This post shall have no pictures

And you can blame my kids for that.

On Saturday we took a trip out to Torium, the biggest shopping mall near us. It boasts many international brands not found in other smaller malls like, Nine West, Marks and Spencer, H&M, Mango, Zara, Pull&Bear, Gap, Sephora, and Swatch. Not to mention, an indoor snow play ground complete with hills to sled down. Skis and snowboards can be rented as well.

As for us, we'd have enough of snow the last winter to last for a life time. So we shielded our eyes from the evil white condensation and walked on.

At first, it seemed like it will be an easy day out as they do provide a 50 minute free play area pass for kids's Monster's age. I spent those 50 minutes flying around H&M trying on clothes.

After that, it was all downhill. Monster tried several times to run away from us (but that's hardly anything new), tried to take off her clothes in a changing room. At Mango she nearly pulled down a rings display, had a meltdown at a shoe store, and lastly jumped off a stool at the food court banging and cutting her lip against the table. We ate food to the "music" of her continuous whining, and the intermittent gagging from Falafal who insisted on biting of chunks of potato fries stolen from the table.

We still managed to keep our spirits up until it was time to go home. We missed the last free bus service provided by the mall that takes you home so we had to hop onto a crowded mini bus. It still would have been fine if BOTH my kids didn't decide that this was the perfect time and place for having a meltdown....in the middle of armpits and asses and bags hitting me in the head and Falafal clawing my scarf off my head.

Falafal was still easy to handle, all I had to do was take him out of the carrier and let the crowd entertain him (or was he entertaining the people?) Monster continued to whine and cry and poke me in my ribs asking for more space (we did manage to get a seat thanks to a friendly rider). By the time we neared home, I had resorted to tuning out to my own kids pretending they were not mine, even considering giving up ONE for adoption (only as a joke of course). Then I felt sorry for the people who would adopt them and decided to do this kindness to humanity and raise these devils on my own.

One thing was confirmed though and I informed Wizard of this too: I am good with these 2 kids! I have no wish to go through these days again with another 3 year old and a 6 month old. We'll have to tolerate Falafal since he's here anyway and hopefully make the 6 year old Monster take care of his 3 year old issues (muahahaha). No way am I messing up this situation any further.

Of course, Wizard laughs at me and goes "In a few years you will want another baby and you know it."

So I had to tell him "I shall write a detailed blog post on what happened today and use that as a hormonal deterrent."

So here it is, the post that shall be tagged so I can read it "when hormones attack my brain cells" and I am conned into wanting another child.

Are there days when you want to contact a child psychologist just to explore your options, or contact a mental hospital?

That one image...

Every time I head out in the world, I am always on the look out for that one moment in time captured in a photograph that can sum up my life. I have yet to find that one image that will contain my life inside a frame...

I am not even sure if it is probable. My life has been so complicated from the very beginning. I used to think my early years were probably incident free but came to realize that they still had a great impact on my adolescent years. There is a 6 year old hiding in my heart and she remembers everything.

Perhaps, it is merely wishful thinking...wanting to go back to those days when we were living our life not aware of how it will change our future. Had I known about my future, I might have stared at a neighbor's garden a little bit longer, committed to memory the feeling of stealing falsay from a tree a little bit harder. I would have asked another question or two, I would have acted to certain people differently. More kindly.

Had I known. Had I known my life will be so interesting in the future, I would have felt better about the mundane little things that brought me down.

I confess, it will be a hard task to find an image that will sum my life in a photograph. Yet, I keep on searching... for me it's the journey that is the adventure, not the destination.

Got Milk?

Sure, I have some recent unforgettable moments too, like the one with Wizard's sister in law showed me her milk cabinet filled to the brim with packaged milk. I naively asked her "Won't it all go bad? Why isn't it in the fridge?" As if I've never seen UHT treated milk before. *Sigh* It was becoming a fad as I left Pakistan in the fall of 2003 and we did prefer it over unpasteurized milk because our milk man kept trying to keep the traveling milk cool by melting ice blocks in the milk cans....ice blocks that had been sitting next to horses and their copious dung!

(Side bar: When we moved to Lahore from Karachi in the summer of 1997, my brother wondered why his hair was turning a slight shade of green by each evening. A kind cousin explained it was the dried horse dung hanging in the air over Mall Road.)

http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/hsingh2/articles/milk.research.pdf

To be honest, I'm not convinced that UHT treated milk is good for human consumption. I'm of the times when unpasteurized milk was boiled twice and cooled before drinking and that was that. We never got sick, and certainly were not lactose intolerant. I do remember the first few times we started drinking Haleeb Milk (Pakistan's UHT treated milk brand), yes, it caused a number of issues with too many bathroom trips afterwards. I never really connected the two.

All I know is, you can't make yogurt with UHT treated milk and that is cause for concern hahaha.

Edit: Since I started writing this post, I have discovered the existence of unpasteurized milk in Istanbul as well. I'm seriously contemplating switching us all back to that.

I'm curious to what my few readers think. Please share your experience with unpasteurized, pasteurized, and/or UHT treated milk.

Turkish surprise number 19

Occasionally, hubby will bring something new from the market and ask me "Did you have this in Pakistan?"

Thank you for rubbing in the wounds my love, no, even if we did I won't remember it because I haven't been back in ages!

This time though, we had an interesting argument. He brought back "Kızılcık," a small berry that grows on trees the height of apple trees. It looks like a cross between cherries and cranberries. My first bite into it, I cringed...it was extremely tart! While I was trying to bring myself back from tart-induced-confusion, Wizards exclaimed "I KNEW you'd like it!"

Huh?

I about died from the possibly poisonous berry and what part of my flailing for water and gacking into the sink did I look like I enjoyed it?

"Oh you ate the unripe one, they still need to sit and ripen a bit."

Why thank you for that important piece of information!

Three days later, I bit into the now darker berry tentatively. There was still a hint of that fruit of death tartness, but it was more pleasant this time. The flesh left my mouth feeling dry and it reminded me of...

Jamun!

Could it be? Have I found jamun in Turkey?

Jamun you see, has some beautiful memories associated with it. It gets harvested from tall trees late summer into the monsoon season. My earliest memory of Jamun happened at our neighbor's home where older girls seasoned the purple berries with salt and pepper. With the jamun in one bowl, and another bowl held over it, they would shake the berries till the salt made some of the juice start leaving the fruit. "To lessen their tartness," they explained.

Most other times I ate jamun, the memories were ruined by the stupid worms creeping out just before we were about to pop the entire thing in our mouths. There were a few times when after finishing off half a bowl of the purple fruit, we'd realize that every berry was in fact compromised and o.m.g. we already ate like half a kilo of worm infested fruit!!!!

Thank fully, the worm prefers to reside not in the flesh of the jamun, but the seed. Or so I like to tell myself every time I remember that god damned (yet extremely tasty) fruit.

To replicate the same memory, I seasoned kızılcık with salt and pepper, shook them till they got watery and inspected for worms.

No worms.

As I dug into my bowl of jamun-related-but-better berries, I realized, I had found yet another silver lining.

My Very Own Pepper Chain

Drying peppers grown in Wizard's family garden in Malatya.

Monster's first "person" drawing!

Monster, 3 years and 3 months old. Draws her very first person drawing =) Complete with eyes and NOSE!

Salma Said It: Daddy would have Killed you!

Every time I am cutting watermelon slices out, slicing precariously close to the whitish parts, I know I'm NOT doing it right. As it is, Wizard happens to be a scrooge about wasting food, so in spite of all my pleadings that "the white part is NOT for eating, it is the reason you get stomach ache after eating watermelon" he refuses to let me waste it. So I continue the atrocity that is, not sparing the white, and cut it out as Wizard showed me.

Alas, every time I cut a watermelon at my sister's house, she never misses a chance to tell me (accompanied with a dramatic gasp) "If Abbu (our late father) was alive, he would have killed you." You see, my dad loved watermelon and took delight in cutting and delicately picking out the seeds out of single bite pieces for his family. He would NEVER have left the white meat on.

Each time Salma tries to keep me from adding on the pale pink and white meat on to the watermelon slices, I think to myself "But Wizard will kill me if I waste the white part and HE IS ALIVE!"

Here you go my love, enjoy the stomach ache that is sure to follow.