Still Jonesin’ for Sun

I have only been to Vegas once before. A few friends who shall remain nameless (Rachel and Brandon) and I decided to drive there one weekend from ORU. And yes, good ORU girls do go to Vegas…apparently. Rachel kept telling girls in our dorm that we were going to evangelize Sin City. I’m still not sure if she really thought we were going to go street witnessing or she was trying to delude other good ORU girls.

Anyway, we took off and drove 18 hours to Nevada from Tulsa and stayed one night, visited all of the casinos and drove all the way back. I still think I must have “addictive personality” written on my forehead because everything I touch in a casino throws money at me. They must think, “Let’s see if we can get her hooked.” I had no ever loving idea how to play black jack but never lost one hand. I didn’t make tons because, luckily, I’m a grab-it- and-run kind of girl, but I made enough to pay for my trip and then some!

Last week, the day we were leaving for North Carolina, I got one of those unfortunate sales calls. Since I belong to a big hotel points club, they always target me to “promote” their new properties. To make a long sales pitch short, they got me. I have been craving sun, particularly when I’m pregnant in winter…I get sooo blue!

So, Conrad and I will be heading off to very sunny and very warm Las Vegas Nevada in a few weeks! Yeah! He’s never been to the west coast and he, luckily, is also a grab-it-and-run kind of guy, so we should make it just find in Vegas. We are staying at a beautiful hotel and planning a fun trip of Shows, restauranting, and hiking in (or driving through, depending on how I feel) the canyons. And of course, visiting the outrageous casinos!

Sunshine and Belly Bops

We drove to NC this weekend to visit the Stenner’s. We had such a good time with Eli, Jayden, Ruth, and Gary! We decided we wanted to break in our new mini van, so we drove all the way to North Carolina! Isabelle did surprisingly well…thank you DVD player.

We spent the weekend relaxing and visiting with everyone and Jayden and Isabelle got to know each other a little better. Jayden is about a year older than Isabelle and is all boy. I honestly didn’t know our little girl was such a delicate flower until this trip! The first thing Jayden did was come up to Isabelle with a big grin on his face and said, “Hi Belle.” And gave her a big belly bop. Although he only outweighs Isabelle by about ten pounds, she promptly flew back and hit the ground. I don’t think she was expecting a belly bop. This really hacked her off and she threw her hands up in the air and screeched as loud as she could. This became their signature interaction throughout the weekend.

If Jayden didn’t want Isabelle playing with something he’d scoot in front of her and start pushing her out with his bum. These two only children had a weekend of hard knocks. Being the responsible parents that we are, we took lots of video and laughed a lot.

One of the best things about the trip was the 77 degree weather! Yes, I was basking in the sun and loving every minute of it! On the way home on Sunday, I slept for a while and when I woke up we were in West Virginia and the temperature had dropped over 25 degrees and it was snowing…urrrghhh. That was honestly depressing!


Since the Easter traffic was so bad on the way down we decided to leave a bit early and missed most of the festivities on Sunday. But we stopped and had a nice Easter lunch of North Carolina BBQ! Luckily we seemed to miss most of the traffic and arrived home late, but in time to get a good nights sleep.

Thank you Stenner's for having us this weekend! We had a wonderful relaxing time!

Cabin Fever

Many of you experienced this with us a couple of weeks ago, as we got the biggest snow storm in the midwest...at least the biggest in MY life time! We got over 20 inches of snow. We were snowed in all weekend long. This is how we kept ourselves occupied....

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The Michaels, M.I.A.

Lately, my days consist of getting up before my family even wakes up, getting ready, leaving for my day. Traveling all over the state of ohio, eating eating eating all morning long. I’m starving in the mornings! By the time I get home in the evenings, I’m so spent and nausea begins to set in. I don’t want dinner, I don’t even want to SMELL dinner. After we swing some sorry excuse for food for Isabelle and Conrad, I give in and eat oatmeal around 7ish, before we get Isabelle ready for bed. I collapse into bed not long after her!

I feel like crap, BUT I’m not throwing up several times a day like I was when I was pregnant with Isabelle! Whoo hoo! I have to say that I am sooo thankful for my wonderful husband! He has more than taken up the slack for me while I’ve been out of commissions. Without a doubt, this is the man God had prepared me for! He was doing the dishes a few days ago after dinner and afterwards he sighed and said, “I love a clean kitchen.” I prayed for a clean husband, and God was faithful!

More often than not, he is the one taking care of Isabelle. He get’s her ready and off to daycare in the mornings. And when he comes home at night, he starts entertaining her and spending time with her because Mommy is usually totally tuckered out and at the end of her patience with Isabelle. And let’s be honest, I didn’t have much patience to start with, so it’s only gotten worse with pregnancy! I told Conrad that I asked God for more patience, but instead he gave me a patient husband. He thought that was a great big cop-out.

Guest Blogger

This is Isabelle. My mom is on the couch sleeping and my dad isn’t home from work, so I thought I’d blog today. Since my mom has been such a slacker lately, I feel like I need to tell you some important news…I’m going to be a big sister! My little brother/sister is due on October 16th and Mommy isn’t feeling that great, but I hear it isn’t as bad as when she was pregnant with me! So that’s good news!

So, I decided to celebrate by whipping up a big bowl of whip cream and eating it (while Mommy is sleeping, of course). It is my favorite!

Jona & Abigail's Celebration

This weekend we threw a baby shower for my sister Jona. Her baby girl is due on April 3 (tentatively named Abigail). It was so nice to see family and friends and Jona got a boatload of great baby stuff! We had the shower at a little coffee shop in Norwalk called Sheri’s, where they have a beautiful party room.

We wanted Jona to have a really nice shower…and we figured this will be the last party like this for our family so we went all out! Not to mention, I have really been thinking and praying about starting an event planning business, so I was hoping to get some great pic’s for a potential portfolio. The pictures didn’t turn out wonderful, but the party did!

I have also started to develop some party “theories.” Whether we are talking about a wedding or shower or birthday, the event may be to celebrate the person or couple, but it certainly is NOT all about the person of honor! It should perhaps reflect them, but the party or celebration should revolve around the guests attending.
Besides, if I, as a guest, took time out of my schedule to come to your event, and even spent money on a gift, the least you could do is serve good food, and maybe even give me a little gift to thank me for coming! And all of the guests who ever attended weddings with terrible food and inconsiderate hosts said “amen.”

But back to the baby shower: the party ended well with a really good time of prayer for Abigail and Jona. Thanks everyone who came and congratulations Jona!

Cynical Me, Part 2

You may not know what I do. I administrate free vision clinics for children in rural areas in Ohio. I go to small towns, bring doctors and all of the equipment and we run free vision clinics…free to everyone…no cost. Come one, come all!

Last week I was in southern Ohio at a jam packed clinic. This is unusual because, if you were unaware, people often don’t show up for free healthcare. So, we usually double or triple book patience, because so many don’t show up for the FREE medical care. So we had more folks show than was normal. One mother came and brought her five children with her because one of them needed an eye exam. They had to wait over an hour to see the doctor.

By the time mom got in to see me she was irate. She was ranting and raving about how long she had to wait and why we couldn’t get our act together in order to shorten her wait. I have no doubt it was difficult to entertain her five children for such a long period of time…but her response brought to a head some of my stronger feelings about our current system and what is and is NOT working.

Why do the people I work to serve feel such a sense of entitlement for FREE services? They don’t pay a dime for their Medicaid programs, but I, with “great” insurance, pay a $15 co pay plus 20% of my entire medical bill. And when I take my child to the ophthalmologist, I still have to wait over an hour to see the guy!

In Ohio, we just revamped our Medicaid system, where private companies are running our public Medicaid program. One of the items that all companies must offer is “incentives” for patients. Meaning, if a pregnant woman who is on the medical card, makes and actually goes to her regular prenatal appointments she gets a prize….perhaps a gas card to speedway for doing what any responsible mother would do anyway. Your tax dollars at work.

“Anything the government does for its citizen that they should do for themselves makes us a weaker nation.” My last thought from my friend Brandon.

Cynical Me

Honestly, the older I get the more thankful I am for my slacker job. Good pay, good benefits, plenty of time to work on other things. As long as I don't have lapse of conscience and can conform well to the system (which has been my issue in the past) I'll get along well.

Anyway, I recently thought of Letterman like list of Top Five Reasons you Know you work for the government (I hope no one is reading this, like the Columbus Dispatch!As it's been quite a firey topic in the governers roundtable lately!)

1. You come to work, THEN do your hair and make up.
2. You come to the office early, so you can do your morning devotions at your desk.
3. You are finished with your day’s tasks before 9:15 a.m.
4. You got written up three times this year, but you still got your two annual raises.
5. You spend 85% of your work time doing paperwork to prove that you were working.

Of course, all of these things I have OBSERVED not actually done myself! ahem. They say to beware of whatever you put in print because it always come back to bite you in the butt. Let's hope not:)

Add it to the list...

There hasn’t been much going on in the Michael Household this week…hence the lack of bloggage. Last Thursday the daycare called me and asked me to pick up Isabelle early, she was running a fever. When I got to daycare, her face was all red and she was so miserable. When I took her home and put her PJ’s on, she just sat on the couch with me. Poor little thing. She ran a 102 degree temp all night long and we woke up every four hours to medicate her and sponge her off. It broke in the a.m. and she was fine as wine! So that was our Valentine’s day.

We visited my parents this weekend and ended up leaving Isabelle with my mom and dad Monday and Tuesday night , so we kind of celebrated Valentines day with dinner out on Tuesday night (A grown up restaurant with no highchairs or picking up silverware off of the floor ten times!)

On another note, despite my vehemently anti-mini van attitude, we bought a mini van this week! We traded in the ole’ faithful (and paid for) 1996 Honda Accord for a shiny 2005 Nissan Quest…with all the bells and whistles. You can officially add two things to the list of things I said I’d never do. 1.) Drive a mini van 2.) Have a DVD player in my vehicle. After a year and a half of crying baby car rides..I give in! And we got an excellent deal, thank you e-bay!

Happy V Day

Here is a picture of our little valentine dancing to her cousin Shanti’s guitar playing! By the way, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard an Indian sing American Country Music. Classic…

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On other fronts, we officially let our new house go this week. Actually it looks like they sold it out from under us last week! Can you believe that? We are okay with this. AND, on a happy note we got ALL of our deposit back (whoo hoo!) because our builder is pulling out of Ohio! They were in Dayton, Cincinnati, and Columbus. Although the Columbus market is booming, the other two areas were doing so poorly they forced the builder to leave Ohio all together. Bad for our builder…good for us!

Product of the month

Although I like to scrapbook, like all of us, I do get a bit behind! I can only imagine this get's worse with more children...



Anyway, I found this great website, called How Fast They Grow. It let's you create very cool 12x12 full glossy pages for $7.50 each. A bit pricy, but it might be worth it for a few pages a year. I don't like this product because it offers limited creativity, but again, thier layouts are phenominal!

Another Proud First

I am happy to report that we experienced another proud first in the life of Isabelle. Sunday morning we got up early (as is our custom since adjusting from jetlag) and started getting ready for church. I threw Isabelle in the bathtub and went about getting ready for the day. Suddenly I heard Conrad yell for me. “Come quick!” I knew what it was, instinctively.

It was morning and our little girl has bowels on a strict time table. Morning, after a fresh diaper change and during her usual breakfast time is her first bm of the day. Sure enough, I had left her in the tub to play just a little too long and she felt the urge, while bathing…
Conrad said he found her playing with it and it took him a few minutes to figure out exactly what it was. Luckily, I had gathered advice from friends before hand on how to clean a tub of this particular refuse. So a quick shower for the little one and a few minutes of grunt work and we were back to square one. I figured this had to happen sooner and later, right?

Also, today is Isabelle’s first day in the toddler class at daycare! She has been transitioning for the past week into this class. She has always loved this classroom, and going into it has always been a “treat” for her, so she transitioned pretty well. Also this means no more naps in the crib…she’s on a cot now. What a big girl she is!

Not to mention we are VERY excited as this means her weekly tuition goes down $50 a week. Whoo hoo!

Henna

While Conrad and I were planning our wedding back in good ole’ 2005 (ahem.) I kept questioning him about Indian traditions that we could include in our wedding. After much prodding and poking and google searching he convinced me that most Indian traditions were steeped in Hinduism and wouldn’t be included in our wedding. Bummer.

You all know what tradition I was hedging for, right? I always always wanted to get henna tatoo’s on my hands and feet. So while I was in India I found out that I have a Henna Buddy. Conrad’s Sister-Cousin (I’ll explain that title in another post!) Suzanna loves henna! So, one afternoon Suzanna, Anthony Mary (my sister-in-law) and I went to a little salon for pedicures and henna. I had it put on m feet only, knowing I would be peppered with questions and a complete distraction to the little ones I would be seeing in my vision clincs the next week if I agreed to henna hands!
Suzanna had henna put on her hands, and Anthony Mary decided to skip this excitement and took a nice nap while our she waited for us. Consequently, she’s in grad school full time and the mother of an energetic seven year old.

You will notice in these pictures the fruit of one of my other favorite items while in India…tailored clothes! I got three new outfits tailored while I was there and got my dad 5 tailored shirts, which he was ecstatic about. All for less than $10 each. Don’t you just love the exploitation of the labor class in third world countries??? (okay, I hope you hear this statement laced with sarcasm, but that doesn’t always come across in a blog, does it?)

A Little Slice of India

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Home Sweet Home

I have so much to write about and great pictures to post, but I am too busy to get to these things. It will have to suffice to tell you that we have arrived home saftely. All is well. We left at 2:00pm (EST) on Thursday and got home Sunday at 12noon. It was a LONG trip with a toddler. She started melting down about one day into the trip. We are exhausted!

I am trying to remember if I have ever been so glad to see my house as I was when we arrived Sunday afternoon. I don’t sleep much on planes, so I had a lot of sleeping to catch up on. But I am so exhausted and sleeping so heavily that it’s almost not restful..have you ever felt that way? Not to mention we have all been getting up at 3:30 – 4:30am every morning. Such is jet lag!
More stories coming soon….

Worship Session

Here is a picture of all of the Michael Grandkids dancing to a little worship music this week.


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Living on India Time

Three nights this week we have made plans to go out and visit the annual festival thingy here in Hyderabad. The plan was to be ready by sixish and we’ll go. So I dressed our little girl up, washed the thick layer of dirty pollution off of her, and was ready to go by sixish. Then seven came, then eight, by 8:30, Isabelle was out like a light. So much for that idea. By the end of the second night I was getting real tired of Indian time. But what can you do? When in Rome….

So I have devised some activities to distract myself and Isabelle while we are killing time waiting to leave/eat/sleep/whatever. The first line of defense is a walk around the neighborhood. I will start off by saying that the idea of walking to go nowhere is a complete foreign concept to most Indians and I have a difficult time getting anyone, including my husband to do this with me. The one exception to this is my daughter who will use any form of manipulation known to an 18 month old and go with virtually anyone to get out the front door of the house.

As we walk around, we stop and stare at stray dogs and stray water buffalo. We also stop and watch the neighborhood kids play cricket. I’ve even tried my hand at it…and it seems like all of those years of little league have paid off…I can bat like an old pro.

But what I’ve discovered is that whenever I step out of the door of the house, within five minutes, I have gathered a crowd. This morning there were about 20 little school girls gathered around us, taking kisses from Isabelle and saying in their little Indian English, “Nice baby, Auntie. Nice nice baby.” Isabelle took it for all of about ten seconds before going ballistic.

A few days ago I had a group of about 20 boys from the cricket field gathered around asking me questions in Telegu and English. We were having a nice conversation and I had a nearly insurmountable desire to start yelling, “Square off, square off, Pod up, Pod up.” And even started thinking of ways to bring in the net. (If this doesn’t make sense to you…it’s okay, you are certainly in the majority.) This was before my husband, who was playing cricket in the street with our nephews saw me and came running with a concerned look on his face. I told him no worries, I was used to drawing a crowd!

We fight not against flesh and blood

My first trip to India 10 years ago was filled with a series of really odd events that led me to believe that the enemy of our souls took a more direct route to destruction here in India than the subtle tactics used on us in the States. In fact, the spiritual oppression in India was so intense that first trip that I couldn't stop crying for the first three days I landed in this country.

Last night was another odd occasion. We had just gone to bed and Isabelle had been asleep for some time. All of the sudden, she started screaming, and kicking, and fighting, and punching us as hard as she could. This is so out of the ordinary...we had never even seen anything even remotely like this from her before.

After a few minutes of trying to comfort her to no avail, I started to undress her to see if there was anything "wrong" that I could see. Nothing. After about 10 minutes of our inconsolable child, Conrad's two brothers heard the odd commotion and came upstairs. We already felt like it was something beyond physical...but really a spiritual attack on our daughter and had begun praying. They joined us and we took her out on the veranda and continued praying until she finally (after about 45 minutes) fell asleep.

In my mind, I was still wondering if there was an ear infection or a belly ache. But there were no other symptoms and this morning she awoke fine and happy as a clam.

Being in India always reminds me, to spite our little suburban bubble that my life tends to be, that there really is a battle raging out there. It is for the hearts and lives of precious people, including our daughter. I guess you could say we got a little reality check yesterday.

Our First Family Party

Sunday evening we went to our first family party of the trip. Again, if you haven’t’ read of my recounting of family parties from our last trip to India, I’ll sum up. Family parties here mean big tents, 300 guests. So when said relative invited us Sunday morning at church for that evening, I eventually got around to asking what we were celebrating. The answer I got was, well, it’s kind of like a birthday party. Kinda like? What does that mean? Then I asked how are we related to said relative. The answer I got, “I don’t know.”

Later I asked my sister in law, Anthony Mary, what this celebration was for and she said the young girl officially began womanhood, so we have a party. Wonderful….a party to celebrate THAT. When we arrived, the mother (relationship to Conrad still unknown) kissed me and ushered me off to take pictures with said young girl. When I met her I said, “Congratulations!” Is that what one says on such occasions? I have no earthly idea.

Anyway we stood and took pictures with her for about twenty minutes. Everyone wanted pictures with the family Gori (foreigner) I guess. Isabelle had a wonderful time being a sheer terror and running from relative to relative and dancing. This kid loves to dance. Put on a Bollywood tune and watch her spin.

Sunday also marked Isabelle’s first Auto Rickshaw ride. Five of us in a little auto. Isabelle, not only free from her car seat, but free from things like seatbelts and doors…and in Indian traffic. This is certainly a conscientious parents worst nightmare. Lucky for us, we are not conscientious, but this mode of transport with a wiggling kid is still a challenge. I’m beginning to understand why Indian mothers take their children virtually no where.

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Indian Church

Sunday we went to church with our family here in India. We enjoyed this so much. We arrived 5 minutes before the service and unfortunately too late to sit in the main sanctuary, but were seated (separately) in one of two overflow’s with about 700 others.

If you’ve ever traveled to other countries, church there sometimes tends to be like visiting a church in the US about 15 years ago. They are singing songs we sang in the 80’s or early 90’s and you even will hear the pastor telling antidotal stories that your American Pastor used 15 years ago. All a little surreal. My favorite is (and all of my ORU friends will appreciate this one) “Hold up your Bible and say, I am what this Bible say’s that I am, and I can do what this Bible says I can do.” Sorry, I’m off on one of my tangents again.

But this church wasn’t quite like that. It was good Word, good worship (Chris Tomlin songs!)…and they even had children’s church! Although Isabelle was a bit young to enjoy this aspect, it was really good to know our Indian niece and nephews were benefiting from this.

After church we shuffled off to get coffee and snacks and fellowship. As we were standing in line, a lady and her daughter came up to Isabelle and I and started talking to us. She looked familiar but I couldn’t place her, then I realized that we had chatted with them in the airport in Dubai and flew to Hyderabad with them! Such a small world!