Chiang Mai

More than halfway through 2016.   What a privilege to have been able to call this place home for a few months in our life.  M has thrived.

2016

I am averaging one blog post every 6 months. Nonetheless, I'm thankful for this space.

We just completed our longest trip as a family. We took a month off for the holiday and flew to California, Taiwan, and the Philippines.  Again, I made the mistake of booking too many flights.  I believe we counted 10 in a month, two of which were 10-13 hours long.  Oof.

Despite the tantrums, shifting sleep schedules, and awful jetlag, it was worth it.  2015 was a big year for me in terms of adjustment to motherhood and work-life balance.  It was not easy.  There were rough patches and more than a handful of times that I wanted to quit my job.  But we made it through the year. In some ways this trip felt like a celebration of what we have been through and what we can do as a family. While this trip, along with the others we made in the year, did not help my precarious daily balancing act, it reminded me that parenthood is what we make of it and M will be a happier, healthier child if her mother is thriving.

I have not made resolutions in years. For the year ahead, I have two concrete goals, apart from the "usual" (i.e., respect boundaries between work and personal life, travel, own my work).  The first: to navigate an international move with my family, which will happen in a little over a month and which I am trying to do very carefully.  The second: to grow into my new role at work, but in a way that allows me to carve out more time with my family.

Panama

Do folks blog anymore?  These spaces have been so quiet, recently with a few of my favorite blogs closing.  I guess many of us who want to document life via social media moved to less intensive forms of documentation, like Instagram, long ago.  But I'm finding more and more that I want to write in this space, even if it's just a picture and a few words about how the month treated me - not that I have a lot of time.  

Today, with M asleep and the sun too hot for me to want to venture outside for too long, I want to write a few words about our trip to Panama, which we planned as a stopover en route to California. In her first year, we've clocked a decent amount of mileage domestically with M, but this was our first international trip as a family.

Traveling with an 11-month old child was fun, as well as challenging.  Gone are the days where I can pack a small suitcase and be out the door with minimal planning. Baby infrastructure is needed, if only for ease of mind. Thankfully, M traveled so well.  She was happy and curious as we explored Panama City and enjoyed the attention of the many strangers she came across. She handled the bus rides, taxi rides, and metro/subway rides like a champ.  She even tried Panamanian food. Perhaps most importantly, she tolerated the 5 flights we scheduled over a period of 2 weeks. (Not to self: That's too many flights.)

There were, of course, rough patches, including shifting sleeping schedules.  Also, flights with a curious baby are exhausting!

If time permits, I'll post more about Panama City and Boquete, our two stops in Panama.

M.

I love you.

Life lately

The last few months have not been easy.  The cumulative fatigue--the lack of a good night's sleep for nearly 11 months--has caught up with me.  In addition, there's a lot of tension at the office and an increasing workload that coincides with my deceasing motivation (or you could see it as my stricter enforcement of boundaries between work and life). I am working on a project that focuses more on research and writing, a nice change of pace.  I do wish, however, that I could take on more complaints/cases, but I also know from experience that providing legal support to a group in another country would require frequent travel, particularly where dispute resolution is involved.  And right now, I'm okay staying at home for most of the time.

Motherhood has also presented challenges, but overall it has brought me so much joy.  Some weeks, I'm startled by how much M is changing into a being with a personality. A few weeks ago, she added "mama" to her vocabulary, which consisted of "hi" and "dada." She also started very clearly mimicking my tone and even some of my gestures.  

In July, we'll celebrate her first birthday. It is insane how writing/saying that chokes me up.

Images from Joburg

Thank you for the nice comments and messages in response to my last post.  Although I still struggle with finding time to be in this space, I do want to continue this documentation.  I'm thankful for the support of this small blogging community.

And so:

I spent about a week in Johannesburg, South Africa in early February.  It was the first time I was away from Madeleine.  I felt guilty being away from her.  But despite the lingering guilt, that trip was really good for me.  In addition to providing me the best sleep I have had in the past 9.5 months, that trip also gave me an opportunity to be around incredible advocates from all over the world, strategizing, plotting and drawing links between our work.  My heart was on fire.  I was reminded of how the work I am doing from DC fits into the bigger picture. 

That trip also forced me to accept that being outside and working outside of DC is a necessity for me.  There is a lot to enjoy about our lives in DC.  I am conscious of the many things, all the small pleasures associated with daily life, that I would miss.  But I feel just as strongly as I did two years ago, when I first moved: I don't want to settle here - we don't want to settle here.  I want to be back working in Asia.  Since Johannesburg, there have been opportunities presented that would allow my family to move back abroad.  I don't intend to make a move in near future, but Ethan and I are looking ahead. (And that is a reminder to myself as to why I keep this space anonymous!)

Portland recap and this space

Well, hello.  I haven't checked into this space in a while. It's not for lack of trying, but I admit it has been a struggle to keep up this work-life-baby balance.  Most days, I prioritize any extra minutes of sleep I can sneak in.

Briefly, since last time, there's been a lot of just daily life, a trip to Portland (evidence above) and even a trip to Johannesburg, South Africa.

There's so much I want to write in this space.  At the same time, I've often thought about shutting down this blog.  I started it nearly five years ago, at a time when I thought it was important to document the mental and emotional preparation for a big move abroad.  And I'm so glad I did.  Blogging forced me to take stock of both the small and big moments in the past five years, colors, shapes and emotions I would have strained to remember today.  Through this space, I can remember what it felt like the first day I stepped foot in Phnom Penh, the cacophony of motorbikes, and the gravity of the idea, slowly settling on me, that this dusty city would be my home. I can recall the first moments I realized I loved this strange international human rights thing - that feeling of having my heart on fire; the crescendo of emotion when I realized I fell in love with Ethan; our travels; our moves to Thailand and eventually back Stateside.

But I've been in DC for nearly two years!  How?!  And I'm not often inspired to document life here. Hah. That sounds horrible but it's the truth.

That's not entirely true. I am inspired to document M's life and motherhood, as I stumble along.  I wonder, though, if this is the place to do it.  Shouldn't I avoid pictures of her (like the one above) in the public domain?  Does this make me a bad mother? I joke, but I'm somewhat serious.