hello brain!
wait...whose kids are those? where's my husband?

After a month and a half of pure insanity, I finally had a weekend to decompress and re-enter the universe. I kind of feel like the David-after-the-dentist kid-high-on-dental-drugs youtube video sent around by Aunt Katy. Like, is this real life? I feel funny.

December was an absolute haze of play mania. Coming back from holidays, still jet-lagged, we all started in on four day a week rehearsals. Mondays for main cast, Tuesdays for Dance Crew, Wednesdays for Tech, Fridays for full cast, and Saturday mornings for everyone. I mentioned in the previous post that it was crazy, but really it was CRAZY. I didn't really eat or sleep for the last two weeks of the show. Y'all know I am a very conscientious sleeper, and for me to be lying awake until 1 am thinking about stupid, stupid stuff like the colour of the lights on the front of the stage in the 24th scene is NOT GOOD. Ji Hong and Seung Yi existed as sort of blurs in my peripheral vision, smears of humankind that I could only focus on for brief moments before falling into non-sleep sleep.

The good news is that the play went incredibly well. We had 42 kids in the cast, and the kids did all the lighting, music, make-up, costuming, and stage crewing for the show. All the adults sat in the audience. OMG it was scary, but the fact that we did it that way made the audience very kind and patient with our scene changes and minor technical glitches. Along the way there were dramatic moments: the stage left crew kid suddenly didn't show up on Saturday, there was a power outage - luckily during the intermission, praise be to all the gods who were looking out for me, the cast nearly died of hunger during the first show until our kind Principal came backstage with goodies for them, etc. We had a great adults-who-were-involved party on the Friday night and then after the Saturday show we had a kids' cast party as well. It was all incredibly fun and entirely worthwhile and everyone who saw the show had great comments afterwards. But man, was I wiped out.

Then, two days after the show wrapped, I headed to Shanghai with ten kids and my colleague to attend a drama festival. I had attended a similar festival in Delhi the previous year, but getting to travel to CHINA made it much, much awesomer. My daily posts from the trip that I sent back to my admin will be in the next post.

Since coming back, I've been taking it pretty easy. I had a long weekend so I just mellowed out with the kids most of the time. I've been obsessive compulsively putting together two videos for the drama trip and have actually had a few minutes to catch up on my marking and to tidy up my classroom. Yesterday Phet got back from Canada at about 4 am. He fell asleep with all of us for the morning and then we all got up at 8 am and he piled up a heap of gifts for us. I got my first ipod - thanks, dear! - and better yet a big fat storage drive so that I can finally clean this machine up a little and be able to download some photos once again. Ji and Seung Yi got cute new clothes from Gramma, and jellies and mango gummies from Gu Pas. And then, the food! Many cans of anchovies and tubes of anchovy paste from Mum and Dad, 200 bucks worth of cheese from the Leslieville cheese shop, sacks of valentine cinnamon hearts and smarties, black licquorice, cans of pate from the aunts, and another 100 bucks worth of salami and prosciutto. YUM! Then, after lunch and a nap Phet had to leave at 5 pm to go to Columbo. Boo. The kids and I staved off the sorrow by going to play and the park and by enjoying what has got to be THE finest Delhi weather ever known. It has been truly spectacular here this week: pure, crisp blue skies, clear air, pleasant and cool breezes, warm sunny sunshine in the sun but not too hot, just beautiful. Pretty much like my favourite Canadian weather, which is warm summer days in Calgary. They're basically the same: something like 25' max, clear and fresh. So nice.

Ji has his buddy over today for a playdate - now that I'm aware of the universe around me once again, I can organize such things. It was so bad in December that I got an invitation for a birthday party for Ji via email, but I couldn't open the attachment, and then I totally forgot to ask the Mum for info, and then yesterday I was like, 'hey Ji, it sure seems like a long time since someone in your class had a birthday party', and he was like, 'Well, everyone else went to Alexander's birthday but I wasn't invited.' And so of course I said, 'Why weren't you invited? Oh...wait a minute, you WERE invited...' Bad Mom! Seung Yi, meanwhile, is doing very well. She and Laree have both had sort of congested coughs (not noses, just lungs) for a little while, but have been in fine spirits and have been really quite healthy this season. Laree had a bad hive-y reaction to something early this week, and I think it might've been strawberries. But she's fine now. I took Seung Yi to school for the first time in months today and it was so cute to watch her go in. They have this thing where the kids get dropped at the gate by family or nannies, and then there are teachers lined up strategically along the pathway to help herd the kids into their classes. I thought it was nice how they encouraged that kind of independence. Seung Yi brought me right into her class and then I just said a quick hello to the teacher and headed out - but still nice to see where she spends so much of her time. She and Laree are there from 9 - 12 now, so it's a pretty considerable chunk of her life, given that she still naps for part of the afternoon!

Seung Yi is just delicious - ruddy, wonderful, want-to-bite-them cheeks, and she seems to slowly be moving out of her awful whiny phase. She is learning to do new things on her own and yesterday showed me how she can take off and put on her own pajamas and how she can get up on the toilet and wipe her own bum after she pees. She talks about all kinds of stuff and is a very quick study. Ji has only to do something incredibly dangerous once and she'll instantly follow right behind him. She also notices so much around her - perhaps unlike my elder child. The other day we were out driving and a little girl was begging for money, and she said, 'That little girl no holding hands on the street.' I said, 'Well, she's asking for money.' Seung Yi asked, 'Where her family?' I said, 'I don't know, maybe they're busy asking for money too.' Seung Yi then said, 'I want to find her family,' and then engaged in a rather long discussion with me about why the girl had no money, what it means to be poor, and why some people are poor. She's a very observant and thoughtful kid. She and Laree are entering a sort of older-and-naughtier era at the moment. They ransacked the rangoli sand (this very colourful sand used to create patterns on the sidewalks or on the cement outside houses here) and made a HUGE mess of it the other week, and then more recently they WASHED Ji's itouch. The itouch was touch-and-go (ha) for a little while but now seems to be ok. Well done, Apple. Still, they're lots of fun, and they seem to be getting more like friends and less like SWORN ENEMIES these days.

[Delhi-16-February-2009]