What To Do About Summer

Summer is my fourth favorite season.  My favorite podcast host (do you guys listen to podcasts?  I bet you’d love this one as much as I do) said that about spring, but ya’all, summer is not my jam.

I like school days with routine, cooler temperatures, fall colors and Christmas.  As a Colorado girl, I even like snow in May.  Aside from camping, which I love, summer has little appeal for me.  Having lived too many years near war-zones, I cringe at Fourth of July fireworks and unexpected thunderstorms.  While I normally refuse to be the entertainment director of this circus, bored kids are real thing in a country with no libraries, playgrounds, public swimming pools or VBS.

Summer in Afghanistan is especially challenging this year, because it starts with the month of Ramadan.  Next week, all of our friends, neighbors and co-workers will be fasting from food and water from sun up to sun down for thirty days.  The sun is up well before 5:00 a.m., the temperatures are in triple digits by noon and the last call to prayer at sunset gets later and later as the month goes on.  You can imagine how difficult it is to get through this month, how tired and grumpy everyone is and how most things come to a grinding halt including visiting and teaching ESL.

In order to make the most of this month, we are going to flip our schedule around and see if we can’t do things more like our local friends.  Instead of sleeping in, we are going to get up at 5:00 a.m. and enjoy the cooler morning hours.  Mr. Incredible will be at his workshop from 6:00 till 11:00 when everyone knocks off for a long afternoon siesta.  The kids and I are still going to go to Dari class, but early in the morning instead of midafternoon and there are plans to become reacquainted with typing programs, piano lessons not to mention all the Legos and art supplies we’ve brought over the years.  This is the current plan, anyway.  Its possible things will dissolve into all day Minecraft marathons followed by ice cubes for dinner, but we are going to try.

The exciting news is, that in the hottest weeks of summer, our family will be traveling to Greece!  I Googled “cheap family holidays in Europe” and although it didn’t cooperate when I tried to make it say “Swiss Alps”,  I did find some interesting lists of underrated cities.  The top two choices were Krakow Poland and Thessaloniki Greece.  I figured there was only so much looking at old churches and cobblestone we could do with the kids, but Greece has old stuff plus beaches plus, Ikea, so we booked an apartment in Thessaloniki.  We can fly somewhat easily to Istanbul for not too much money but for our break we wanted to get all the way out of a Muslim context and into a country where we could be freer with our food and clothes.  Opa!

We are down to the last three days of school and regular work hours, so here’s hoping our summer Ramadan schedule can keep us going and keep us happy with each other.  And here’s really hoping the electricity stays on to run the fans and fridge!

What are your favorite, low tech ways to keep the kids entertained this summer?

3/21

For the last seven years, March 21 has rolled around and brought with it a range of emotions and thoughts.

World Down Syndrome Day, so chosen because Down syndrome is genetically, a third copy of chromosome 21. 3/21.  I know, it only works if you’re an American and write the date like that, but there you go.  We also get Pi day for the same reason and you can’t argue with a mathmatical excuse to eat pie.

The first couple of years, I remember so clearly, how much I hated knowing such a day exisited and at the same time was desperate to let the world know how much we loved our boy, gosh darn it.  We “celebrated” with forced glee and broken hearts.

And then, like every mom of an older kid with Ds said, around age three, it became real.  We found real joy, and actually celebrated this odd chromosone that gave us our Jack Jack.  I realized that being this kid’s parent was what I was made for and just what our family needed.

And now, it almost goes by unnoticed.  Down syndrome doesn’t get much air time anymore in our thoughts or conversations.  I’ve moved on from babycenter.com groups of trying to figure out how to be a mom of a kid with special needs, to, being a mom of three kids, all of whom have different learning styles, different personalities and different challenges.  He fits right in with the rest of this crazy circus.  We’ve spent longer on potty training and the alphabet, then with his siblings, but less time on table manners, people skills and teaching emphathy.

A favorite author, Sarah Bessey, wrote recently in her blog about her youngest baby turning one.  It captures my thoughts perfectly.  She says this:

You disrupted my plans and my life, my expectations and my trajectory, my sleep and my career, my practices and my methods, and I am so much stronger and more compassionate, more fully myself, because of you. You are the holiest interruption of my life so far and I want to rise to be your mother.

Jack Jack, you were unexpected, the day you were born with almond shaped eyes and blue lips.  You turned everything upside down and now, sitting in the middle of this “disruption” seven years later, I can say with unfiltered gladness, how great it is to celebrate you and all the people in the world that have a little extra chromosome and all of my heart.

Happy 3/21.

 

Spring Things: A List

Almond trees in bloom

Spring in western Colorado, where I grew up, is not really a thing.  There’s winter, then some wind, some smoke from farmers burning fields, some more winter and then it’s June.  My mom planned Easter dresses and egg hunts around snow coats and 60 MPH winds and there is no planting your garden till Mothers’ Day weekend near the end of May.

But here, in this warmer climate, spring is a delight.  We are easing out of a short, but cold winter and I am appreciating for the first time, why spring could be a favorite season.  Here are some things about spring in Silk Road City that I’m especially enjoying.

note: all the photos are from a trip we took earlier this week to a park/orchard on the edge of town

running free in the open green space — not something we get to do very often so it’s a joy when it happens.

1. Less layers:  Our mud house is heated by one coal stove and it never gets much warmer than 69 degrees and quite a bit colder in the bedrooms. It’s lovely to be able to shed a layer or two of clothes and to type this up in my living room without gloves.

2. Plastic on the windows: In the same vein, the house also needs layers to keep our heat in.  The windows are as leaky as certain Wiki sites and need an extra cover of thick plastic on the outsides.  When they came off this last weekend it was like getting glasses cleaned and realizing the world wasn’t as dirty and grey as it had seemed.

taking a break from all the running for a brotherly chat

3. The return of fruit and veggies: We live in a town surrounded by subsistence farm land and in a country with little in the way of imports.  So when winter comes around, mostly what we can find in the bazaar are potatoes, onions, carrots and cauliflower.  Oranges and apples are the only kinds of fruit for a while, so it’s always a day of rejoicing when the apricot and cherry trees start blooming and tomatoes and cucumbers from southern Afghanistan start appearing in the bazaar.  Soon, it will be mango season, which will only last a few weeks, but those are glorious weeks indeed.

4. New Years Day: That’s right.  The New Year is celebrated on March 21st, spring equinox, a homage to Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic days when it was part of the Zoroastrian Persian empire.  Naw Roz (new day) is celebrated with everyone going out for picnics, dressed up in new clothes and ready for a new year. It’s festive and fun and makes so much more sense to celebrate a new year outside with new growing things, a new school year about to start and new baby lambs every where instead of celebrating new things in the middle of the cold, dark winter.

sun on our faces and feet

5. It’s not hot — yet.  I’m trying to enjoy this slow slide into summer and not dread the coming heat.  It’s hard when it’s already so warm in March, knowing that it only gets warmer from here.  But today it’s cool and raining and the kitchen is cold enough that it feels good to bake bread and drink another cup of hot coffee. These pleasantly cool days won’t last long and I’m going to relish them.

She thinks she’s a sheep whisperer

The Shepard and his boys

What about you?  Do you love spring or is it a non event in your part of the world?

 

 

 

Silk Road City — photo essay

Six months ago we stumbled off our 8th and final airplane that had brought us from America to our new home in northern Afghanistan…almost.  Actually, we still had an hour and half drive before we reached our final destination.  Six months ago, it was blazing hot and dusty and with the haze of jet lag and inevitable stomach bugs, those first weeks seem almost like a hallucination of some sort.  We spent the first six weeks house hunting and getting settled.  We started to get to know the people on our team and slowly got our brains back in Farsi speaking mode.

Today the weather is, literally, freezing. I’m typing this, bundled up in many layers and sitting as close as I can to our coal stove.  All three kids are in school, which is in a room across the yard from our house.

Our kids’ teacher and our other teammate Miss B and I are busy planning a shopping trip to the big city later this month.  Mr. Incredible is at his workshop in town, getting ready to manufacture heating stoves.

Later in the day, I’ll head off to language class and Dash and Violet will ride their bikes through our neighborhood to their language class and then on to meet up with some Afghan friends who come over to our teammates house to jump on the trampoline and do homework together.

All that to say, six months in, Silk Road City is becoming home.  I thought you might like to see some photos of places and people around town.  You’ll notice there are no pictures of ladies — this is a very conservative place and most women go out fully covered, including their faces and friends who do let me take their picture, wouldn’t want their faces shown to people they aren’t related to.   There is so much I could show you, but I tried to limit myself, with this post, to pictures of things in our every day lives.

 

Dash getting a stylish haircut at the barber shop

My language teacher’s niece. Her name is literally “Moonlight.” I have made it my mission to get this gorgeous girl to smile at me and we’ve wasted many a “study” hour cooing at the baby. But seriously, how could you not?

These motorcycle rickshaws are how we get around as a family. Mostly though, Dash and Violet ride their bikes, Mr. Incredible takes his motorcycle and I do a lot of walking.

Jack Jack’s favorite thing to do, is to catch a rickshaw with Daddy and help him with his work in town.

Silk Road City is mostly desert, so this park/orchard at the edge of town is the perfect spot to go when we need to hear wind in the trees and walk on green grass. It’s almost always empty, so the kids and us ladies can walk and run freely.

Down town has a few shiny buildings and modern offices, but it’s still mostly an outpost of open bazaars and mud walled houses.

This guy lives in the big city an hour away from us. He runs a metal casting workshop with his sons and has been very hospitable to Mr. Incredible, showing him the way things are done, helping him find supplies and patiently answering this foreigner’s many many questions.

I walk this street nearly every day to language class. It’s quiet and rural and most days I have to doge herds of goats and small shepherd boys. The floating pink balls in the picture are sticks of cotton candy. The neighbor kids come running as these guys walk down the road singing and calling out their product.

This sweet girl was proudly showing me her bike riding skills as I walked past one day. She agreed to stop for a picture and gave me this full faced grin.

Violet, Dash and Jack Jack tearing up down a dusty road near our home at sunset.

On our drive home from the park (pictured above) we passed this camel. He’s all dressed up for a wedding and will be escorting the new bride and her possessions to her new home.

This camel, however, got turned into stew meat. Violet and I had some camel stew at the big feast at the end of Ramadan. It was served with pumpkin, fresh naan and tea and it was yummy.

 

Forward into Forty

Turning 40 has put me in a retrospective mood. At first, I thought I’d hate it, I grinched and whined to my husband and I felt…old. But then, a few weeks ago as my birthday approached, Mr. Incredible and I sat down and talked over the past year and suddenly, turning forty didn’t seem hard, it seemed fitting that I was starting a new decade with so many new things, good things, renewed things in my life.

My 39^th year was a watershed year in many ways. The year before was full of death, loss and confidence shaken – confidence in my marriage, my parenting, our work in Afghanistan and if anything we’d try to do was worth all this awfulness.

We took a year off, went home to Colorado and spent time with people who loved us and counseled us well. We got a diagnosis for Mr. Incredible and shadows that had been chasing us our whole marriage got a name, got some medicine and a plan for coping and slowly those shadows are fading away.

I feel more ready to do hard things than I did a year ago. I’m doing intensive language learning for the first time in eleven years (having babies, toddlers and then babies again is not the preferred method for learning a foreign language, in case you were wondering) and I’m finding that digging deep and making this old brain do serious academic work is in fact something I can do.

After so much emotional turmoil, I found myself on shaky ground, with my faith and with myself. Not lots of existential questionings with capital letters and bold font (Does God Exist), but more of a fog of grief and worry and an unmooring of my place in His work and Kingdom. I’m very much an ISFJ on the Myers-Briggs. I see the world through my experiences and senses. I like order and tradition and for my people to be happy.

I get Mrs. Weasley or Samwise Gamgee on the “Which Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings character are you?” quiz and then I have to take it five more times till I get Hermonie or Arwen – the heroines of their stories, not the helpers. My experiences and senses had so thoroughly sucked and I was struggling with much dissatisfaction with my personality and the way I respond to the world.

This past summer I read two books that cut through some of that fog and have helped me immensely in finding my place again and even better than that – being comfortable with who I am at my core. “Jesus Feminist” by Sarah Bessey and the very funny “For the Love” by Jen Hatmaker gave me clarity and even permission to be cool with my personality, my political views, my world view and our family’s global lifestyle and my main role as wife and homemaker. No, it’s not for everyone, but it’s for us, and we love it. It’s okay to be Mrs. Weasley or Sam. Their part in the stories are crucial, and Frodo and Harry wouldn’t have made it far without them and for sure they would have been a lot more hungry and cold.

So, it’s a new decade and a new year. We are in a new town in Afghanistan, which I’ll call Silk Road City and we are ready to do a new thing. I may have turned forty first because of that December birthday, but now I get to watch as my college roommates, high school friends, the people I spent my twenties with in Egypt and my thirties with in toddler playgroups walk into their fortieth year and I will walk with them, with hope.

 

 

 

As Happy As This

You will never be as happy

As Jack Jack

Who, after 10 hours of driving,

Two nights of rain and

being made to see the sights…

Finally…

Finally!

Got somebody to build him a fire

And roast

Marshmallows.

Because He Lives

Last year we celebrated Easter in Windy City Afghanistan.  We didn’t know then that a few days after that lovely morning, we would be mourning loss after loss of friends murdered, cancer, hearts too broken to be fixed, and accidents while on vacation.

It’s no secret I’m going into the month of April with a heavy heart, knowing that one year anniversaries are coming up and will keep coming for the rest of the year.  John. Lisa. Sejia. Bekha. Werner. Karina.

But, Easter.  Resurrection Sunday.  The reason, the only reason, that we are not smothered by grief, is knowing that every one of our friends have loved Jesus well and the mothers of the children in that list say every time “Better is one day in your courts than thousands elsewhere” and my girl is dancing with Jesus.

So we celebrate.  We celebrate Jesus’ triumph over death.  We celebrate the joy of spring, of new beginnings.  We celebrate being together, with a sharper knowledge that each day together is a blessing not to be taken for granted.

Have you ever been this happy to find an egg?

Violet, being the best big sis

Dash and RK. Double trouble these two.

taking stock of loot

Because He lives, I can face tomorrow,
Because He lives, all fear is gone;
Because I know He holds the future,
And life is worth the living,
Just because He lives!

— Bill Gaither

What We Have

Tags

Afghanistan, Jack Jack

Our life is not typical, not by a long shot. We don’t always live in America.  We don’t always live in Afghanistan though either.  We are followers of Jesus from the west, living among devout Muslims in Central Asia.  Both the Rocky Mountains and the Hindu Kush are visible from our living room windows.

The Hindu Kush, a range of the Himalayan mountains runs diagonal through Afghanistan and rings Kabul

 

We have three kids and one of them has an extra chromosome.

It can get confusing at times living in two places at once.  Sometimes I rummage in my kitchen for ten minutes before I remember that I do indeed have a pastry blender, but it’s in Asia.

But some things are constant, no matter what continent we live on.  In honor of World Down Syndrome Day (3/21 for the third chromosome on the 21st) here are some things we have because we have Jack Jack.

1) We have a team. Speech therapist, special ed teachers and aides, and a kindergarten teacher named Miss Bliss (could there be a more perfect name for a kindergarten teacher??) who spend their days thinking of ways to help Jack Jack learn and communicate the very best he can.

Kindergarten

And we can take them with us!  Our speech therapist has offered to do sessions over Skype, our special ed teacher posts schooling ideas to a Pinterest board and my Facebook friends lend support for potty training and the very best iPad apps for reading.  Every where we go we have a team of people cheering Jack Jack on.

2)  We have family.  In the States we are surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins and a church family that will blow your socks off.  They know we are weird and don’t laugh if I announce that the tap water here is safe to drink.  They give Jack Jack every opportunity to be a part of their lives and to join them in what they are doing. Our friend Wayne knows that if Jack Jack is coming over, he’d better be ready to feed the horse and check the chicken house for eggs because Jack Jack comes ready to work.

Helping Papa wash the motorcycle

In Afghanistan we have foreigner friends who become aunties and uncles to my kids.  Friends who enthusiastically come for a showing of Frozen, or an Elmo themed birthday party because we if we are going to be crazy enough to live in Afghanistan, then we’d better stick together and have fun!   We have Afghan friends who say “how can I help?” and old grandmothers who stuff him with sweets and tea and pinch his cheeks like every other kid on the street.

Jack Jack’s fifth birthday with Aunties from England, Australia, Finland and Afghanistan to help him celebrate

 

3) We have our little routines and rituals.  Stuffed animals that have more miles on them then most cars, criss-cross oceans and make whatever bed we are sleeping in safe and familiar.  We bake sugar cookies for Christmas in a Muslim country and have a picnic for Naw Roz (Persian New Year) in America.  For Jack Jack our routines are especially important to help him understand and navigate his world.  We get up and get started with our day at a certain time, home school or public, eat dinner together as a family every night and a Bible and bedtime story with Grandma on Skype or with mom on the cushions on the floor.  All the kids are flexible and easy-going so we don’t have melt downs if something is skipped or out-of-order, but we can see how having a few things pinned down in the day makes it smoother for everyone.

Naw Roz picnic in our yard in Windy City Afghanistan

Our lives probably look different then yours, but if you are here as a new mom with a new diagnosis, I hope you can see that it’s because choices we’ve made to live cross-culturally, and very few because of Down syndrome.

Happy World Down syndrome Day!  Happy Naw Roz too.  We’ve a lot to celebrate with spring equinox and a little boy and his whole tribe that we get to be a part of, thanks to that third chromosome.

Oh, just hanging out. In Sri Lanka.

Ten Years Ago

Our firstborn, Violet, turned 10 this weekend.  She marked the occasion by hosting her first friend slumber party.  The house was full of super giggly fourth grade girls who were alternately grown up while doing their nails and still little girls when snuggling down with the half a dozen stuffed animals they each brought to sleep with.

Having our baby girl turn 10 has been so strange. It does not feel like a decade has gone by.  Do you guys realize that the wee children who graduated from high school in 2004 had their 10 year reunion this summer?  I don’t even know how that math works out.

Here are ten thoughts about life in the early 2000s and Violet’s first year.

1)  Ten years ago Mr Incredible and I were living in a very tiny apartment in Mesa, Arizona.   We had this hilarious, floral print couch and still basically lived like we were in college, eating a lot of Raman and cold cereal.  We made the controversial decision to get rid of our land line and to strap our cell phones to our belts permanently.  We got internet in the apartment for the first time and had a DVD player and a VCR all stacked up on our plywood entertainment center.

Isn’t that the purtiest couch you ever saw?

 

2)  “Friends” was in its final season and I was hanging on to “ER” because, I’d started watching in college when George Clooney was young, and I was going to see it through to the painful end.

3)  Violet was born six weeks early, and I went from working full-time in an office, training and sending young people to the Kurdish parts of northern Iraq to help with the relief efforts there, to being home, alone with a small infant, that could have no visitors until sometime after Christmas.  I was so lonely and bored I watched ever single minute of the extended versions of The Lord of The Rings, with and without the director’s commentary and all the extras.  That took about a week and then I moved on to every BBC Jane Austin drama ever made.

6 weeks premature meant a couple of weeks in the NICU

4)  I had no mommy friends.  I lived on my Babycenter.com birthboard.  No decision, from what the baby should wear when we took family photos to what I should wear when we took family photos, could be made without thoroughly discussing it with e-maginary internet friends.  Looking back, I cannot believe I never thought to find a mommy group with actual people in it.

5)  My sweet friend Lisa was just getting into midwifery and had planned to come for the birth at Christmas.  Of course, she missed the actual birth but we had the best time together when she did come, after quarantine was lifted.  Lisa was with us in Afghanistan, before Violet was born, was a part of my life every year after that until this year when she switched this earthly home for her true one in Heaven.

6) We bought our first digital camera for her birth.  We then proceeded to take elevinty million pictures of her doing… well, pretty much nothing.  I included in her (first) baby book,  four pictures of her looking at our cats from her play mat because I couldn’t choose between her focused or unfocused look.

7)  By the time she turned one, Violet had been to England and we were living in Kabul, Afghanistan.  Before she turned two she’d also been to Pakistan, Tajikistan and Thailand.

camping in Tajikistan

 

8)  Ten years ago, Kabul was in ruins.  The airport runway was littered with burned out wreckage of planes from the war with the Soviets and the streets were lined with piles of rubble and bullet-ridden walls.  Now, the airport is gleaming (thank you Germany) and clean and even has a luggage carousel. Streets are paved and you have to search to find a pile of rubble amongst the new multi-storied shopping centers and apartment complexes.  We are privileged to have witness it’s revival.

One neighbor’s house in Kabul with bullet holes and bomb damage

Another neighbor’s house — brand new with marble and roses

 

9)  We were really, really young.

10) In 2004 Pixar released a new movie.  Can you guess?

 

 

The Saga of Kindergarten (special needs adition)

It’s November.  I realize I’ve missed the boat on the back-to-school post, but for the first few weeks of school I wasn’t sure if it would be a school-is-great/inclusion post or a diary from the nervous hospital where nice people with pharmaceuticals come and check on me — sort of post.

We decided a bit late in the summer that we were not going back to Windy City, Afghanistan for several more months.  We wanted the kids to have the assurance of one place to start and finish the school year so we enrolled Violet and Dash in their classes in our small, hometown Christian school.

This school is not just any school.  My parents helped to start it.  I went to school there and so did my sisters.  My mom has been a teacher there for 30 years.  It is a big part of my childhood, my faith and our family.  Violet and Dash have gone there when we are in the States and their classmates keep in close contact with us when we are apart.  When we were in Afghanistan this past year, Dash’s classmates went out on the playground and yelled and yelled, in hopes that he could hear them.

When Jack Jack was diagnosed with Down syndrome, the school was something I really grieved over, thinking that it was closed to him; that it would not be part of his childhood.  Too academic, too fast paced.  No way he could go there.

And then, suddenly, we were faced with needing to decide where to have Jack go to school and I was not thrilled with our public school options, but so emotionally drained and exhausted from all the losses of the past year that home schooling wasn’t much of an option either.  My mom encouraged us to look at putting Jack Jack in the Christian school, so with some trepidation, we set up a meeting.  And the meeting was brief but positive.  Yes, we’d loveJack Jack to come.  We think it would be great for him and great for the school.  But there are no services.  No aid, no help adjusting the curriculum.  Okay, I’ve been homeschooling, I think I can figure this out and we really do want him part of this community.

First day of fourth grade, second grade and kindergarten

I rounded up several volunteers, a different person each day, to help him in the classroom.  Parent involvement is a huge value, so there were several moms wanting to help out in the classroom and willing to work with Jack Jack and me.

A friend of our family, who had adopted two kids with special needs later in life and who had recently lost their youngest son, was longing to be back in the world of special needs parenting and so she took on a more official “aid” role for Jack Jack in the classroom.

Serious work going on.  Ds moms will cheer for the pencil grasp!

And then, ten days into the school year, just as we are figuring out things like a potty schedule, how to help him with transitions (he was flat out refusing to come in when the bell rang) and what his learning curve was, the kindergarten teacher resigned.  And good friends of ours lost their little girl in a complicated heart surgery.  I was devastated on both accounts and my knee jerk reaction was to yank Jack Jack out of the classroom and keep him close, keep all these bad things away from him.

Don’t let the smile fool you. It took some stern teacher voices to get him to line up.

But…all the reasons to have Jack Jack in this Christian school remained.  The community we’d built, going to school where Violet and Dash and Grandma are right with him, the prayer and values of our faith, and the fact that his resource teacher was seeing more progress in 30 minutes a day then I’d managed in a year of home schooling… We stayed, but it was a day by day decision for a while.

The classroom was a bit chaotic, but the parents all rallied behind the school, we took turns subbing and volunteering and keeping things as normal as possible for the kids and in three weeks a new teacher was hired.  And in those three weeks, something happened.  Jack Jack went from being the only kid in the school with special needs, to being a kid in school.

learning some songs with his cousin, who offered to stand with him so he wouldn’t get lost in the crowd.

He has friends, kids who consider Jack Jack one of their friends.  He does circle time and calendar, chapel and the Pledge of Allegiance.  He plays with Dash and those adorable second graders at lunch and gives Grandma a hug and her junior-high class a high-five when he goes by her classroom.

And you know what we don’t have? IEPs.  Long, drawn out meetings where battle lines are drawn over services.  No pointless testing — I work with his resource teacher and a private reading specialist and prepare his work for the week.  I went to parent teacher conferences with a list of all the things he’s learned in last quarter and some ideas of where to go in the next.  The principle was pleased, his teacher was pleased.  We discussed the upcoming pancake breakfast fundraiser, prayed for each other and meeting over.  We would not trade that for all the special ed degrees in the world.

So far I’m zero out of a hundred on all the things I thought were out of reach because of Down syndrome.

Inclusion works