Ordinary

I’ve just realized that most of my friend’s blogs are really good at keeping me up to date with their day to day lives. I read them and know how their baby is adjusting to the addition of solid foods into their diet; how they feel about their new workout routine; what they thought about The Hunger Games movie; how a new Pintrest recipe turned out. Of course from time to time there are thoughts on bigger life changes like a family illness or new jobs. But generally there is just lots of news about the fairly ordinary.  

And I love it.

In a world where I often feel a million miles away from their day to day lives, I like knowing the mundane.

I’ve realized that I, on the other hand, am often bad about the day to day. I think this is for several reasons. For one, my day to day tends to look pretty different from one week to the next so sometimes its hard to know what to explain and describe. For two, the bigger stuff can sometimes, in some weird way, be almost safer, can’t it? I don’t mind that there are complete strangers out there who are reading about my spiritual journey with adoption, but it’s odd that some of my own loved ones probably don’t even know what country I am in right now, much less what I ate for breakfast. I’m not completely sure why this is. We all have our own kinds of guardedness, I guess.

So for what it’s worth, I’m in Kenya right now. I was in Uganda last month and Tanzania a couple weeks before that. I will be in North Africa next month. But for now I‘m in Kenya. Oh, and I had pancakes for breakfast.

I broke down and read the Hunger Games trilogy a couple weeks back. If you ask me about it in public I will maintain my literary snobbery and tell you how over-inflated all the hype is. But if you catch me in the right mood in private, we just might have a long talk about war and peace and the nature of true love. Maybe.

I have started driving in Nairobi. This probably seems like a long-overdue accomplishment, but with a perfectly functional public transport system in a writhing mass of humanity in a city of 4 million with about three working traffic lights (observed only certain hours of the day) all overseen by corrupt policemen, I have been perfectly happy just taking the bus or letting Bryan navigate the chaos. But with a feisty one-year old a belly that only fits down matatu-aisles with increasing difficulty I finally bit the bullet and got behind the wheel. And guess what? SO fun. I love it.

I haven’t been working out. Period.

The hormones that relegate memories of sleep-deprivation and comatose exhaustion to the darkest recesses of your mind have kicked in full-swing making me deliriously excited about meeting my MaryKat in just a few more months. My back is starting to hurt and I can’t breathe and bathe Annabelle at the same time anymore, but every time she moves I feel such a surge of joy.

Annabelle…oh, mercy where do I start. Annabelle is all little girl these days, complete with pigtails and fits to put on Mama’s perfume. She has two or three Hello Kitty band-aids at any given time, most of which are from actual injuries. She likes to talk to my tummy, which tickles, and frequently says, “Oh my ness!” when something surprises her.

I don’t have a Pintrest account. Should I? Can’t decide.

I’m happy to have Bryan with me again. He’s taken two trips up North in the past month or so leaving us apart much more than we prefer; the time we have been together has been full of branch meetings, team-building retreats and lots of reporting and paperwork and logistics to prepare for our transition back North. So on Monday we are taking our first family getaway as a family of three to a cottage on a Lake Naivasha. I. Can’t. Wait.

In Nairobi, the land of every fresh fruit and vegetable you can imagine on every street corner for dirt-cheap, we have been eating lots of delicious salads and stir-fries. And ice-cream.

So there is a glimpse of my mundane these days. It’s a good day to day. A happy ordinary. One that is soon to change to something entirely different. But in some ways, knowing everything is just for a season makes the present even sweeter.