Our Seedlings

My very annoying mantra since we’ve arrived has been “I have too much to do.” I hate that I’ve been saying that to my husband on a nightly basis when he asks me to just sit down, stop moving for a few minutes and watch some television with him, but it’s true.

It’s not just the moving-across-the-world thing or the putting-away-all-of-our-earthly-possessions-in-under-48-hours thing.  It’s also the I-have-a-whirling-tornado-of-a-toddler-who-can-disable-padlocks-and-rearrange-the-dining-room-furniture-faster-than-I-can-wash-the-dishes phenomenon that everyone warned me about but that I couldn’t actually grasp the gravity of until it happened to us.

He’s not even 14 months old yet and he’s got me running faster than my high school cross country coach who was famous for such sayings as “if you are going to puke, puke on the grass” and “it’s ok to run so hard that you pee your pants.”

Now that I think about it, both of those sayings are now actually incredibly applicable to my daily life again.

In any case, what I meant to say is that the hours between 5 and 7am and 9-11pm have become more precious than gold to me right now, but slowly I’m crossing off the list of things I have to do and looking forward to getting to do more of what I actually want to be doing with our time here in India.

The walls are painted, there are no more boxes left to unpack. We finally have a part-time housekeeper to help me fight the never-ending war against dirt and bugs here. We even have the beginning of a vegetable garden growing under our car park.

Every afternoon now, Will and I go outside to wave at all of the kids on their way home from school and to marvel at their bicycles and scooters. (Will has a real thing for wheels lately–and waving).

We also take a few minutes to check out our seedlings in their planters and see what is coming up.  Neighbors pass by and ask what we are growing.  We exchange “hello’s” with parents carrying backpacks and chasing scooters.  I show Will the new green buds in the planters and he looks briefly in wonder before he begins whining campaigning for me to let him play with the padlock on our storage shed and throw things.

Something about those tiny green shoots is so reassuring to me. All they need is a little bit of time to grow where they are planted and looking at them reminds me that the same might be true for us as well.

Monday marked the end of our first month in Delhi. I hope the next 23 months do not pass nearly as quickly or in remotely the same way as the first. That was a hell of a lot of laundry. A lot of walking through “the club” feeling like the new kid at school. Way too much running around like a chicken with no head and a crazy-long to-do list.

Our little seedlings though remind me that tomorrow is always another day.  Every day we get a little better at our lives here–figuring out what works for us, what doesn’t, what we need to do differently than we did in the places we’ve lived before.

Our artwork is hung on the wall now, I’m boycotting our washing machine until we all run out of clean underwear.  We need some time now to focus on the really important things–like inviting people over to brunch and running around town seeing the sights and taking pictures.  Looking for work and maybe actually keeping up with this here ol’ blog again.

And maybe, just maybe, sitting on the couch for a few minutes to do nothing but relax for a few minutes with the husband and maybe watch a little bit of “A Minute to Win It,” a strangely captivating Indian game show which I should really get back to now.

So how are you all doing?  What’s new?