Joys and challenges

The past few days have involved:

- A move from CHTC Guest House (simple) to Alumni House (beautiful and very modern). Our Alumni House room is more childproof, which allows us to give Thomas more freedom to crawl around, which he really enjoys. Alumni House also has a microwave and a fridge / freezer which we seem to be able to use, at least for a little bit of stuff, though I'm not altogether clear how much use might be overstepping bounds of acceptability in doing so.

- Life without cell phones. Our service was canceled last weekend and we have spent a lot of time this week trying to get it reinstated. After the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks in which cell phones played a prominent role, India requires a lot of documentation to get a SIM card (copies of passports, passport-sized photos, proof of address). Apparently our documentation wasn't appropriate, so our service was cut off after someone looked through our paperwork. We have to be in touch with the place we bought our phones in Chennai in order to get it sorted out. It is a bit of a headache. On the plus side, getting the documents to the original cell phone store (3 hours away) by courier only cost 18 rupees, about 40 cents!

- The malfunction of our all-important travel fridge. Hypotheses are either an electrical surge or just poor product design. A fuse blew at the same time as the fridge went out. Our new room has more outlets, which allowed us to plug in food-related items likely to condense water in a separate outlet from electronics items. However, we are therefore not using a surge protector on some items.

- The malfunction of our travel kettle. It no longer turns on reliably; the button seems to be stuck somehow. We therefore can no longer cook or easily store food for the moment!

- A baby who seems to be undergoing a so-called "sleep regression," which according to parenting blog lore often occurs at around 8-9 months. This means that he is up again every 2-3 hours, sometimes more often, and cries unless he nurses back to sleep. This means he is more likely to wet our bed, which is where he ends up sometime around the 3rd or 4th awakening. I'm really tired.

- A baby mouse/rat(?) running around our new room yesterday morning! At one point it slipped right under the door, and then came back in, so it probably came from outside.

- Thomas inventing games, which is absolutely adorable. He started playing peek-a-boo with John a couple of days ago by pulling up on the edge of the bed so he could see John and laughing, then getting back down, then pulling up again and laughing - over and over for a good 10-15 minutes! Needless to say, John had a hard time working with all that cuteness directed at him. And then yesterday morning Thomas took one of his teething rings and threw it as far away as he could (generally just a couple of inches), crawled over to it, picked it up and threw it again, crawled over to it, etc. This also lasted for a good 10 minutes or so.