Home Improvement

Here's a picture of our driver Maraj (left) and guard Rambir (right, holding Isaac). That thing on the ground is the closet organizer the carpenter was building in the front yard for us. The most amazing thing was that the carpenter was dressed up in a button-down shirt with nice slacks and shiny leather shoes and he still looked that way when he left!

This is Babu, our landlord's property manager. We only wish we had such a good property manager for our house! Babu came over on Saturday and supervised the painter painting the gate, the plumber/electrician replacing two of the water heaters, and the carpenter building shelves and a clothes rack in the prayer closet. My favorite home improvement was the gadgets they installed on the doors to make them automatically shut when people come in to keep the mosquitos out (which I was even more grateful for when I found out yesterday that our driver Maraj's 6-year-old daughter has malaria)! Babu thinks I'm a crazy woman with my constant requests, and he just laughs whenever I ask for yet another thing.

This is Isaac standing among some of the beautiful flowers in our garden. Our mali (gardener) doesn't speak any English, but I asked him one day through Sarita if we could plant some vegetables. The very next day he showed up with tomato transplants from someone else's garden! And yesterday I handed him some herb seed packets and he cheerfully planted them--even the cantaloupe, which he thought was papaya and he kept saying would take 10 months to grow.

This is the painter painting our newest baby gate. He changes into his painting clothes in our front yard and squats wherever he's painting. He's very Zen.

This is Isaac taking Graham for a walk on a rug we got on loan. Graham is getting so mobile (though not walking yet!). I think if he had more floor time he'd be scooting around, but no such luck with so many people to carry him around!

Here's the loaner rug again with Farookh in the background. Farookh came recommended to me be a friend I met from Nepal, and when I called him up he brought over 10 similar rugs and laid them out in the living room so we could see how they looked! The service here is incredible. The rugs are very expensive though, so I'm on a quest for something less fancy and more inexpensive. I was also turned off to this rug when it stained Graham's hands and face when he started drooling on it!

On Saturday we asked Sarita and Sudhir to make us chapatis (kind of like wheat tortillas) and daal (lentils with curry-type spices). Yummy!

While we were eating Isaac opened the back door and looked outside. "Look, Mommy!" he said, "The guard is eating the same things we are!" Sure enough, his wife had sent him with the same delectable treat. Only he was warming his chapatis on the heater in the garage!

Russell liked the chapatis a whole bunch, but he kept insisting, "No, NOT chapatis, tortillas!"