Big Ben
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Today was a much better day. It's Saturday so there were no meetings or doctor's appointments, and no school. We went out grocery shopping, came home and got dressed, took a bath, cleaned up our room, and got ready for a day of sightseeing out on the town. We went and saw Big Ben, the London Eye, and Buckingham Palace.
We're staying in Chelsea, which is like the hip Soho (NYC) part of London. We can walk to the subway, and there's a big double-decker bus stop right in front of our apartment, so it's pretty easy to get around.
Juntara's favorite thing about our apartment is the bathtub, which she refers to as our "tato pokari" or "hot lake." We usually spend about an hour in there every day chatting and singing away. It's amazing to me how self-sufficient she has become. Most people she meets can't even believe she's blind. We had an assessment with someone from the blind association on Thursday, who said that she had unbelievable and extremely rare social skills for a child with as limited vision as she has. She's bright and seems to be picking up on everything she learns really quick. We've been spending a lot of our time cooking. Juntara will literally go into the cabinet, take out the potatoes, tomatoes, onion and garlic- chop them all up on the cutting board, fill the pot with water and add the rice, set the table, and do the dishes. We are a great team in the kitchen. She's memorized where everything is and navigates her way throughout the apartment, downstairs, and to the toilet. There is a French bakery and deli downstairs and Nicolas, the owner brings us pastries and little treats daily. Bless!
I was pretty down in the dumps yesterday. Every time I looked at Juntara I would feel tears come to my eyes. I kept thinking about how unfair all of this is for her, how much I hate this disease, how frustrated I am with her father, how this was all supposed to come to a happy ending. We thought we could get rid of this tumor in one swipe, we thought her life would be normal, and everything would be perfect. But it's not. Things are far from perfect and things will be far from easy. Then I look at her and she's smiling and laughing and content and I start to cry even more. And it doesn't make sense that I'm crying, but I am.
Then Juntara looks at me straight in the eye and touches my face and dries my tears and says "yah but Maggie, what can we do?"
She’s wise and calm. She knows this is far out of our control. It's not in our hands, so we just have to live and make do, and laugh and sing, and laugh some more, and be patient and love. And when all is said and done, we’ll remember our days here and how we got to ride on a huge red double-decker bus, and go to Buckingham Palace, and get our picture taken in front of Big Ben. We’ll tell everyone in Nepal what a bathtub is and how wonderful hot baths are. We know that there are more adventures to come and we’ll see where our life takes us next.