She Laughs at the Days

He took me out for ice cream for my birthday, trying on phrases in the same way he’s trying on manhood for the first time this year. “It’s on me,” he says in the card. He’ll pay, with money he earned.



“What can I get?” I ask him in the DQ line. I don’t know how much he has stashed in his pockets.

“Oh, anything for 40baht or less,” he sort of drawls, trying to be casual. I suspect that if I do order something for 40 baht that he will not have much left for him. His daddy slips him another 20 from behind, where he and the other kids wait to get ice cream too, but try not to intrude on our ice cream “date”, even though we’re all at the mall together. His quick smile and quiet, “Thanks” confirms my suspicions.

So I order the blizzard in a waffle cone, and he orders the same, in a different flavor, and we wander over to a corner of the food court and sit down. I am picturing his first date in my head. I think he’ll be remarkably similar to the way he is right now, trying to act casual, but…

Sunday night on our way home from the market the clutch went on our car. We pulled over at the first place that seemed like it might have some of the things we needed for a repair. We hadn't eaten dinner yet, and it was getting late, and the car wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, so I ran into 7/11 to get some food type things to tide hungry children through the wait for a ride.

There was a little boy sitting outside the door, filthy, with a ragged scrap of cloth tied up to help him hold a little girl with pigtails who was passed out in his arms. He had a little cup and was asking for money for food. I didn't give him any money, but I did buy him some food and take it to him, looking him in the eye and making sure he understood that I wanted him to make sure the little girl got some to eat too. (I know the money he gets he won't keep, but i thought he could at least eat.)

I turned around after getting back to the car and watched a little girl in a pretty pink dress r…

Seven!!! No way.



You are too tiny and little to be 7. What happened to my little girl?

I'm sorry. I always do this. It's milestones like birthdays that suddenly show me how quickly the individual days are passing me by and how quickly childhood, which seems to take forever when you are lost in the blur of the day to day effort that it takes to care for children, flies past us, like the view of the ground out the window of a jet plane.




So this year, you moved to Thailand. That was hard. You are finally adjusting to being here and making plans for the future in Thailand, rather than constantly talking about what you are going to do when you get back to America. You have friends here now, and things you like to do, and places you like to play.



You are still very young in the way you understand things like time. And delayed gratification is not your forte. You understand very well that something comes after something else. But you think you can speed along the thing you want by ma…

We were privileged to celebrate the New Year with the children at the nearby Grace Home, run by our good friends at Compassio.



They had Mukake, Thai BBQ, and movies and sugar so all the kids had a lot of fun. (Some of the sugar was our fault because we had a giant Christmas party the night before and people brought so many khanome (Thai for snacks) and bottles of sweet drinks that we had a huge surplus. The New Year's party was a perfect chance to get it out of my house so Bam Bam would stop yelling like a sugar addict, "But I want nacks mama, I want them.")



It was really fun.

My feed is full of New Years Wishes and resolutions. There's a lot of hope for a happy, healthy and prosperous year to come, and to stay safe while partying. There were a lot of resolutions as well. A lot of them beautiful and difficult to fulfill, but possible.

It got me thinking about what I wish for the people I love, for you reading this, for me, and my family in this coming year.

I pray for…