zen motherhood

The island life is starting to get easier and I feel like I am becoming more in tune with the culture, feeling a little more 'Bajan' every day. Driving is becoming second nature and I am able to over-take a stopped bus, honk to say thanks, and give way to cars who need to make a turn across traffic with a little more ease and not stress out. I am even backing in to parking spots a little faster. All the while I am able to keep an eye out for a random pedestrian, goat, chicken, or monkey and swerve, or allow for crossing, accordingly. I notice now how rushed the tourists seem to be in the grocery store while the locals take their time. I am now somewhere in the middle as I Do have a list but I don't have anywhere I need to be. I have learned to say good morning and good afternoon as I pass people when I am out and about. I have gotten to know the waitstaff by name at our favorite eateries.  They, in turn, have gotten to know us by name as well.  I have found a regular volunt...

I am not sure if it's because I don't have a lot going on, or that trash is a sensitive topic for me, but I really look forward to Trash Day on the island. I think it is partly the unpredictability of it all. Our current trash day is designated for Friday. However, since we have lived in this house, it has been usually Tuesday. Not always but mostly. When we moved here they said to us that trash day is not consistent and they just come when they come. So it's quite exciting when they finally do. I guess that is island life. Perhaps I need to share more so you can really appreciate my excitement for trash day. Living the island life you don't think we worry about such things as trash (some monkeys just magically come get it right?), but you soon start to recognize the benefits of a steady trash schedule that we took for granted state side. An anecdote I love to share (insert sarcasm) is when we first moved to the island, we were in a short term rental place. It had a sma...

If you haven't already read it, you need to grab a copy of the children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie to really understand the humor for this post. It's based on a style called a circular tale. One action leads to another action which leads to another and then another and then another and finally, eventually brings you back to the beginning of the story. It's a lot of fun. I didn't find them all that fun to read when my youngest was little, and as I have also discovered, they are not that much fun to live out in reality either. I feel for the little boy in the story that followed that mouse around. So, if you need to pay your power bill, you will want to go on the line and pay it. If you want to pay 'on the line' you can either 1) Use a company called SurePay (like a Western Union and requires a local bank) or 2) Use your bank (must be a local bank) or 3) power company website.  If you are not up to this century in technology and live under a rock the...

 In June of 2019 my husband found out that he has non-Hodgkins Follicular Lymphoma. A type of blood cancer that accounts for only 4% of the cancers in the US. There is no cure. I, on the other hand, do not have cancer. I do not have any diseases that I am aware of. I have some weird gluten intolerance but that is about it. But I felt the need to write about dealing with cancer as a spouse and moving to a new country during a pandemic and how that has impacted me emotionally. My hope is that other spouses/partners/family members who have someone close in the same boat may find some connection with this post.  The data is not conclusive on whether or not those with NHL are more susceptible to the corona virus. Because it's a blood cancer and because it can impact your immune system, there are theories on what could happen but not sure I want to test that out and become of the first data point if it there are negative impacts. The cancer attacks the lymph nodes and for my husband...

Dropping off my youngest for daycare was always a battle. As a toddler I would need to perform the drop and run to 'trick' her. By the time she figured out I was gone,  a meltdown was past its prime delivery time so she would move on.  In recent years it has gotten easier. She rode a bus for a bit which helped as there were other kids there and she was still at the age that she would hug me and say good bye. Since my daughter has turned 12, the 'change' has set in. I don't mean the obvious one, but I mean the tween- teen-distancing-I-find-you-embarrassing change. We have set the ground rules though, the more you act embarrassed, the more we will be embarrassing. I think it's tied to Newton's third law, I'm not sure. We can't help ourselves as parents. I also don't care about looking foolish in front of other 12 year olds. That's the beauty of being a parent and almost 50. Your pool of people I-Get-Embarrased-In-Front-Of gets a lot smaller.  W...

Husband: I watched you on Find Friends (Find My) while you were driving. Looks like you stopped for awhile outside of the school? Me: Oh yeah, I had to stop and wait for a goat to move out of the road and then a chicken. This was an actual dialogue exchange.  Driving in Barbados has been an adventure to say the least. It feels like rally car driving in an urban setting. The two major highways are in fair shape but the side roads are a force to be reckoned with where there are always spots of construction, erosion, and then there's the added obstacle of livestock. I didn't drive for the first few weeks. Husband is a great driver and I like to do a little recon before I venture into something dangerous. So I remained a passenger for a bit. Also, they drive on the left side of the road and you sit on the right side of the car. I felt I needed time to wrap my head around That. So the above exchange was on my first adventure, out on my own. I don't actually drive with my husband...

I couldn't think of a catchy title for this post. However, I think it's appropriate for my final post about our move. Mostly because this whole post is about the one member of our family who has tried every ounce of my patience, stretched every string of tolerance I have, all the while securely wrapping my heart strings around his fuzzy little paws. There isn't a fancy title for that, it is just- The dog. He is, I am sure, the reincarnate of the little boy I never had. He never listens. He never obeys me. He sometimes eats what I give him but usually eats something else, like my slippers. He only comes to me when he's sad, sick, or needs to go outside. Which is typically between 2.30am and 3am. I open with all that to outline an understanding of our relationship. We are not close and I secretly think he loathes me and that I'm in the way of his true love, dad.  But I feel this odd sense of dedication and responsibility to this animal so getting the dog to Barbados w...

 I love road trips. I never really went on any when I was a kid, but I love them. I love the planning. Planning the snacks. Planning the best route.  When the kids were young, planning out games or movies for the ride. So when we decided that once the house was sold that we would go on the mother of all road trips, I was excited. I had it all figured out- our first few weeks of moving out of the house we would spend locally. Starting off with a treat to a luxury local hotel and then transitioning to something more practical to say our good bye's and wrap up loose ends.  We would then venture to South Carolina to see my parents but ensure to  practice safe covid protocol and social distancing. Then on to Melbourne, Florida to see the rest of family and prepare for the last leg of the trip. Our final stop would be in Miami to board the plane to - Barbados. It felt like a very solid plan and living on the road with a dog and only one child in tow sounded like an episode...

This is more of a side story to my last post. I like tangents but this one was too long to include. I alluded a few times to a suitcase I couldn't part with which was labeled Office. I was pretty excited about this little gem, but it became the subject of every joke along our journey. It was comprised of all the basic office items that I thought we would need while 'en route': envelopes and stamps, pens, batteries, chargers, paper, a mini scanner, a mobile printer, and of course a small whiteboard.  As you can guess it was a little heavy and I was questioned on multiple occasions if this suitcase was really necessary. We could just as easily locate an office supply store or use the hotel business center right? Part of my reasons were to avoid this scramble to find a place to print out something or copy an important doc while we spent time on the road and due to covid many business centers were not even open anymore.   As we hauled everything into the trailer the first nig...

Getting ready for Barbados, probably the easiest thing about it, I thought, was going to be packing. A moving company would be coming in to do the boxing up of all of our things.  So I figured my job would be throwing some stuff in suitcases, labeling some stuff for packing. Bam. Done. So I quickly organized our belongings into 4 main categories of items (because we can't just throw stuff around willy nilly now can we?):  1) Donate- I had to put a big orange sign on these things that said DONATE but it felt good to shed some old stuff. 2) Denver - at the end of our Barbados expedition our plan is still to wind up in Denver, so I put a big green sign on these items that would be put in long term storage in Denver labeled of course - DENVER. 3) Barbados Ship- not everything can fit in suitcases so I even designated a room that I labeled with one big blue sign BARBADOS!!! 4) Barbados Pack- we would schlep this stuff on our flight/road trip so no labels for this stuff. I just star...

I failed to mention in my last blog post that selling the house was a spawned task from my original list- Task 2: Find a Place to Live. We felt we couldn't look at a new place until we started to sell the current place. In hind sight not sure why those things couldn't have run in parallel but I am sequence kind of gal so here we are. So with selling the house, we could fully initiate Find a Place to Live. This would seem pretty straight forward right? Search up on AirBnB and done. We started to find however, our requirements for a home were narrowing our options, one being we had a fluid house of 5 people so 4 bedrooms would need to be our minimum. Apparently there are not a lot of 4 bedroom homes on the island that are not a billion dollars. We also would like a number of bathrooms to accommodate this said 5 people so a minimum of 4 bathrooms. (we have three girls in that mix so cast all the judgement you want on us sharing bathrooms- you will understand if you have girls) And...

One task that was not on my original Project Barbados: Sell the House.  It was on our Project Denver list, of course, but that was slated for spring of 2021. It seems we have an accelerated timeline and a little bit of scope creep.  Spring is usually the best time to sell a house in the US. The weather is nice, people are looking for new options with the school year nearing its end and in some cases, companies are handing out their bonuses.  However, in the aftermath of COVID lockdowns, the real estate market was a bit different. Houses were flying off the shelf in the summer, so we opted to take a chance and get ourselves out there. I had several reasons to doubt that we would sell fast. Despite the stories we had heard, I still couldn't shake that, technically, we chose the slowest time of the year to put it on the market. We had a gigantic house (over 7000 sq ft/ 650 sq m) and we sat on a large piece of conservancy land (50 acres). We had a gigantic koi pond and a pool...

Five tasks.  To move to another country/location, I thought, 5, simple, tasks. 1) Figure out schools for kids. 2) Figure out a place to live. 3) Figure out work.  4) Pack stuff.  5) Get on plane. Simple right? Um seems not. I now have a list of 150 tasks.  Two still In Progress and 2 in To Do.   Through those 150 there have been so many good stories that I couldn't help but dust off the old blog and share some of the more humorous ones that have stretched my zen practice to it's thinnest point. This is edition 1 of series 1. Yeah that's right, I am planning more than one of these things.  To catch everyone up- we moved to Barbados. We were living in Virginia, in the process of planning to move to Denver, Colorado, when my husband got an expat opportunity so we decided to take it. This is where the story begins. For us, we like to do things big and in multiples- when we got married we figured that wasn't enough, so we decided to move to the US, buy a ho...

I am officially a serial cleaner. I can't stop. It seems fueled by the lovely skill that I see everything that is not in its right place. Everything. Exhibit A: There is a can of V8 juice sitting on the coffee table that has been there for over a day. I have been waiting to see if anyone will pick it up. They have not. Why I don't pick it up myself is beyond me. I feel this need to force myself to let things go. That the can is not hurting anyone. Surely it's empty so it's just a can. ~~But what if it's not. What if it's full and it's getting all moldy?! Ack. Yes Cathy fans, I just ack'd. I have even resorted to evaluating my need to clean. Because it seems to be a problem. Yes I am my own therapist. It's cheaper that way. I sometimes wonder if I didn't notice everything would I still feel the need to clean. I also wonder why I  have this maddening compulsion To clean. I mean a little dust never hurt anyone right?? It is partly geneti...

I posted some time back about how does one teach compassion. I wound up commenting how fortunate I was that my daughter has compassion already built in it seems. With the recent events of the world, the topic has come up once again. I watch the news and pictures of these young people now so angry with the world. At one time, naive to the world and the flaws it clearly has and just enjoying life. I also have now two teenagers in the house. And although they have spent the past year and a half going through changes, I am bracing myself for more to come as they encounter a new world of emotions, clicks (I think they call them squads now), and crushes. Their compassion is at that precarious point where it will become jaded with the reality of the world. People are not honest. Some of the closest people to you will be mean. School is becoming harder and seemingly unfair. Everyone starts to judge you more by how you look and what you wear rather than what you say or what you do. My husb...

So I meant to post something on Mother's Day. Something super cool and profound about being a mom in this crazy world while still trying to provide the best parenting I can to my daughters. So yeah. I did some laundry instead. We did mother's day breakfast with presents and then I spent the day in my regular routine. Nothing profound. Nothing actually cool.  I was on a business trip last week and these are always a glimpse into life without children, home, spouse obligations and I think some people embrace it and take advantage of the 'freedom' that it introduces.  However, I found that this proposed freedom wound up being an apparition if you will, for me. I was at a conference and so these ideally can be as intense or as relaxed as you want them to be. You make your own schedule. No one is checking how many sessions you go to. (well except those volunteers at the door with the badge readers). It seems like the perfect setting to travel to a land far far away and to ju...