Spaghetti Night

Tuesday and Thursday nights are spaghetti nights here at the HCH. But not like American spaghetti. Spaghetti with ketchup and onions and hotdogs. It's actually QUITE delicious. We make it at home pretty often. I had also made some banana chocolate chip muffins for the kids for dessert. Cause, you know, why not offer MORE carbs after a dinner of nothing BUT carbs? I am American. It is what I do.

The girl table:

The boy table:

And yes, they always eat segregated. Don't hate. It's cultural.

Today was a good day. (Well, my eyes feel like there is broken glass shards ripping my eyeballs apart, but other than that it was a good day.) I am learning what it will be like as a mother to 25... not easy-- but lots of fun--always moving.

After I did Nia and Nico's school, we just hung out with Sandra while Nixon and Nick went back to discuss the local scholarship program that HCH supports. And I nearly drank the dead roach that was floating in my coffee. I chased Josiah away from certain death several times (trying to get into the bleach, wanting to jump off the cement second story stairs with no rail, hitting the lame dog in his dislocated hip over and over again...) and rescued Nico from nannies yelling at him for messing with the laundry on the line. (And then made him apologize.) I helped Nia and Nico make some Thanksgiving crafts, and read them the story of Squanto. I said "Timoun, ale!" (Kids, GO!) about 284 times today-- all merited (to get them to put a move on it when Roro was ready to take them to school, to go tell them to go upstairs and do their homework, to get them out of the kitchen when I was trying to bake and they were sneaking licks...) There are ALWAYS kids around.

By the time Nick came home, I was ready to collapse... I was tired from chasing Josiah, my eyes were burning, it had just poured (with all our clothing on the line) and so the house was closed up and getting pretty sticky. I told Nick I just needed a few minutes to regroup and take a (cold) shower. So I went into the bedroom and locked the door. Then into the bathroom and locked that door. (Cause you never know with THAT many people around all the time...) And after I got undressed and into the tub I realize we're out of water. The nannies had done a lot of laundry today and a neighbor hooked up her hose to "borrow" some of our water (which she apparently does fairly regularly). So our cistern on the roof was empty. No water for the shower. In a very small towel (and I am kind of a bigger gal) I unlocked the bathroom door and then bedroom door and screamed for to Nick to pump some water up to the roof. Then I relock the doors and just sit on my towel and wait. In a few minutes, I am rewarded with a cold, cold shower and am able to scrub some of the filth of the past few days off of me. Now, "scrub" might seem like too harsh a word, but I literally used a scrub brush (as in what they clean the floor with) to clean my feet. I SCRUBBED my feet. After walking around on cement and tile for two days with no shoes on, it was necessary.

I am off to bed in a few minutes. Please, I beg of you, PRAY my eyes get better. This is no fun. But hey, if worse comes to worse, an American eye doctor is coming to Thanksgiving dinner and I can probably bribe him to take a look at my grotesqueness...

Ta ta for now...