Thai Mothers' Day

Today is the queen's birthday, which doubles as Mothers' Day.  As you can probably figure out, Fathers' Day is the king's birthday.  I assume that monarchs always have to get married, so you always have a birthday for each gender, but it might get a little sad if the non-ruling one dies before the ruling one.  Do you still celebrate their birthday?

For now though, it's a happy national holiday, and since it falls on a Tuesday, and the military government is conducting a happiness campaign, they closed the government on Monday, so that people could have a four day weekend.  The embassy is also closed.  One of the perks of working overseas is you get American and local holidays.

Vivian and I have been going to ISB every other day to explore and check out books from the library, but Jeff hadn't been there yet, so we took advantage of the long weekend and took him with us on Monday.  He thought it was great.

As we were walking around the school and talking about how awesome it was, Vivian turned and asked us, "Why did you wait so long to move here? Why didn't we come here sooner?"  Excellent question Viv ;-)  I think she's going to be okay.

I also took advantage of Jeff being home on Monday to leave the kids with him and go shopping with Young.  We gave her Tuesday off, but she said she would prefer to work on Monday, and then take some time off when we go on vacation.  She doesn't have any children, and her mom lives about eight hours away, so she didn't want to go home for the four days.  We're always happy to have her around to take care of us, so that was fine with us.

Since I was baby free at the veggie stand, I could take some pictures of what it looks like.

Most things are laid out on tables.

Pumpkin is sold by the slice.

You get a plastic basket, and then put your selections in it.

The backups are under the tables, so if you're a savvy shopper like Young, and you don't like the looks of what's on the tables, you go for the bags underneath.

They also sell dried fish and have raw meat sitting out on plates.

I didn't take a picture of the meat, and I didn't buy any fish, but I know that Young eats them.

Our basket was full, and then we had a couple extra bags on top of that and the whole thing came to about $15.  When we went to Big C for our major meat and dairy shopping, we got all the way up to $40.  That means our weekly shopping for meals is coming in at a little over $55 dollars a week.  I love living in Thailand :-)

Also, since I haven't put up a picture of super baby lately, here she is living the good life in Mommy's chair.

Happy Thai Mothers' Day to all the mommies out there!