Anna and I are taking care of our 3 pastors kids for 3 days.
Day 1: I'm going to bed...
Day 2: I slept about 4 hours, may be 4 and a half. Hudson, the middle-child and only boy, came into our room last night around 4:30 and said, "When I wake up in the middle of the night, sometimes I sleep with my parents. Can I sleep with you guys?" And of course I responded, "Yes".How cute is that, I don't know how much longer I can hold out from having kids. (My suggestion to the parents: buy a larger bed.)
Day 3: (You can tell I was too tired to even write anything before I went to bed last night.) Anna had to leave for work and 7:30 and I had to get the kids on the bus by 8:00. We had a few delays, but caught the bus no problem. Let me tell you a story from this morning. One of the kids decided that Britney (their beast of a dog) should be allowed out of her room (Now I know what you're thinking, keeping a dog in a room!! But you haven't met this dog yet). The dogs doing crazying, running around the house, until it's time to brush teeth and we find that Britney has peed in one bathroom and crapped in the other. God bless that dog. (My suggestion to parents: think 3 or 4 times before getting a pet. Or you might find yourself pray to God that He would allow your pet to die so that you can teach your children about death).
Day 3 Evening: This will be the last episode of A Day in the Life of the Hilliards. Brett and Shannon's flight was cancelled and so we had one more day with them. They were going to call us again to tell their kids, but the phones in Bali are crap and so I told them rigth before they went to sleep In some ways I think that might have been better. Abby was already missing them, so it was good that she could go straight to bed. The other 2 did ok with it.
The cleaning lady came, with her daughter, and it was so good to see the fruits of her labour. Ok, here's the deal. Us people in HK (and other parts of asia) live with different norms to the rest of the world. Domestic helpers are cheap! If you gave up your starbucks coffe, you could afford to have a helper for an hour. This is a very intesesting situation. Not into exploiting people or their poverty, and so usually I would be against this kind of think, but I'm not. I loved our helpers growing up. My family never had a live-in help, only one that would come once or twice a week. They are like your aunts (especially if your blood relatives live half-way around the world). So getting back on topic, I don't see how a parent can have a clean house without a helper (I cannot believe I just wrote that). It's true. Cleaning your house is the last thing you want to do once you send your kids off to school.. So this entire week I was looking forward to Asan (the Hilliards once-a-week helper) coming. It was amazing; the kids were in bed and the house was clean...pure bliss! (Tip for all parents or parents to be: you will need extra help and this will include: the Trinity, your partner (if you have one), family (doesn't have to be blood), friends, and domestic helper (choose one that speaks a language you don't, so that they can teach your kids).
Day 4: We got the kids off to school and made arrangements for them to be pickup up, but the Hilliards has as well and it was all very confusing, but sorted itself out. And so that was it. I went over in the afternoon to pickup our things and said goodbye and completed Parenting 101. (Warning: parenting causes sleep deprevation. Remedy? I think we learn about that in Parenting 102.)
I hope you have enjoyed this poor grammer, sentence structure, and spelling hodge-podge which I live to call....
writing by daniel mayhugh
