Moms visit

The hecklers are heckling and the audience is growing restless. It has been a long time since my last post. My attentions have been focused on work and my mom and so I do apologize my friends. I will try to get us back to our regularly scheduled program.

My mom's visit was very successful. Well, it was mostly successful. She spent the first week sick with high fever and exhaustion and hardly able to play with her grandsons. She was incredibly frustrated and so was C (I ended up having to work quite a bit). So her visit didn't really seem to start until her 2nd of 4 weeks.

Her 2nd week she and I spent 5 glorious days alone in Bali without husband or children. That's right, 5 days without attachments in lush beautiful Bali, playing with my mom. We first headed to Ubud, which is regarded as the art and culture center of Bali. It is in central Bali, surrounded by lush vegetation, rice paddies, and mountains and volcanoes. The town itself is pretty funky. It felt to me like a Telluride, Colorado on the beach in a different country: some fun and hippie shops and some snooty and swanky shops; paintings and pottery and wood carvings spilling out from all nooks and crannies; women wearing long flowing skirts and halter tops; and the sound of Balinese or Bahasa Indonesia on the streets. It's kind of a strange place.

We stayed at this charming little place called Alam Jiwa. The properties (there are 3 little hotels) are set in lush gardens bordering rice paddies. Our room had a Balinese bed on the veranda where we huddled for a couple hours the first night under the mosquito net during a thunder storm. We had a great time talking the night away. The staff is excellent and friendly and they serve a fantastic breakfast. My mother fell in love with their papaya juice and pancakes, and I loved their pineapple juice - best I've ever had. We were quite busy in Ubud. We spent quite a bit of time shopping, and somehow it still wasn't enough - not even for my mom who usually hates shopping. We also spent a half day learning how to batik. It was actually pretty difficult and time consuming, but it was fun. We also spent a day visiting a few of the area craft villages and having lunch overlooking a volcano.

Our next stop was the Tandjung Sari on Sanur. The hotel was a bit disappointing - not nearly as charming or interesting as the less expensive Alam Jiwa. This was to be our relaxation time at the beach, sleeping, and nice dinners. We had some of that, but I could have used more of it! We went out in a boat to go snorkeling, which is when I learned my mom doesn't really swim! You'd think a 35 year old woman would know that about her mother... So I went snorkeling and mom put her face in the water for a few minutes. The snorkeling was just ok. We went over to Seminyak to watch the sunset at La Luciola restaurant, one of my favorites on Bali. Dinner was delicious and the sunset too cloudy. We took a walk on the beach and chased crabs into the water.

The rest of my mother's visit was a medley of spa visits (my mother is addicted to the facials), local sightseeing, and playtime with the grandsons. C had an especially great time with nana. They were playing together constantly and nana was the queen of story invention. She told C all kinds of wonderful stories about dinosaurs and volcanoes (C's current obsession) and little boys and bajajs. LC became more and more comfortable with her as the time went by. Unfortunately he didn't become an efficient crawler while she was here, but he did manage to show her that he could scoot around on his belly.

And then she was gone, back to the hard cold Wisconsin winter. C went back to his boring routine and I went back to work. We all had a wonderful time and we're so happy she came for a visit!

Not much to tell you since then. I've been working too much and trying to balance it all (story of everyone's life, I know). But we have another vacation in sight. Thursday and Friday are holidays so most people take advantage of the 4 day weekend. To celebrate we're getting out of Jakarta to Lombok, an island east of Bali. I've heard great things about it and we're looking forward to some quiet and relaxation. Then I'm headed directly to Bangkok for work for a week. I've wanted to go to Thailand since I was in high school so I'm pretty excited about it. So, we're keeping busy! I'll write again in a couple weeks.