NYR 12-29-11 - Ruth

Our housekeeper Ruth continues to be such a blessing to us. She's pleasant to be around, she keeps our house running well (especially now that I'm working full-time), and she loves Mac so much. What else could I ask for? I am so thankful for her.

NYR 12-7-11 - hot water bottle?

Last night Ruth watched Mac while we went to the Christmas party. When we got home, she said that he was very cold and so she made him a hot water bottle. Now Mac has a true talent for bamboozling Ruth to get more Coca Cola, to stay up later, to avoid a shower, etc. I was sure this "too cold to sleep" was yet another ruse to stay up later than bedtime.

But we don't own a hot water bottle, so I was very confused as to what she meant when she said she "made" him a hot water bottle.

Before I went to bed, I checked around his bed as best I could without waking him up to see if there was some hot water device that needed to be removed. I felt nothing so I went to bed.

This morning when I woke Mac up for school, he had a 2-liter Sprite bottle filled up with what used to be hot water stuck up under his armpit.

Ruth had literally made a hot water bottle.

Which Mac thinks is the most brilliant invention ever.

For sweet Ruth who's so clever, I am truly thankful.

today

I just thought I'd tell you - since you're so interested in my gastrointestinal health, I'm sure - that the bug is back. It decided to revisit at 4am and it's been going strong ever since. It is not fooling around this time.

I do have exciting news to share with you, but Ruth is now on the scene and she has taken charge. I'm drinking hot water with a cinnamon stick and mint in it and she's making the bed with new sheets so I can get in. I love her.

More later.

after all my smack talking...

Ruth called this morning at 8:30 to check on Mac because she was so worried about him. I told her that the fever and the headache had completely disappeared (and never came back all day), but I couldn't come up with the right word for "throat" to tell her that he still had a sore throat. I asked her to hold on for a minute while I used the ever handy Google Translate, but she thought I meant I had to get off the phone right then and she hung up. I looked up sore throat online, and tried to call her back but her cell phone went straight to voice mail. I left her a message to tell her that he had a sore throat and asked if she had any recommendations for clearing that up.

Well I never heard from her, which I thought was odd, if only because it's so unlike her. But cell phone batteries die, people leave the phones at home, etc. And it wasn't her day to work here anyway, so the fact that she even called this morning impressed me.

And then at 4:30 this afternoon, the doorman called to tell me that Ruth was here and was on her way up. She'd been babysitting three children all day somewhere close to here and she'd gotten my message so she wanted to come see for herself how Mac was.

Is she the sweetest lady ever or what?

She was concerned that he needed antibiotics (apparently it's okay to take prescription meds but not over-the-counter meds), but I told her that I thought it was this virus that was going around his school and everybody says it ends in 3 days so we should be near the end. I had to tell her what he'd eaten and drunk today so she was satisfied that it wasn't too sore.

She went upstairs to visit with him and see for herself that I hadn't killed him with neglect. I could hear them chatting away, him in English and her in Spanish. I have no idea if they understood each other but they were getting along as usual like old friends.

I love this lady.

oh ye of little faith

Maybe it was the potato wrap or maybe it was just time, but Mac woke up this morning feeling much better. The headache is completely gone, the fever is completely gone and only the sore throat remains.

I have to admit that I'm tempted to call Ruth to ask for the shaman treatment for sore throats....

today's medical lesson, part 2

So the Tylenol wore off, as Tylenol tends to do, and the fever came back and so we hurriedly took more Tylenol while Ruth was downstairs doing something. Well then she came back upstairs and said that Mac looked very red and asked had I checked for fever. I didn't tell her that I'd given him more Tylenol; I didn't want her to pull the green onions out of the veggie bin in the fridge, so I started talking about the headache he had.

During this conversation, Mac decided he wanted to eat some soup but by the time he got downstairs, he decided he wanted to take a nap, so we headed back upstairs and I told Ruth just to leave the heated-up soup in the pan on the stove.

As I was getting Mac settled back into my bed, Ruth came in with thinly sliced potatoes and a white pillowcase. Mac thought he was going to have to eat the raw potato and was ready to have a fit, when she started putting the potatoes slices around his forehead and then wrapped his head up with the pillowcase. Apparently the potatoes draw the headache out and the pillowcase has to be white because white clothes reduce fever.

Who knew?

She left shortly after this tribal ritual and Mac informed me that he hated the smell of raw potatoes and that it was torture to lay there with these potatoes on his head. He said the potatoes were drying up on his head and I said that was a good thing because they must be pulling out the headache. I'm not schooled in such remedies but surely that's what was happening right? He then asked if headaches were "dry" (I guess because the potatoes were drying out from pulling out the "dry" headache.) I assured him that yes, headaches were dry.

With the shaman gone from our home. we ceremoniously removed the pillowcase and the potatoes. But I leave you with photos of my very own Mr. Potato Head!

the embarrassment of having a housekeeper

When you're a stay-at-home mom, it feels really decadent to have a housekeeper three days a week. Don't get me wrong - I can survive the guilty feelings, but it does feel bad. I feel like I should be curing cancer or something instead of surfing the internet when Ruth is here, so generally that means I leave home during her hours of work.

So today when Ruth got here, I took inordinate pleasure in the fact that I really was working. I am in the process of updating sponsor information on the corn maze website, so I was able tell her - truthfully - that I'm a partner in a business in the US and that I was working on the website. Not exactly curing cancer, but I could tell she thought that was important.

I kept working, but I could hear the blender going. The next thing I knew, she was bringing me a freshly juiced glass of passionfruit juice. She said it helps with attention.

D-E-C-A-D-E-N-T. I love this woman.

P.S. For you corn maze lovers out there, check out www.WestFarmCornMaze.com for everything that's going on this year at the maze. Everything's been updated but the sponsorship information. This year, there's a reward program with our sponsors, so you can get all sorts of neat discounts and free food, etc.

P.P.S Our sea shipment is being delivered on Friday morning at 11am.

what $10 buys you in Bogota

Ruth and I have established Fridays as "replace the flowers" day around the apartment. We have one borrowed vase, two that I packed in our air freight (knowing that flowers are cheap in Bogota), and 4 old milk bottles that we bought at a little junk shop the first weekend we were here (again, because flowers are cheap and I didn't want to wait until our sea shipment arrived to enjoy the bounty).

Because the weather is bad today, Ruth took the very good initiative to buy the flowers on the way here. She spent about $10 and came home with all this. I cannot wait until our real shipment gets here with all the vases we own - we're going to have more flowers around this joint than we know what to do with!

P.S. I can count. There's one other vase with flowers in it from last week's purchase. The flowers last so long here that the six vases we filled today have had the same flowers in them for over two weeks. I finally dumped them all yesterday in anticipation of "replace the flowers" day.

Ruth and spaghetti sauce

Today I asked Ruth to make a pot of bolognese sauce for our dinner. I'm sure there are a lot of things that can go wrong when making a pot of bolognese sauce, but I have never tasted bolognese sauce that has zero taste of tomatoes. In my new local parlance, there was nada tomato-y about this sauce. What did she put in there????

Clearly bolognese isn't one of her strengths, but she more than made up for it by going all over creation to buy a gorgeous and humongous bromeliad (after a couple futile attempts at floral bouquets) for Jimmy to take to a dinner tonight as a hostess gift. That, my friends, was worth the price of admission today!

more Monday musings

1. I went to the embassy today to get my blood pressure medicine reviewed because it's not working very effectively. BP's still up so we're changing meds to see what happens over the next couple weeks.

2. While at the embassy I talked to the woman in charge of getting our household effects here, and I got GREAT news. The shipment is in country and is waiting at the port in Cartagena for paperwork to be processed. The woman in charge said she thought we might be looking at setting up a delivery in two weeks, but definitely within a month. This will be nothing short of a miracle if we have all our stuff in the next couple weeks. And it won't be a moment too soon as we are receiving our first visitors, BBFF Gisele and her husband Flavio, in early October. Dare I dream that our apartment will be "fixed" by then?

3. Jimmy's on an overnight trip. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

4. The British School has a co-curricular program which basically works into the school week those extracurricular activities that we as Americans would normally do after school or on the weekends. Mac will do two co-curricular activities per week per term (and they use a trimester system so he'll end up doing 6 activities per year). The list of options came out today and he had to make a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice for both days. His first choice was artistic rollerskating/hockey, but I convinced him to change his mind. I'm all about broadening horizons but my kid isn't going to be in the roller derby or synchronized skating or whatever "artistic rollerskating" might be. So his Monday choices (and we're banking on getting his 1st choice for each day) are fencing, robotics and tennis and his Wednesday choices are tennis, swimming and horseback riding. I LOVE THIS SCHOOL!

5. We are off to eat dinner, which is yummy ropa vieja. Because I had the morning at home, I made the recipe halfway and Ruth finished the second half. I have to tell you that it is divine!!

Monday musings

1. We didn't go to the formal do on Saturday night. When Jimmy got home from work on Thursday (after my Carolina Herrera experience of okaying a classic black suit, immediately followed by the office assistant telling me that the classic black suit was a no-go), he asked how my day was and I told him "VERY stressful". When I told him why, he suggested we just not go to the event. Is it that easy to get out of it? So on Friday morning, I decided that I wasn't going dress shopping after the school reading program meeting and that we'd just skip the event. So the assistant changed our rsvp and that was all settled.

2. Because we'd hired a babysitter for Saturday night, we went for drinks and dinner with another new couple here in Bogota. We all love the babysitter and intend to use her services as often as possible before her family departs post next year.

3. Mac came home from school on Friday and told me that the headmaster at the school told him he wasn't wearing the right kind of black shoes with the dress uniform. Oops. I knew they weren't dressy enough but I'd hoped to fall through the cracks. Let it be said there's no falling through the cracks at the British School. So we bought a beautiful pair of little boy's dress shoes on Saturday. They have very nice shoes here for all ages.

4. The school communicates totally electronically so late Friday afternoon I was checking the website and saw that Mac had to choose what he wanted to do for his performing art in music class. The choices for his year are violin, cello, percussion, recorder, drama, stomp, choir and maybe something else that I can't remember. Guitar doesn't come as an option until next year. So he has chosen violin as his first choice, but if that's already filled, then stomp is his second choice. The school has a limited number of violins that we can rent, so hopefully we answered early enough to be among the first come first served. Rental for the year is just $40 so it's a steal of a deal to learn violin. And in true British School fashion, if Mac doesn't shown sufficient improvement in some number of months, he has to choose something else.

5. We went to church yesterday at the English-speaking church here in Bogota. They have a huge sanctuary that could probably seat 350 people. By Jimmy's count, there were some 50 people in the service with probably another 15 or so in the children's church. Now I know that lots of people don't ever go to church, but all I could think was that we're posted at one of the largest US embassies in the world - there are some 400 Americans posted here - and there were only a couple of other embassy folks there. If even 1/10 of the Americans at post came to church and if 1/2 of those 1/10 had families, we could have filled the church up.

6. We told Mac they had a children's church and asked if he wanted to go, and he said no. Before the service started, this nice preteenaged girl came over and asked if he'd like to go. He said no and then she very wisely told him they were going to be drilling stuff and making a tent. He was out of there in a flash and afterwards, said it was the best children's church he'd ever been to. There was another CGB child in the program - a little older than Mac, but he was thrilled to make the connection with somebody from his school. He even prayed for that boy and his family last night.

7. Ruth started on Friday and she's wonderful. She was supposed to arrive at 7:30am but got here at 6:45. By the time I got home from my school meeting around midday, she'd cleaned, grocery shopped for dinner stuff and fresh flowers, had dinner on the stove and was ironing. She comes back today for more fun. Last night, I decided I wanted her to make ropa vieja today but that's a lot of recipe to translate. So I found this fabulous Google Translate program online and BAM! in two seconds the whole recipe was translated. I can't wait to eat dinner tonight!

Thursday morning musings

1. The second day of school went as well as the first. Mac seemed to enjoy himself very much and he didn't complain about things in the rice. He was starving by the time he got home at 4pm, though, so I don't know how much he actually ate at school. And still no homework.

2. My friend Alisa sent out a link to this great website today. I encourage you to visit it, whether you have kids in school or whether you've always want to know or re-learn things like Newton's Third Law of Motion or how to solve a trig problem. You can read the story on Salman Khan here or visit the Khan Academy here. I've just listened to one little lecture, and I'm a huge fan. It's a great supplement to what you've learned in the classroom.

3. Jimmy and I are going to some event on Saturday night because his boss can't go. I haven't seen the invitation but he said it says "gala" on it. I'm waiting for more details, but Houston, we may have a problem. I have my little black dress (remember that one from last year that got worn everywhere?) and I have my black suit. I have nothing else that will work until our sea shipment gets here. Nary a long dress in sight. I don't even have my paint-by-numbers eye shadow kit because I figured I wouldn't need it until the Marine Ball in November and surely our sea shipment will be here by then. If I have to wear the little black dress, I don't have a pashmina - it's in the other shipment - nor do I have an evening handbag. There is no Ulta beauty store here nor do I have anyhing to fix my hair with. BUT I did line up a babysitter - there's an American teenaged girl (with the embassy) who lives practically across the street from us. She loves to babysit, so she's on board for Saturday night. Maybe she has a dress, makeup and handbag I can borrow?

4. Ruth is now starting tomorrow. She was helping her last family pack out and the packout lasted longer than expected, so she was tied up yesterday (or at least that's what I understood).

5. This embassy has what is a huge commissary for us. The only other commissary post we've been to is Brasilia and their little commissary was pretty pathetic. The store here got a huge new shipment in so I went shopping yesterday for fun things like Honey Nut Cheerios and Pop-Tarts and tortilla chips. Last night we had a nacho feast complete with Jimmy's most delicious guacamole. I could eat it by the gallon when he makes it. Tonight we're having chili with Jiffy cornbread muffins, which I also bought yesterday at the commissary. That means leftover muffins in the morning for breakfast. I can't wait!

Hope you're all having a great Thursday!

housekeepers r us

If you're not an expat, don't read this. It may make you physically ill and I don't want you to ruin your computer.

One of the perks of living as an expat in many places around the world is that you can afford a housekeeper.

And having a housekeeper is a marvelous thing.

I'm not talking about a cleaning service that comes in once a week where you still have to clean up during the week and then you have to clean up before the cleaner gets to your house. I'm talking about a full-service, full-time housekeeper.

We are not, in fact, hiring a full-time housekeeper, which in Colombia means somebody who works in your home 6 days a week. If we had a bunch of children or a baby, that might be more inviting. But we're trying to instill in Mac that he needs to make up his bed every morning and pick up his toys and put his dirty clothes in the phantom dirty clothes basket, and if we had somebody 6 days a week, even I'd stop making my bed and picking up my toys.

So we're going to "rough it" and go for somebody 3 days a week. In this business, and especially during this summer transition season, there are always housekeepers looking for work. We have an interview set up for tonight for a woman that a friend recommended, and then I took the initiative to call another woman on my own this afternoon. She said she could come over immediately. I had planned to see if she could come over tomorrow night when Jimmy was home (with his good espanol), but she wanted to strike while the iron was hot, so I told her to come. Which meant that Mac and I had to quick-clean to make it look like we weren't slobs.

Her name is Ruth and she's a little dynamo packed into about 5 feet and maybe 90 pounds. She's worked for embassy people for a long time and she can do it all: she cleans, does laundry, irons, cooks, shops, runs errands, pays bills. You name it, she can do it. She also agreed to stay late on Wednesday nights so Jimmy and I can resume our weekly date night which we had and loved in Brasilia. She's her in 40s, married, with two children (one is 22 and is a systems engineer and the other is 12 and in school). She is also going to university at night to study child psychology. Previous embassy families have left her with their children while the parents went off on vacation. She seems perfect - even Mac said he liked her.

If you're not an expat and you're still reading this, this is your final warning to stop reading.

Guess how much Ruth charges for her services?

Less than $17 for an 8-hour day.

The woman we're interviewing tonight had better come prepared to impress because Mac and I are pretty much in love with Ruth. And if we vote for Ruth, Jimmy's going to vote for Ruth, too.

P.S. If we hire Ruth, she can start on Wednesday. Blessed hallelujah!