Categories
asia places to go

when you give a cat a bath…

this sounds like a potential children’s book title that could be really fun. like if you give a cat a bath, then they will want a fluffy towel and if you give a cat a fluffy towel, they will want a pedicure…something like that. it could end so well with the cat having some warm milk and a nap at the end. maybe someday i’ll write that story but…

this is no such story unfortunately.

one thing (of so so many) that’s interesting living in a country when smart phones are still a thing of the future and internet costs per minute at a cafe, information just travels much more slowly. rumors are truth and spread like a spilled bag of marbles on a tile floor.

so here’s the story:

one day after we got home from work, we found a kitten right in front of our apartment. he was emaciated and just not thriving but he was oh so adorable. we took pity and did the responsible adult thing (or something) of keeping the cat and deciding to nurse it back to health. we started with giving it some food and love and soon the whole neighborhood was around us wanting to know what was going on. because if anything is going on with the white people, everyone else needs to know about it. everyone in the neighborhood came to check it out the time that we were beating a cockroach to death with a mag light (story to come), they came to check it out the day we were trying to wash our laundry by hand because we realized we didn’t have any way to wash clothes, and well they came pretty much every day to check in and find out what crazy shenanigans the white people were up to that day. so yeah pretty much story of our lives…

anyway, all the neighbors were flocking to try to figure out why we cared about some scrawny alley kitten and we told them we were going to clean him up and save his life. once we said the word bath though, you would have thought that we were talking about murder or something. turns out we sort of were. the cambodians said, oh you can’t give a cat a bath, it will die…the other expats on the street, the philipina ladies said, oh you can’t give a cat a bath, it will die…more neighbors showed up and said the same thing. we really made our neighbors even more interested in the antics of white people after this.

so we fed the cat and it seemed to perk up a bit. he was super dirty and gross so we went against all sage advice because i mean, come on, you can give a cat a bath right?? we gave him a bath, wrapped him up in a towel, put him in a basket and left for work!

when we came back, he was dead. i’m not joking. we gave a cat a bath, and it died! what in the world?!?! of course all the neighbors came by looking through the doors when we came back and we basically confirmed it for all cambodians, possibly the whole world:

people…when you give a cat a bath, it dies!

p.s. the photo above is not this cat, we never got a photo of our cat we had for a few brief hours…this is the one our over involved neighbor brought us the next day to, you know, mend our grief over the first one…we didn’t even really want a cat but then we ended up with this psycho of a cat…

Categories
nest things to do

live a little

while simplifying my life and getting rid of stuff, i found an entire cupboard full of candles. of course jared says, hey why don’t we get rid of a bunch of these? i say, no! they don’t go bad and we’ll need them for the next y2k or the zombie apocalypse or whatever. plus he doesn’t help with the hoarding because pretty much every trip we go on we find a cute little boutique and buy a beautifully scented soy candle. then we get home and say, why did we buy another candle?! now it’s a running joke and whenever we’re at the store asking what we need, one of us will say, candles!

as silly as it is, the discovery that we hoard candles got me to thinking. what are we saving them for? special occasions? but then i forget to light one. i remember to put out the holiday ones every part of the year but  never light them. i used to be this way as a kid. i’ve been a saver for as long as i can remember and while that’s a good thing most of the time, sometimes it makes you forget to live a little. i remember saving my halloween candy so it would last and i could still be eating it long after my brothers. but at least once or twice i saved it so long i forgot about it and found it once it was questionable. over the years i’ve tried to be better about this habit and enjoy things when i have them but it’s tough!

so i’m going to try to be in better practice of burning candles. so even if you have taken travel by the reigns and been all over the world, sometimes you have to be brave about different things and live a little. what does that look like to you? that looks like a lot of things for me,

but today that means lighting a candle

and enjoying it.

Categories
nest things to do

sleeping through the night

10/33

hahahaha.

oh, you want to know why i’m laughing? i’m laughing because i’ve been duped, we all have! we think that there’s a time when kids start sleeping through the night, and then always do!

oh, your kids always do sleep through the night? ok then i’m not talking to you…go have fun with your unicorn 😉

for everyone else, what the heck right? i mean that is THE number one question i have gotten since my daughter was 2 weeks old, is she sleeping through the night yet? not the question i expected. i expected the when do you want more kids question but no, this is by far the most asked question.

i seriously still don’t know how to answer that question. ye…well, i mean, kind of. i mean she can, and she does, but not all the time. i know everyone in our parents’ generation has forgotten history and thinks we were all sleeping through the night since 6 weeks old and that was that. so then when people asked when she was little there was all this pressure to give excuses as to why she wasn’t all the time. it’s so silly! who cares if your kid isn’t sleeping through the night all the time but when everyone and their mom is asking you, you start to get paranoid that there’s something wrong with your situation…should i be letting her cry more, should i give her more food, should i make her warmer, colder, but she’s teething and i can’t do anything about that and and and what should i do to get my kid to sleep?

luckily all my friends are going through this right now and none of their kids sleep through the night all the time. so that made me feel, well, normal! no need to be paranoid but seriously why is that THE question?

i think the next time someone asks, i’ll just send them to this website: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/claire-zulkey/baby-acting-crazy-its-probably-a-case-of-jbbb_b_4337821.html

JBBB it will set you free…

Categories
celebrate eat things to do

good food takes time

9/33

i was peeling a clementine for the babe the other day and she was getting whiny. she’s 1 so she gets whiny a lot, growing into a toddler is hard work! off the top of my head i told her to be patient because real food takes time. i’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. real food does take time! it’s a lesson i really want to teach my kids. there’s a place for fast food but i really want to stay in good habits and make fast food for unique occasions. i want them to learn how to cook and enjoy it, like i’m only beginning to do now in my 30s. today making the thanksgiving meal was awesome and everything was from scratch. i actually enjoyed it and a big reason is that i just felt good about how healthy it was, no shortcuts, no junk. it was a meal i could feel good about feeding my family, including the baby!

oh and my pomegranates all went rips so i spent the good portion of nap time seeding these. see, real food takes time!

Categories
africa places to go

It’s Your Turn

8/33

i came across this photo recently and kind of chuckled a little bit because this was my first time baby wearing, 11 years before having a baby of my own, or even knowing what baby wearing is.

it makes me laugh because baby wearing is such a thing now but in africa it’s so different! they strapped this baby on me and said, ‘your turn’ and then got back to work. honestly this was the only time i felt useful when i was hanging out with the african ladies. they are so hardcore! when it was my turn to stir the pot for dinner, i could barely move it, but i could hold a baby, and if that helped them get dinner done, then great!

i asked if the babies ever fell out. they said ‘sometimes’. so different. so so different.

Categories
nest things to do

living cleanly

7/33

oh my gosh, i can’t believe i just discovered this!!

after cleaning up our eating habits, we started looking into lots of other things in our life that could be toxifying our life. we just went through all the cupboards and just got rid of a ton of lotions, shampoos, cleansers, etc… because they are full of terrible chemicals. some of the chemicals are known carcinogens, there is food coloring, formaldehyde, and chemicals that change your hormones! these ingredients are in so many items, ones that are even advertised as ‘natural’. but why am i surprised, all the food is falsely advertised…

so i was googling to find what are good ingredients in soap and i came across this website, goodguide. you can search any product, and if you have the app, you can even scan products, and they rate them based on health, environment, and social and you can see how it measures up! i ended up looking up everything we owned, threw 95% of it out, and searched for products that rated 10 for health. we were able to find a lot of products at target and amazon, some i’m still on the hunt for but i’m so happy to say that my cupboards are cleaned out and simplified.

i feel safer with less toxins for our bodies and less risk if kids ever get their hands on cleaning products. as with everything healthy, the ones we went with are a bit more expensive, but it’s worth it…it’s worth it…it’s worth it!!! ask me and i will tell you how clean eating and clean living is worth it!!