This is one of our new favorite photos of AB. There only two things I don't like about it - the laundry on the chair behind her, and the fact that the camera focused on her hand and the carpet, not her face. My camera chronically focuses on things other than peoples faces. It is like it has a function called "no face focus." I could Photoshop out the laundry, but I can't fix the out of focus shot. What a junker. Beside all of this doesn't she looks so cute?
My house helper is a sweet lady. She and her husband work in our city during the week and go to their home in an outlying village on the weekend. They have a 11 year old son who lives with his grandmother in the village. Village people tend have different standards of what is clean, more so than the city dwellers who still have a different standard of clean from many other countries. For example she had to be told that the toilet water was never to be used to clean the floors or anything else outside of the toilet. Also the older village ladies like to tell everyone else what to do, more so than the non-village ladies who also tell me what to do...once when I was pregnant a woman pulled her car over just to tell me that I should not be wearing hilled boots while pregnant. I am not sure if I get an earful just because I am a foreigner and they think I am ignorant or because it is just the way it is, but below is an interaction that I had with my house helper yesterday morning.
I need to start with a preface: I think people look silly when they wear down coats and wool sweaters when the temperature drops below 80 for the first time since May. This is mainly because 1) it is probably not even cold; it is just finally not hot, or 2) they then have to inevitably dress for summer weather again the next day making them look like some who clearly overreacted. With that said, although I am a strong supporter of not dressing like it is cold until it actually is cold, I am not opposed to a reasonable jacket when it is cool. A couple weeks ago I put this outfit on AB to keep my house helper from thinking I was killing her on a cool morning. I then changed her into a onesie after she left.
Then, yesterday morning my house helper tried to convince me that AB was cold because she was just wearing her diaper and a bib for breakfast. We did not have the air conditioner on and AB's fleece PJs were too warm. Our thermometer said it was 78 degrees in our apartment, a full 6 degrees above the recommended room temperature of 72. At that temperature if I could wear just my skivvies to breakfast and get away with it I would. Our conversation went something like this. (Her name is Ms. Ge)
Ms. Ge: She is cold
Me: She is not cold
Ms. Ge: She is cold
Me: She is not cold
Ms Ge: She has no clothes on. She is cold
Me: She is not cold.
Ms Ge: You are wearing clothes, so you are not cold. She is cold
Me: I wish I was not wearing clothes. I am hot, and she is not cold.
Ms. Ge: The floor is cold.
Me: Yes, but she is in her chair, so she is not cold.
Ms. Ge: She is too small, she is cold
Me: She is not too small. She cries when she is cold. Right now she is not crying. She does not like to be hot, and she is not cold.
At this point Ms. Ge started speaking in the local dialect and I have no idea what she said. I am sure she was saying how the cold was going to enter AB's bones and she would be weak her whole life. By the way, it was more than 80 degrees outside and she was wearing a long sleeve sweater. For many of them it is either completely hot or completely cold, there is no medium.
On a similar note, the locals are very concerned when I don't warm up AB's baby food. I do not care if it is hot or cold. I will feed it to her whichever way she will eat it. Fortunately for me she is not picky right now, but they think her baby food should always be hot. Ironically they refuse to turn on their heaters during the winter because they think the heaters are evil...really they think it ruins our muscles or something like that. I have been in a house that literally had ice on the floor from something that been spilled and not cleaned up. It probably stayed there until the temp finally came above freezing. I know there is some merit in drinking hot or cold water at different times to help different ailments, however I do not buy most of the hot/cold preoccupations. If they were consistent maybe, but most of them seem silly.
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