Greetings. I won't give you an excuse about how busy I was because let's face it, we're all busy. The weather's taken a turn for the worse in Chicago. The nights dip down into the 40's (about 9 C). We've been having spurts of crazy rain and the other night we had a tornado warning close by. We were all in the car on the way to dinner and the kids looked pretty terrified. Of course it was nothing that a little tandoori chicken and saag paneer didn't solve.

My bosses must have sensed my frustration at work because they gave me a promotion yesterday. I have 3 more months on my old projects which includes traveling to meet individually with my team. At the very least I'll hit Utah (shout out to all my mormon readers!), Toronto and Quebec.

The (American) football season has started. The Chicago Bears are undefeated so far which makes D very happy. He's only made bread once this season because we've just had so much to do on the weekends. This year for game day we try and make something that is associated with the team we play. The first game was against the Green Bay Packers (Wisconsin). We made slow-cooked bratwurst with cheese and summer sausage.




D baked homemade rolls and a loaf of french bread for the week.

This weekend is one of my best friend's wedding. I'm on a mission to find shoes that are fancy and stylish yet comfortable for salsa dancing.


Ley and Steve got a lot of nice things for their new house.

Ley has her Masters in Psychology and uses her training in their relationship. There's a lot of talk about feelings and emotions in every conversation. I told D last week that I feel sad when he leaves his dirty socks on the floor because I take it as a sign of disrespect. He silently went over and picked up his socks but gave me a look like I had just escaped from a Psych Ward.

Finally, I leave you with pictures of the Girl's first haircut. Despite being a little over 2 years old, the Girl's hair has shown minimal signs of taming. What it lacks in length it makes up for in equal parts curl and frizz.

Before


We went to the same place that we took the Boy for his first cut. They have little cars that you can sit in and watch your favorite program.



After
She had little sparkly barrettes on the sides and the woman sprinked glitter in her hair ("Momma! I'm a glidder pwrincess"). The gitter must have had specks of glue on it because I still can't get it out.

Hope everyone is doing well.

I just returned from Vegas Friday night and I'm off to Boston tonight. I get to work from home but have travelled 10,000 miles in the past month.

I'm securely lodged between a rock and a hard place.

Despite all this my husband has been a superstar and the kids have been amazing.

Does this count as a post??

I'm home. It's 2am and I can't sleep. I've been a little conflicted about my job lately. I've been overwhelmed for a while. It's not the travel at all. People have been dropping likes flies and the company has done very little to help prevent the rest of us from leaving. I'm overwhelmed with my projects and lately I'm barely keeping my head above water. I have to remind myself that things could always be worse. But of course, things could always be better.

Brazil was great. It's a wonderful country with friendly people. Unfortunately on my flight back I was surrounded by high school exchange students who had no concept of volume control. I read this great article in Vanity Fair about scars. The most interesting physical scar that I have is the one on my left palm. My mom worked double shifts for many years of my childhood. My older sister would "watch" me from the time we got home from school until my dad came home. Now by "watch" I mean she would watch TV and I would try not to get in her way. One day when I was about 10 years old I was cutting a bagel to pop into the toaster. My parent's house had a TV in the kitchen and I was watching that episode of Happy Days where Fonzi rides his motorcycle over barrels in the parking lot of Al's diner. In hindsight the episode was pretty lame, but for a 10 year old this was a pretty episode. Anyway, my eyes were on the TV when they should have been watching the big cleaver in my hand. (No immigrant Indian family is complete unless there are a couple of machete-type knives that can cut through a chicken leg or coconut shell in one chop). I felt a burn and when I looked down my sesame bagel was drenched in bright red. I sliced into flesh and was mere millimeters away from a tendon. I'm so lucky I didn't lose the use of my hand.

Wow..I digress. OK. I'm sleepy now. I leave you with pictures of our Onam celebration. Onam is a harvest festival. D commented that it's sorta like American Thanksgiving Day without the connotation of genocide. My cousins came back from India today so we celebrated with a big dinner at their house and my aunt and uncle brought outfits for all the girls.


Here's the Girl getting dressed.


Here she is with her cousins.


Here she is looking innocent.


All the kids


Here's the cake that says Happy Onam. My aunt sent my uncle to get a cake with sprinkles and he brought home a Madagascar cake.


It was chocolate and it had a ton of frosting so I don't think the kids would have cared if it had math problems on it.

Finally my favorite picture of the week. We take pictures of the kids every month on our steps.

Here are the kids on the Boy's first day of First grade.

Good night!