Big Brother is watching you.

I miss my China friends. You go through this incredible life-changing experience for a couple of weeks and then in one long plane ride, it's over and you're back to your old reality + one. Flashes of my three weeks in China keep coming back to me. In particular, and this may only be useful to anyone traveling there in the future, that hotel e-mails, beginning in September, will be monitored by the PRC. As tourists wanting to blog from the privacy of your hotel room, you will be required to fill out a lengthy questionaire before having access to the internet. We received several letters from the Marriott apologizing for "service delays" while we were there because they were installing "a new and improved system". Well that was it. Big brother wants to know what you are thinking via your correspondences to the rest of the world.
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Now that I'm home, I'm kicking myself for having been so overcome by the "mother of two" thing, that I completely forgot to buy tacky Chinese city place mats to add to my collection. I came back empty handed and only remembered this yesterday! Not that I saw any to purchase but what city doesn't have plastic place mats? I'm sure I could have purchased some at the Great Wall. I just couldn't see them through the fog.

The obsession with place mats started on a motorcycle trip I took from New Orleans to Monterey, Mexico, too many years ago. I remember stopping at a motel in New Iberia, Louisiana, and coming across some place mats of the State Map (complete with lovely pink flamingos) and the friends I was traveling with told me that I would see those things everywhere and to hold off on buying them. Well guess what? It's been twenty years and I still haven't seen them - and this is how an obsession is born. I don't have any other collections, which is surprising because I come from a long generation of packrats. So now, when I travel out of the country, I make it a point to seek them out, to the great embarrassment of all who travel with me. I stunned some friends of mine when I purchased a set in Gibraltar. I'm big on geography and I use them as an educational tool for my children. Yeah, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

On the home front, I finally left Makena for three and a half hours yesterday. It was the longest time we've been separated and I was worried about the impact this might have on her but I had to get to a meeting and I needed to reassure everyone that I could still "keep it together" and be productive on the work front. To my surprise and then relief, it went extremely well. She never cried and was in good spirits the entire time. Jack was home with her as well as Nancy, her new nanny. She had started working in the morning and the two spent most of the day observing each other. It was actually great because Nancy didn't try to force Makena to like her. She wasn't in her face. She'd walk past her occasionally and non-chalantly place an object (we're big on spoons and Tupperware)in her vicinity, to peak her curiosity. By the time I had to leave we brought in the "big guns". We had Nancy take Makena outside and personally introduce her to the eleven chickens and Rommel, our giant African desert tortoise. Then, she reunited her with Tiger, who we'd kept at bay most of the day, and it worked out perfectly! Makena hardly noticed I was gone (I'm not quite sure how I feel about that) and she spent the rest of the afternoon being distracted by Tiger's antics and Jack's theatrics. She napped and when I finally returned home, Makena saw me and reached her arms out to me making a happy, scrunchy, face. Jack sort of looked up at me, grunted, and then went back to watching his Sponge Bob rerun.

Life is still a jetlagged blur and nothing prepares you for re-entry with a Chinese baby when your brain is screaming for sleep. It is insane and none of the blogs I've read have ever really addressed this, in terms of the time it sucks out of your life before things return to normal, or a permanent routine is established. So if you're off to China in the near or distant future, don't forget to budget two more weeks to whatever psychological deadline you are giving yourself to function ideally.

I also have a new resolution. We're not going to pay for Mak or Jack's college education. We're setting up a therapy fund. The kids can always work their way toward their carreer goals and if they pay for them, they'll be all the more willing to reach them, after all that's what their father and I did. Okay, maybe I'm hallucinating.

So we're all taking it day by day with no real end in sight. My main goal is to move Jack's bedtime up to midnight before school starts in five days.

Wish me luck.


Isabelle, living life on the other side and missing her China friends.
PS Makena's picture was taken at 2AM.