Archive for my kids

Where’s my camera when I need it?

21 April 2008 at 8:57 pm · Filed under cooking, food, jobs, laws, my kids, purchases, travel

Maybe I need a camera phone after all. I needed it on Sunday, and since I didn’t have one, I will try to paint a word picture for you.

We drove up to the butcher’s store in Doug and Carey’s Hyundai van. It’s a big store on a corner of a major street. Don’t think of these outdoor markets with slabs of meat hanging around in the open air. This is a meat store with coolers and freezers and men who use plastic gloves to cut normal slabs of meat and weigh it on digital scales.

Mark and Carey went in to buy steak to grill while Doug and I sat in the van out front with the kids. Doug and Carey have four kids, ages 14 to 7, and our three were there, too. Megan, the baby, was asleep on my lap. (Okay, so it is still Chile. We didn’t have any carseats that day.)

Johnny, age 11-ish, and Doug start talking about the guy who has a little stand out front of the butcher’s shop. I hadn’t really noticed him before that. He has a square table and a big umbrella for shade. He also has a display board of maybe 12 folk music cds that he’s selling, and a karaoke machine. He’s playing loud music and occasionally breaking in with an advertisement for the butcher’s shop. “Today only, get your steak at only $2.50 a pound.” Or something like that using pesos and kilos instead. It goes really well with his folk music, let me tell you.

Doug tells Johnny, “I’ll give you three dollars if you go over there and ask the guy to sing ‘O Canada’ on his karaoke machine.” Johnny’s thinking about it. I say, “I’ll give you three dollars if you get him to turn the thing off.” I didn’t think he would, but I should have known. It was Johnny. He’s fearless.

After a couple of minutes of thinking it over, he jumps out of the passenger side door and walks over to the 60-something-year-old man. We can’t hear what he says, but the music keeps playing and Johnny comes back grinning.

“What did he say?” “He said I would have to pay him to turn it off.” “Did you offer him part of your three dollar reward?” “No, why should I share my reward with him?” “Well, what reason did you give him to turn it off?” “None.” Silly Johnny.

Mark and Carey came back and we drove away. But it didn’t occur to me until later that it’s not normal to have a karaoke guy advertising the butcher under an umbrella on the street. Funny.

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All wrapped up

21 April 2008 at 8:37 pm · Filed under holidays, jobs, my kids, purchases

Gift-giving in Chile is a time-honored tradition. And free gift wrap at almost every store is part of the tradition.

On Saturday we took the whole family for a walk to the nearby mall in search of a birthday gift for a friend of the girls’ from church. He turned four on Sunday, and this mall has the best toy store around. So after we picked out a set of five Hot Wheels cars for $9, I stood in line to pay while Mark took the girls to get some lunch in the food court.

I took the opportunity to buy a gift for Jenna’s upcoming third birthday while they weren’t looking. Then I got the two gifts wrapped after standing in a separate line/mob. No one really knew who had arrived first, and there were several people waiting around for one of the two gift-wrapper ladies to finish. But it was eventually my turn, and I sailed through the process, having already become accustomed to the routine.

“Boy or girl?” “One of each.” “Okay. Is this paper alright?” Dinosaurs and princesses. “Fine.” After a few moments of watching the process, I am internally laughing.

My mother spent a good amount of time teaching me some basic life skills: bed-making and gift-wrapping are similar. It’s all in the corners. But apparently, even though this lady is a professional gift-wrapper, she hasn’t figured that out yet.

In Chile, the most common way to wrap a gift is to put it inside a ready-to-fill envelope made of wrapping paper. They fold the paper in half and tape it together, usually along the back of the envelope. Then they fold and tape up the bottom to form a kind of thin sack. Once you show up with the gift/filler, they shove it in, whether or not the bag they’ve made is the right size, fold and tape up the top, and add a bow. They use these bows where you pull the ribbons and they sort of scrunch themselves up into a bow-like shape. Every gift uses at least a meter of scotch tape, I would guess.

Well, the gifts I bought stuck out of the lady’s pre-made sacks, so she had to actually use a flat sheet of wrapping paper. I laughed because, even though she had to actually wrap the box, she didn’t tape down the top flaps. She taped them to one another standing up, so it would LOOK like a sack! Here’s the photo:

 

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Strap it on

10 March 2008 at 7:05 pm · Filed under my kids, people, school, travel

I have an exercise for you. Take a not-so-small-anymore baby and strap her on the front of you in one of those baby carriers. (I prefer Baby Bjorn myself, since it’s lasted through some beyond-normal use and three kids.) Then strap an almost-three-year-old into an umbrella stroller. (Again, I have to recommend a Chicco Caddy, for the same reasons as above.) Strap on the backpack full of diapers and extra preschooler clothes, wipes, snacks, etc. And strap on a smile. Don’t forget that last piece, because you are going to need it. You are going to pick up a five-year-old from school.

It takes 10 minutes to get out the door of the apartment, down the elevator from the eleventh floor, and out the front gate. If you share the elevator with another resident of the building, you will get your first chance to exercise that smile. “Oh, what a cutie,” they say. That’s good, they are still focused on the baby.

By the time you get down the street to the bus stop, another 10 minutes have passed, and another 20 people walking on the sidewalk. “Que valiente,” they whisper to each other. Now they are talking about you. “How brave she is!”

The bus could take anywhere between two and twenty minutes to arrive. More opportunities to exercise that smile come with the wait. “Can I give her this candy? What’s wrong with her?” Now they are watching the two-year-old. Keep smiling!

You pull the kid and yourself and the stroller up onto the bus. Good news: now they think you have to be crazy, so they give you a seat, even if the place is full. But keep smiling because they are watching you now. If you keep smiling, the bus people will smile back, and you can complete some good-vibe circuit that will insure that you arrive with your smile still in place when the bus reaches your stop in 20 minutes. If you stop smiling, well…don’t stop.

Once you have made it to the door of the bus with your baby strapped on the front, your kid trailing from one arm, and your stroller gripped tightly in the other, push the buzzer and get off. Then assemble the stroller without bending over (remember the baby is still on you) and strap the kid back in place (if she doesn’t kick you in the meantime). You are ready for the next leg of your journey.

Cross the street, avoiding the potholes and the “dog doodles” in the sidewalk, hopefully not against the light, and walk six blocks to the school. You made it! Halfway that is, because you are about to gain another little dynamo and her backpack, and try it all again on the way home.

Roundtrip = 2 hours. Keep smiling!

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