Abroad

Three years and a week ago, Charles and I left for a month of traveling in Bangladesh and India.

Today we are leaving again.

For Bangladesh.

In the last eleven years, I have made this trip nine times.

I don’t mind doing it again.

At all.

But I’m glad the packing is over. I’ll take a toddler traveling any day over packing up a household for two months.

Because that’s how long we’re staying.

An English teaching team in a Bangladeshi village that I’ve never yet been to needed houseparents.

If they had asked us to go months ago, I have no idea what we would have said.

But they asked us last minute, on semi- emergency basis, so we are going.

That’s how we work best.

Every time I asked her if she wanted to go to Bangladesh, Winter said “No, just stay home. Stay here. Not want it Bangladesh.”

But my mother sent this backpack for her birthday, and she changed her mind.

Like me, she is all into traveling once she gets started.

I just have to convince her not to walk airport concourses on her knees. It’s time consuming.

Winter is not the only one thinking about backpacks. For the next couple of days, mine will be another kind of very essential limb for me.

Traveling makes me sympathize with Kanga who was feeling particularly motherly that day and wanting to count things like the two clean spots in Roo’s feeder. I count things regularly as we fly, the eight little magnetic animals, the pairs of footwear and how many pampers are left.

I reorganize my backpack as often as I open it but with the odd sensation that things are different now. The motherly tenderness towards my objects is nothing new, but the objects are now wipes and granola bars (which I eschewed in my pre-parenting years) and little girl’s hair bands and a travel set of connect four instead of the half a dozen books, earbuds, and a laptop and a change of clothes.

The strangest things teach us about seasons in life.

I go as a wife and a mom to cook for the teachers. How strange.

Instead of teaching aids, I packed some cheese and a few other luxuries to make my menu planning a bit easier.

And, yes, we are expecting a baby in July.

But I’m not quite as pregnant as the first picture makes me look. Not quite.

As a lady patient once admitted to my doctor uncle, I might be just a little bit pregnant.

Hours and hours later here we are in the Dhaka apartment, and I have not enough cognitive ability left to quality assess this post.

It’s Winter’s second birthday.

I’m glad I thought of celebrating it last week.

We love her a lot.

She did remarkably well on the trip over. Since we reached the apartment here, however, I can tell her world is topsy-turvy.

Charles told people that I would be putting updates on my blog, so I guess I will be.

It’s an old tradition for me to write while in Bangladesh. I doubt I could break the habit if I wanted to.

Jet lag awaits.

Did I mention I’m glad to be back, accompanying accouterments notwithstanding?