked really well).

While busy nitpicking, I thought to myself what a great analogy it was. Things happen in life that we hope to avoid but when we do have to deal with these situations, we come out stronger, and even more so when they come back to haunt us. I once had a very nervous participant attend my Presenting workshop and he explained that he had even changed his job from accounting to IT to avoid presenting - something that absolutely petrified him. His organisation decided that it wanted to change its IT system and the participant not only had to present the new system to all staff, he had to influence them to use it too. After the training and when he was 'out there' presenting, he gained the confidence to deal with it. Sometimes we have to face situations to be able to deal with them.

When it comes to nitpicking, I've been there, done it and know how to deal with it!

"Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it."

Jodi Picoult

Be re-assured of what you're capable of when you least expect it.

Janet