Family

My Dad is Thai. I'm sure most of you know that. That makes me a Lou Krung Thai Amerigaa (that means half Thai/ Amerian). I'm writing all my Thai words is "karaoke" BTW. That's how Thais refer to words spelled as they sound into English. Anyway, my dad is here but only 'til the beginning of next week so we had a limited amount of time to hang out and let Adelaide meet all her aunts and uncles. Rocky took off work yesterday to come with me and introduce our sweet girl to her Thai family.

Well, that sounds easy enough but looking back on our day yesterday not too much was easy about it. (Adelaide is almost good as new by the way and that's without any medicine. She must have just gotten a horrible virus that just needed to run its course. She had a slight rash on her back which hinted at that.) My dad lives about 45 minutes away from where we are and that's without traffic so we had a little bit of a hard time finding a taxi that was willing to drive us. We finally found one though and were on our way. We were making decent time and were about 5 minutes away from the mall we were meeting my dad when Adelaide began to ouawk (the thai word and a onimonapea for vomit). Yes, my kid has a vomiting problem. She does it somewhat frequently for no apparent reason. It doesn't seem to bother her but it gets old real fast.

Of course I have an extra outfit for Adelaide packed with us, but I have no extra clothes for Rocky who seems to always "catch" Adelaide's vomit. So I awkwardly change Adelaide in the taxi and Rocky wipes off best he can. We get out of the taxi and Rocky just goes to sit down outside. He is covered with puke-- shirt, shorts, even underwear. I set off inside to meet my dad and to find Rocky something to wear. Anything to wear really. It's not always easy to find "falang" (thai word for foreigner) sizes.

Luckily my dad had seen a sale in the mall earlier so we just went there and they happened to have stuff to fit. Awesome. Luckily my dad has his own car here now so we didn't have to torture another taxi driver or bus load of people with the stench that was growing from Rocky's clothes.

Back at my dad's house Rocky changed, showered, and we laundered the clothes. OK, so things are looking good again. We headed to one of my uncle's houses and we had a great time there as well. Adelaide was on her best behavior, and she even gave a high five, a wai (the thai goodbye), a wave, and blew a kiss goodbye to him. Afterwards she took a decent nap at my dad's house without putting up a bit of a fight.

Things didn't stay that smooth however. Adelaide was grumpy when she woke up and wasn't too nice to her aunt and other uncle. She was whiny and stomping her feet. The whininess continued on to dinner. It was not the impression I wanted to leave my dad's family with. What can you do though?

Well, the food at dinner was good, nice and spicy. I can handle my fair share of spiciness but when I bit into some veggies I knew something wasn't quite right. The spice was so overwhelming I couldn't think about anything else. I ate rice. I drank water, but nothing seemed to help. Adelaide was going crazy, but I couldn't deal with her. That's when I looked down and noticed I had eaten a rat sh*t pepper (that's what it's called here). The veggie dish was filled with them. It was in no way enjoyable. It was pain.

After dinner and bringing my aunt home, it was already 8:10pm and Adelaide was delirious. I don't think any car ride would have been more frustrating (luckily vomit didn't make another appearance). My dad didn't know how to get us home and no taxi would take us that far that late at night. So we decided to stay the night with my dad. We didn't have anything-- PJs, toothbrushes, saline, etc, but it was fine once we made the decision. He and his girlfriend graciously gave us their room and we had a good night's sleep.

Above is a picture of my dad and his 3 siblings.