snapshot

 

Do you ever look around and realize that you’re babysitting a 3-month old and his 7-year-old sister in Malaysia, while his parents fly to Jakarta for two days so that their dad can perform popular Islamic music for 7,000 Indonesian boy scouts.  Wednesday and Thursday were like that for us.

Currently we’re wwoofing in a suburb of Kualu Lampur.  The place isn’t much of a farm and our duties are rarely related to plants and animals, but we’re learning a lot, the internet is fast and we’re having a pretty good time.  The reality is that when it’s this hot and there are poisonous things like cobras, I don’t really mind staying inside, working on a website and babysitting.

How did the babysitting go?  Well, the girl moves pretty fast, as you can see, but we managed to keep up.  The baby is exceedingly well behaved, as far as I can tell.

The exciting moments were:

• Having the fish pond on the patio almost overflow in a torrential downpour.  Jack thought fast and we siphoned it off with three hoses.  I’m not sure how much it would have flooded but being proactive made me feel better.
• Helping the girl with her homework, which included identifying diphthongs (long vowels which change the place of articulation, like in “hey” and “now”) in Malay sentences, and 2nd grade math with the directions in Mandarin.  Oh the novelty!