Things I Learned This "Cool" Season

I live in a tropical climate, so instead of summer, fall, winter, and spring, we have hot season, rainy season, and cool (aka not-quite-so-hot) season. Here are a few things I learned this cool season:

My daughters love to hear stories. When they get cranky or start fighting in the backseat of the car (which, these days, seems to be almost every time we drive) the moment they hear "Once upon a time..." they listen up and all fighting/whining stops. It's magical.

Poetry doesn't have to be fancy. One of my favorite singer/songwriters of all time published a book of poetry. So much of it is simple and lovely and understandable on the first read. He inspired me to write this.

There is a car called the S-Cargo and it looks like a snail. (get it? S-Cargo = escargot) It probably looks out of place everywhere, but it looked really out of place when I saw it driving the streets of Bangkok last month.

Source

If you order something off Lazada (the Amazon.com of Thailand) that costs $2.50 or more, you get free shipping. That's just 7% of Amazon's minimum order amount for free shipping. Someday when we live in the US again, I'm going to have a heart attack from sticker shock.

My two year old is way girlier than me. Most days, she will not leave the house without putting on, at minimum, a polka-dot hat. Many days, she puts on the whole sha-bang pictured below. I love it!

Ear infections hurt like the dickens. And they can make you temporarily deaf. Learned this one from personal experience.

I can enjoy a Thai drama without subtitles. I don't catch anywhere near every word, but I can follow the plot. Learning a foreign language is hard, and Thai is especially hard, so I celebrate every victory, including this one!

There is a resort a few hours drive from here that's designed to look like the Shire. And you get to stay in a hobbit hole. Sleeping in a hobbit hole in the Shire is now on my bucket list.

You can get strawberries in Thailand! And right now it's strawberry season! And they're delicious and cheap! I am obsessed with the tropical fruit found here, but it sure is nice to bite into a good old strawberry.

Things I Learned in September

Pineapple skin and mango skin are edible. According to this article. I also now feel validated in my consumption of kiwi skins. Yum!

You can buy rambutan in California, but a single fruit costs as much as an entire kilo in Thailand. I wonder, can you eat these hairy, prickly skins?

When strangers share their opinion about how easy or hard a stage of parenting was, to not take their opinions too seriously. Over the summer, when strangers at the park and at grocery stores saw how pregnant I was and how young Grace was, several comments ran something like this: "18 months apart?! Poor thing, you will not sleep or have a life." I forgot that every kid and combo of kids is different, so you can't take these opinions too seriously. Right now, we're doing really well. I'm sure we'll hit other stages in this raising small children gig that other parents found easy but we will find very difficult. The point is to not project others' experiences onto your own kids.

Four years. That's how long it takes me to build community. Four years ago, we made a forty mile move - just far enough to have to start all over. I felt lonely for the first couple of years and it was hard. Cora's birth opened my eyes to how many friends we've made over the last years. So many people have helped in so many ways. I certainly don't feel lonely anymore!

If you want to suck the joy out of caring for a newborn, be a control freak. I have a type-A personality. With Grace, it took me a couple of months to really learn to let go. With Cora's arrival, I've found myself slipping back into control freak mode. This past week, I have stopped trying to plan ahead and I am embracing the unpredictability of caring for a newborn. It's good for my soul.

The Starbucks Trenta: Is This Real?

I ran into the screen clipping below on the National Post. Apparently Starbucks has come out with a new drink size called the Trenta. The capacity of the cup is greater than the capacity of the average human stomach, so if you order it, please drink slowly to allow some space to free up. I will not represent you in your burst stomach lawsuit against Starbucks.

As someone who sometimes has trouble finishing a tall drink at Starbucks, I am a little bit horrified right now. Is this behemoth beverage actually available for purchase and consumption? Please let me know if this is a hoax or if you've actually seen it.

Shocking News About Bell Peppers

Just had to throw in this
cute picture from the 
Wiki article.

Have you ever gone grocery shopping and noticed that red, orange, and yellow bell peppers cost two to three times as much as green bell peppers?


Have you ever asked why?


As I was pondering this deep question the other day, the answer popped into my mind: green bell peppers must simply be unripened yellow, orange, or red bell peppers.


It just makes sense. Since farmers are able to harvest green bell peppers earlier, they are able to produce more crops in a single year than if they were to dedicate their fields to ripening them all the way. This would raise the supply of green bell peppers and therefore decrease the cost. (I dedicate that analysis to my dear friend who majored in economics. Hopefully I got it right.) Also, I imagine farmers are able to ship them much more easily since green bell peppers are further from rotting than their more colorful counterparts.


I hopped online and in .24 seconds, Wikipedia confirmed. "Cultivars of the plant produce fruits in different colors, including red, yellow and orange. The fruit is also frequently consumed in its unripe form, when the fruit is still green." 


And now I have officially dedicated about 30 minutes of my life to thinking, researching, and writing about bell peppers. I hope that little fact is as interesting to you as it was to me.