Big Screen TV and Beads

We were on the phone with my parents-in-law and I or DH made a passing reference to watching movies on a big screen tv when at our friends’ place in New York. Amie had been eating her O’s peacefully (more or less), but when she heard that, she piped up: “We’re gonna need a big …

Aaaargh Children’s Music!

Amie’s auntie, my sister-in-law, whom Amie calls Toot-Toot-Pishi (“Pishi” is the Bengali word for aunt-on-the-paternal-side), so very generously gave us a wonderful cd of English nursery rhymes as sung by Preeti Sagar, an Indian singer (see insert on cd cover above). Well! Thanks a bunch! The problem is not that Preeti, who is otherwise sweet-voiced, pronounces “heatlhy, wealthy” …

Settling Back In with Blogland News

Cooking really helped me settle back in domestically. I made a hearty potato-leek soup and a Flemish soup/stew called “Gentse Waterzooi”, which means “watery mess from Ghent”. Both are essentially winter and comfort foods (served hot, with heavy cream and lots of potatoes), so that also took care of our climatic shock (Singapore 85 F, …

Home Again and heavily Jetlagged

We returned on Friday evening from Singapore (that’s a non-stop 18-hour flight to Newark, a 3-hour layover, a 36-minute flight to Boston and a 30-minute cabride to Brookline… it tires me out all over again, writing this!). Singapore, by the way, is 13 hours ahead of Boston. The last two nights Amie has been waking …