On the Roof

The boys were up by 5am again - I think I just need to start seeing this as normal and going to bed before ten, but I am really rubbish at going to bed early. Anyway - the monsoons are finally clearing, and the mosquitoes are dying away, so we spend more time outside. I took the boys out onto the roof this morning as I pegged out laundry, and gave them a big bowl of water and some bits to wash, and there you go - happy rascals for a couple of hours......
There is a lovely shady corner of the roof terrace which just happens to be the bit where the tap is - it couldn't be better designed.
When we came downstairs around ten, they were so hungry they thought it was lunchtime.









And a couple of shots, east and west, from the very top of the house:

Our House

We've been here just under 8 weeks, and in this house for about six of them. It's home now - still a bit bare in places and some quite nasty mismatching going on in others, but we're definitely 'home'. So here, have a little mooch around the more finished bits..... First up, Eve's bedroom:




If you look closely, you can see all the cards and letters from her friends in the UK, in pride of place on the top of her bookshelf.


Next up, the play room:




And I knew we were really at home when we put all of our treasures on the season table. The seasons are obviously very different here - the summer monsoons are just giving way to the bright, Autumn sun and a really good growing season - all the flowers are starting o bloom, and the gardener is cutting back the bamboo hedges around our house and planting smaller, flowering plants the way we tend to do the same in the Spring. So, um - a mixture of Summer blooms and Autumn veggies (yes pumpkins and squashes etc here) for the season table:




And finally, the story corner, in the sitting room. This could also be (more accurately) described as the Armory. Yes, occasionally (if we're lucky, once a day) they sit in it, blissed out, reading each other stories. Yes, they honestly do.... I love it when it all goes quiet, and I run in from the kitchen / loo / upstairs, anticipating some form of silent, but extreme, devastation, at which they so excel.....and find that Noah is reading 'Maisey Goes Camping' to Thom, or all three are sitting there, silent and separate, each absorbed in a book.....

But, much, much more often the cushions are being used as weapons of some kind...

Or to make a den at the bottom of the stairs...

And even to make a den on the shelf under the coffee table. Experimentally....

Anyway, here's the showroom shot. The mayhem ones will follow, I'm sure.



Have a fab weekend, everyone, xx.

More pics from the school run

I love the school run - here are a few more things which have caught our attention.....

These bikes with trailers are used loads - sometimes for deliveries, like this one, but also quite often for recycling cardboard or suchlike, which doesn't seem to happen in any official way here. Quite often you'll see a huge mound of rubbish at the roadside and people picking through it, separating out things which can be recycled. The next picture's not a very good one - I was trying to get some lovely washing blowing on the line on a rooftop.... Then a table tennis match; one of the many free range chickens; and a couple working on their house - we see quite a lot of women here on building sites - they'll be carrying really heavy loads in the same way as this lady - pretty tough ladies....

Mama Made Monday

Look away now, Jen, if your package hasn't arrived yet.........



I love making things for new babies - there's something really special and emotive in knitting for someone who hasn't yet arrived. This hat is on its way to Joe, my third little nephew, who arrived safely just over two weeks ago. I am currently working on another little something to go with it too.
And the card matches the ones I made for Jack and Tommy when they were born.
I'm definitely more of a knitter than a sewer (although I'm not even really qualified to call myself a 'knitter' - I just like it!) but I do like occasional cross stitch. I customised a hand made paper card I got here, to act as the mount, and didn't do a particularly good job of it, but I think you can feel the love - which is the whole point after all.....

Bhaktapur

A beautiful medieval town. We did the Lonely Planet walking tour and enjoyed the quiet, and better air quality. Bhaktapur is 'pedestrianised' - in as far as the roads are basically too narrow for traffic, except motorbikes which seem to pretty much count as pedestrians here anyhow.
It's quite a funny feeling - we attracted so much attention, being white / blonde and having a doubledecker pushchair. We get stared at way more than we stare. Which is why I felt a bit more confident about asking people if I could take photos of them - I was especially fascinated by all the knitting ladies - there were SO many sitting and chatting while they knit beautiful hats, socks, fingerless gloves etc on their double pointed needles. I kind of kicking myself now that I didn't ask anyone where they got their yarn from - although it was pretty apparent that hardly anyone spoke any English there and Harv and I have about 5 Nepali phrases we can use, none of which include knitting.

Looking Up

I hope I can be excused by the puddles, mud and potholes - I spend most of my walking here focused firmly groundward.

But today - perhaps it was the novelty of blue skies - or the daydreaming afforded by boys snoozing in the pushchair - I lifted my gazes.

So, here to share are some of the sights: a typical Kathmandu building, but isolated, standing alone and overshadowed by the huge Chinese development behind it; a cucumber plant thriving on the side of another building; and another new development, with bamboo scaffolding. Can you see the builders near the top of it? It really made me catch my breath when I saw the, vertiginous on their behalf.

Golden Temple, Lalitpur, Kathmandu

We all enjoyed the time we spent here.

The tortoises are guardians of the temple - I really wasn't sure about whether they should be touched - but the lady that the children met obviously thought it was ok.....

Oh, and the boy in the photo with Thom wasn't about to get Karate Kid on him - he was just kind of fidgeting about on the steps. Check out Thom's 'please leave me alone and don't make eye contact with me because I don't know you' squirm. He gets a lot of attention here (as do Eve and Noah) because of his colouring, so he does this squirm a fair bit. He's starting to get a bit more blase about it but I do still feel quite protective of him. He's my monkey boy!

The Tom and Jerry mural wasn't in the temple.........