Mommy, can I help

Acacia and Anna love to help mommy in the kitchen. Especially when she is baking some treats. These pictures were taken in the first house that we stayed. The house with the infamous dog "Shadow". Mommy is still baking treats and the girls are still helping out. My job is to sample the treats and make sure they are not poisonous or anything, so far so good.

Bangkok, the city of Angels

After our island excursion we headed to Bangkok to handle our visa's. We were unable to secure them then, but that will be another story. We tried traditional Thai massage with the whole family. How relaxing is that? Anna about half way through it thought it would be fun to climb all over the rest of us. The Thai masseuses were enjoying the Anna circus show. We also rode the sky train to the weekend market and walked around and bought a few things. Note to self: Never walk around a extremely crowded market in a 1000% humidity with a 4 and 6 year old who seem unable to hear my voice. We also made a trip to see an owner of a guesthouse that we've stayed at every time that we visited Bangkok in the past 16 years. We first met Pat the owner of KC guesthouse in 1992. We sent her pictures of us with Acacia as baby and she showed us the pictures up on her bulletin board, which I showed Acacia. It was pretty cool. The place has changed quite a bit but Pat remains the same. They greeted us like we had been gone only a couple of weeks. You gotta love Thailand.

And as you can (not) see, Annapurna's cheek is healing nicely and the dog bite scar is hardly noticable.

Mosquito coast

Poor,poor Acacia. She has her mothers blood and mosquitos love it. She always has this tendency to sleep in just undies or in the buff. Well, one night she crawled into our bed while we were downstairs and the mosquito net was not up yet,so she was open to the elements.I put her back in her bed and made sure the mosquito net was completely covering her bed. I guess there were some rogue mosquitos hiding in the shadows of the net. Anyway we counted 89 new bites. Yikes!

Rush hour 3

Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

Chiang Mai rush hour continued

A few more pictures of our elephant excursion.

Chiang Mai rush hour

On our first couple weeks here we went to Mae Rim to ride elephants and to take in the sights of Northern Thailand. The elephants are amazing and are incredibly smart. One of the elephants painted a pretty detailed painting. Our elephant rides were about an hour. Acacia and Daddy on one and Mommy and Anna on a different one. Lots of colorful things to buy and colorful people too.Just the other day coming home from our friends house we saw a elephant on the side of the street. Something you don't see everyday.

Island getaway

During Acacia's school break we got to get away to an Island on the Andaman coast in southern Thailand. The Island is Koh Lanta. To get there from the mainland you have to cross from the mainland to an Island via vehicle ferry to the another vehicle ferry to Koh Lanta. We had a good time, although this is the rainy season and it was. The kids absolutely loved it though. We had a river inlet right in front of our resort that we had to cross to get to the beach proper. During high tide this river became quite strong, but the kids (fearless and danger) insisted on crossing. One time on our way back from the beach Anna was determined to cross the river channel despite her Dad trying to help her. She was having none of that. By God she was going to do it on her own whether she drowned or not. Don't worry I wouldn't let her drown. Poor Anna got lots of insect bites on her stomach and upper legs. Sand fleas or something. I'll put a picture of that one on a different entry. She is much better now. We needed this break after such a rocky start here.