New Blog

For the next year we’re temporarily moving to https://notesfromrtw.wordpress.com/

Thanks
-arun

The Trip

Nine days before I leave and my bags are more or less packed and my quarter-century old hiking boots are cleaned and ready.

There are still a hundred things left to be done, but Jo - who has been doing the heavy lifting literally and otherwise - says we are making progress. It's hard to plan to be away for a year. Too long for the usual holiday preparations, and too short for goodbyes. But we have been steadily emptying the house of personal belongings while packing what we'll take with us. As of yesterday I don't own any suits - and only one wedding to attend between now and departure date!

One huge and liberating decision we made a little while ago is to travel light. Each of us will have a carry-on sized backpack or duffle bag. We'll have enough clothes for a week. Two, if underwear are called on to do double duty. Along with rain jackets and warm clothes to take us down to about 5°C.

This is a map of approximately where we are going. We'll be African in August and September for the wildebeest migration and the flooding of the Okavango delta, the Mediterranean in October, Hyderabad for Diwali, Bhutan, Tibet, China and Singapore till the middle of December, Australia and New Zealand for Christmas, New Year's and most of January, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Philippines till the middle of March, Japan for the cherry blossoms till mid-April, Patagonia in Chile and Argentina for the rest of April, and then work northwards as winter creeps up South America, spending May and June in Peru, Brazil, Ecuador and Panama, and returning to the US via Hawaii in July. And if we decide we hate traveling, we'll go directly to Hawaii and spend the year there...

Vivian and Evan are saying their goodbyes. It must be mind boggling when you are nine and you only remember about six of those years and you wont see a friend for one full year.  Jo has finished her immunotherapy and had egg for breakfast a couple of months ago. And I'm packed and ready to meet Aaron in Arusha and start walking up Kilimanjaro. 

Catching Up

After threatening to blog more often, I stopped. For the first time in the life of the blog I have one posted in 8 months. I've been grappling with the issue of privacy. Not the general one about your Amazon Echo knowing you better than your spouse, or Facebook manipulating your vote. But the more specific concern about my kids' privacy. Vivian and Evan didn't ask for this.

My need for being a social animal won this round. I'll fill in the stories at some point but here is a dump of pictures - starting with our trip to see Stephanie and Gary in Utah in December, up to yesterday. A lot of pictures...

Poems, Pads, and Protests

Remember back when (I used to blog, and :-) Evan had a stall at the kids' marketplace as a part of his entrepreneurship class? It's Vivian's turn now. She and her friend created a business selling custom poems. You give them a word or phrase and in about five minutes, the girls write and illustrate a poem for you. They've hit the trifecta: their product is ultra-customized, the value of their product is not defined by the cost of parts, and they have no competition. The downside is a limited market: there are only so many literary risk-takers who want poems written by a couple of dyslexic middle school girls. 

So one day I overheard Vivian and her friend discussing how they should get these cute small wax-paper packets to package their poems. The next evening I see these purple-blue-green things on the dining table at home. 

Me: "Oh - is this what you're going to put your poems in?"

Vivian: "No Dad. Those are my pads."

Much laughter at my expense. Even from Evan who is clueless about pads. Though there's a good chance that I bought those pads for Vivian at Walgreens late some evening after Jo armed me with a photo of what the box looks like. We aren't shy about discussing anatomy and bodily functions, even periods. Sometimes, without giggling. The other day Vivian proudly displayed a booklet she had made for her science class about a certain single celled prokaryotic organism. "Doesn't it look exactly like a tampon? They should call it the tampon bacteria."

Having a daughter is distinctly different and new. Broadly speaking I understand what Evan goes through in so far as his body and biology is concerned. Not so with the girl child. But we try not to not talk about the differences. I leave the exam room when the doctor and nurse are in there with Vivian. But we talk about it afterwards. If Jo got really busy with a dream job, I feel I could step in and help buy Vivian her tampons, shaving stuff, or clothes. It wouldn't be easy but I wouldn't be helpless.

Fortunately, Vivian buys some of her own clothes (with money she has earned - sometimes, by selling poems). She doesn't always make the best decisions and at times, Jo has returned clothes to the store the next day and helped her pick something instead that more is suitable for school. Vivian's school has a dress code. The line between what is acceptable and what isn't is a bit blurry. No enforcement of the code for most of this school year has made the line even blurrier.

Vivian's shorts were getting - well - short. So last week Jo and Vivian went out shopping and bought a few shorts that were longer. In fact, they were a good bit longer than what Vivian had been wearing to school all year.

The first day Vivian wore these new denim shorts to school - with a white t-shirt and solid black thigh high socks, she got dress coded. Her shorts didn't go down to her fingertips as per code. In fact they were considerably short of that lofty goal. You'd need to get "uniform" shorts, cargo shorts, boys shorts, or custom tailored shorts to meet the dress code - you couldn't just waltz in to Old Navy and buy something off the shelf.

Vivian came back home unhappy.

We encourage Vivian to think through her sartorial decisions. What do you like, what are you comfortable with, where and what are you dressing for, what your peers wear, what you can afford, etc. The hope is for her to develop her own confident sense of fashion - initially with some parental input.

School dress codes are based on what keeps the boys calm (and later, men). And that is a slippery slope which ends in slut shaming, victim blaming, and a mandatory full body burka.

So over dinner yesterday, we helped Vivian sort through her options. Jo cautioned her against completely alienating her teachers over this issue of dress code. We even discussed the law - as a private school, the dress code was pretty much what the school decides it to be. Sure - she could try to change the code, but it would have to be done by persuasion and reasoning, not confrontation. Eventually she decided on a tongue-in-cheek response. This morning she wore her oversized Rosedale Ride sweatshirt over a short pair of shorts. The sweatshirt comes down to below her fingertips, but she looks like she's not wearing much else. Which segues to the last word in the title of this post.

I'm going to ask her to write a poem about "dress code"! Full circle.