Our Goofy Kids

Here's Ellie's typical bed time attire: pajamas, socks, slippers knit by Aunt Jess, Hmong hat that Aunt Liz brought back from Laos, and gloves. Plus, of course, she has to sleep with a quilt (currently Daddy's old baby quilt), many sleepytime friends, burp rags, and water. No wonder bed time takes so long!



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The other night at bedtime I gave Ellie a kiss on the cheek and she pointed to her other cheek and said "I'm going to sleep on this cheek so your kiss doesn't dry up and go away."

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Here's Ben deciding that I really need to be the one to wear the Hmong hat.


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Ben is now talking up a storm, but in this adorable, laborious, two year old way. We love when he mimics what we say and has these adult things coming out of his toddler voice. One of his favorite phrases now is "Sounds like...a good plaaaan." He also likes "I don't fink so" and he refers to one of his favorite books, Mr. McGillicuddy's Clocks, as "Mr. Gillies Cullie's Pots".

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Apparently, it's not enough to have both water and milk at dinner. Sometimes you also have to have water and milk simultaneously.


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One night Ellie and I were fooling around, sucking our stomachs in to have a "skinny tummy" and pushing them out to have a "Buddha belly". Ben joined in the fun, but after a few minutes he said, "I have a Buddha penis!" I don't have any idea what he meant, but it was really funny.

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Here's Ben and Daddy horsing around. Notice that not only is Ben wearing a lovely purple floral hat, his teddy bear is inside one of Aunt Jess's slippers and is wearing another one as a hat!


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Ellie has long maintained that she is afraid of Buddhas, which was confusing because once you got her in to a temple, she didn't seem afraid. Things were cleared up the other night when she started talking about "scary lion Buddhas" and we realized that she has been so exposed to temples in SE Asia that she thinks that Buddhas and statues are the same thing.

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One relaxed weekend, Ellie decided that she wanted her hair in a ponytail but that we had to match, so I put mine up, too. Then she and Ben decided we all needed necklaces made from their cardboard lacing cards.


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Ellie tells us that when she grows up, she is going to marry Ben so they can play together all the time. They will live in the house we live in now, and she'll work at the embassy in the same office as mommy.

Saving Cambodia's Freshwater Dolphins

In early January, I got to spend some time doing one of the really fun parts of my job: environmental fieldwork. I spent three days in Kratie, a town 5 hours north of Phnom Penh on the Mekong, learning about this elusive little guy, the Irrawaddy dolphin:



The Irrawaddy dolphin is critically endangered and the largest population, thought to be just 80-100 dolphins, exists in the upper reaches of the Mekong in Cambodia.


Folks like these fishermen using an illegal gill net are thought to be largely responsible for the decline of the dolphin. The gill nets are huge and stretch across large stretches of the river, catching everything around. And because they are only checked once or twice a day, dolphins easily get tangled in them and drown.

Kratie was a fun place to be for a few days, with beautiful sunsets over the Mekong...


some neat, if decaying, French colonial architecture...


and a bustling local market.


I had a great time chatting with villagers who live on an island, Koh Pdao, in the middle of the Mekong:





On the way home, there was a stark contrast between beautiful, pristine countryside...


and the rampant illegal logging in the region.

Finally...Angkor Wat Photos

Ahhh...the relaxation that comes with a human workload. As I got on the plane Tuesday afternoon after the TIFA (that's Trade and Investment Framework Agreement) Joint Council meeting in Siem Reap, I looked forward to work not punctuated by high-level visitors, trips, speeches to write for the Ambassador, trips, responding to ludicrous statements by the PM, counseling unions during negotiations, and...oh...did I mention trips? After about 8 months of craziness, things have finally slowed down. I don't know how long this will last, but I am reveling in being able to catch up on long-term projects and second priority sorts of things. And I hope to make it home at a more reasonable time and actually have my weekends for kids, fun and stuff around the house.

Speaking of stuff around the house, one of my projects is to get caught up with photos on the blog. So, without further ado, here are photos from our trip to Siem Reap in December. My parents, Liz, and David were all there, but Liz and David did most of their exploring separately so they're not in the photos.

One of the famous faces of the Bayon, believed to be a combination of the face of the Buddha and the ruling Khmer king. This face is probably 40 feet long.

Hanging out with the kids in the courtyard surrounding the inner temple at Angkor Wat

Ben and Ellie loved climbing around the temples...


...and Ben loved playing in the sand. You can see the entrance to one of the temples behind him.


All the Cambodian and other Asian tourists thought our kids were adorable and gave them a lot--sometimes too much--attention...


though we thought the Khmer kids hanging around the temples were pretty adorable too.

All of the temples at Angkor are amazing because not only are they huge and numerous, they also have so many amazingly detailed carvings, like this one of Apsara dancers.


This gives you some sense of the size of these temples. This one (Angkor Thom, I think) just went on and on. Note the tree growing right through the ruins.

Unlike many ruins in other parts of the world, the temples at Angkor Wat are still in use. Here is a Buddhist nun with incense waiting to pray at one of the temples.

Here's the family at Banteay Srey (Citadel of Women), a more remote temple known for its intricate pink carvings.

A darn fine day

We've got Spande grandparents here right now, and will post pictures soon, but today was a darn fine day, so I wanted to share our news with you.

First of all, I (Nathan) had my most recent DarkReading article linked by Slashdot. It resulted in many more people seeing my writing (12,500 hits since Friday is the last number I've been given, which isn't too shabby for me!) So that was good, even though the Slashdot crowd can sometimes be a bit brutal in their criticism. Nothing I can't handle, though, I've got kids :)

Much more significantly Jen got back from the TIFA meeting in Siem Reap today. This was something like a trade talk, basically the USTR and Cambodian government sitting down to talk about trade issues. She made labor a big part of it, and worked really, really hard to do this well, and they are talking about now making it "the new model for labor diplomacy". That award she got certainly didn't make her slow down at all, huh?

Speaking of awards, she also got the news today that she won the First Decade Award from Gustavus, recognizing her amazing achievements in the 10 years since we graduated. The award will be presented on Oct. 13, which is when we were thinking of being home anyway, so the timing works quite nicely!

So, there was our day. Darn fine all around. Oh, and the kids were lovely for the most part, making it all the better.