ThaiBankie

Nok took Megan to the shopping mall yesterday and stopped of at one of the small photo studios to get some photos of her.  Here are the results.

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Last week we had to go to Lopburi to attend the wedding of a very old friend from my very first days of Thailand more than 7 years ago.  Jarunee who worked in the Quality dept had always really helped me in the early days much as she had done with my predecessor, Ian, in the time before I worked there.  She was always arranging hotels, transport, parties and anything else that we needed help with.  She even helped me and Nok arrange some parts of my wedding as well as being the host on stage at the wedding reception.  It was a given that I would not be able to miss her wedding after how good a friend she has been to me over the years.

I had been out for a few beers on the Saturday night so I was a bit tender on the Sunday when it was time to leave and drive to Lopburi. I started the car and put my foot on the clutch and I thought that it didn’t feel like it normally does but maybe it was the hangover and I was imagining things.  We managed to drive the 60Km along the east ring road around Bangkok and were taking the slip road and having driven the majority of the last 60Km in 5th gear it was time to drop the gear and slow down a little but the clutch dropped to the floor with almost no effort and I spent the next 10 seconds trying to find a gear that I could get into.  Nok said to just go home but I didn’t want to miss the wedding so I decided to keep going and fight with the gearbox for the next 90Km until we got to Lopburi.  The wedding was good and it was really great meeting up with people that I had not seen for the past 4 years.

The drive home after the wedding was a nightmare greater than anything I had experienced before.  Every time I needed to slow down or stop because of the traffic I would desperately try to find a gear that I could get into so that I could drive when I needed to.  A few times I was in a real panic as I didn’t think I would be able to do it, then I remembered a time about 17years ago when I worked on the Ice-Cream van and it’s clutch cable had broken.  I remember someone telling the driver of the van to keep the revs high and it will go into gear easier, and I was even more surprised when I tried it a couple of times and it worked.  We managed to get home safe and on the Monday morning I drove the car to the Honda garage to get it repaired.  We also decided to get it serviced at the same time so I was surprised when the bill was only 5200Baht (80quid).

While my car was being repaired we managed to borrow Tuk and Paibool’s Ford Escape which was a big big help to us because we didn’t want Megan to miss school as it was her last week.  This weekend we needed to return the car to Rayong and we set out in a convoy with Nok leading in the Escape and me trundling along behind in my Jazz.  After about 60Km I noticed that the car was starting to get a bit hotter and thought that it must be getting really hot outside but when I turned up the fan it didn’t make any difference, in fact it was probably getting hotter.  I called Nok and told her that the air conditioning in the car was not working so we continued south to get to Rayong.  I had all the windows down and was starting to get really sweaty but it wasn’t too long till we reached Tuk’s house.

Megan was not to happy about driving with the windows open and she would always tell me to put the windows up a little every now and then.  By the time we got home they were only open about 1cm and almost nothing was coming in through them but it was early evening so the temperature outside was starting to drop a little.

Honda just finished fixing it this time and it is costing me 8090Baht (125quid) to fix it but in Thailand it is a small price to pay to keep cool while driving.

Megan finished her first year of kindergarten today, actually she only joined midway through the year so she has had an easy start.  She will now have a 6 week break from school and return in May.  We are thinking about putting her in for 3 weeks during summer school so that she is well prepared for the year ahead but nothing is confirmed yet. 

As the school is only a kindergarten the kids will need to go to another school once they finish K3.  Today was the schools first graduates as it is only a new school and it was the first time for them to put on a show with all the kids from all the classes from Pre-Kindergarten 1, 2 and 3 and also Kindergarten 1, 2 and 3. 

She is already exited about going into K2 after the summer and today we found out that her new teacher, Teacher Tammy, is the mother of her old teacher, Teacher Cat.

Below is a video of Megan performing with her classmates on stage.

Show at Kindergarten from ThaiBankie on Vimeo.

Last week Nok was on holiday with her friends from university from Saturday morning until Sunday night. Nok disappeared early on Saturday morning while I was still sleeping, I think Megan was still sleeping too because she came into my bedroom at about 8.30am and told me that she misses mummy.  I decide to get up and take Megan out to Seacon Square, which is a big shopping mall a few miles from where we live.  I once heard that is was the largest mall in Asia but I don’t think I believe it but it is still really big.

Once we got to Seacon we decided to go to Yo-Yo Land which is  large area on the 5th floor which is like an amusement park for young kids which has loads of activities for kids to do.  To be honest it is a bit dated now and needs some money invested in it to make it a bit better.  We started off at a pirate ship game that lets you fire a jet of water at a pirate ship for a few minutes, you can knock over some things on the ship and also when some of the boxes fill with water they drop down and other things rise up so that you can hit them too.  Megan quite like this and has played is a couple of times in recent weeks.  Next we went to a large play area which has padded floor an walls and lots of climbing areas and lots of small plastic balls.  Megan spent the first 20 minutes running around trying to collect all the balls but when she had 4 or 5 of them in her arms she couldn’t pick up any more and would come to see me and dump them all beside me and run off looking for more balls. When our time was up the girl came over to tell us that it was time to go but Megan was not yet ready to leave so we gave her coupons so that we could stay for another half hour.  I just sat at the side throwing balls and Megan would run around collecting them. She was just like a wee puppy running after a stick.

After we were all tired out it was time for food and Megan said that she wanted to have some salmon.  We walked to Fuji which is a Japanese restaurant chain that is in every mall in Thailand. we got there and it was quite busy, I told the girl at the door that I was looking for a table for 2 an she said ok.  more people started arriving and she took there name and gave them a ticket with a number on it.  She started calling the numbers for the tickets that she ha just given out and the people went inside, I was still standing at the door with Megan.  the people who got seats were also in parties of 2 so I was getting annoyed so I just told her to piss off and we went to McDonalds.

After McD’s I hoped that Megan would be tire enough to fall asleep in the car on the way home but my luck was out when we hit the Saturday afternoon traffic jam.  Both of us were getting frustrated and I knew there was no way that Meg was going to nod off.  We got home an hour later and Megan was overly tired but I tried to put her to bed, after lying down on her bed for 10 minutes Megan made a dash for the door and went downstairs by herself leaving me almost nodding off on her bed.

We went downstairs and played the Wii and watched some Pooh Bear then I made her some dinner which she finished.  After dinner we played a little more then it was time for a bath and bed.  Megan was fine up until I told her to go to bed then she started with the "I miss Mummy" routine again.  I told her that mummy wouldn’t be back for another day, she went to the window just to make sure that Nok’s car hadn’t come back and we went onto the bed and lay down together.  She said that she wanted to talk to Mummy an I tried to call Nok so that Megan could say goodnight but Nok must have been drunk at this point and was not answering her phone.  I told her that I would wake her up when Mummy called back.  She put her head on the pillow and told me not to sleep in case mummy called back.  10 seconds later she was snoring just like her father.  I stayed for another 10 minutes just to make sure she was really out and then I went downstairs and watched a couple of movies.  My big debate was whether I should sleep beside her incase she woke up and was looking for Nok but I decided just to go to my bed.

At 5am Megan came into my room and said that she didn’t want to sleep in the big bed by herself so I told her to climb in beside me.  She rolled around for 5 minutes and then told me that she needed to do a poo.  I took her to her potty and then put her in her on cot and both of us slept until about 8am.  We got up and planned to go back to Seacon for another morning playing but Megan drank her carton of milk in about 10seconds and then promptly decided to throw it up all over the car.  We went home and got changed and decided to go to Tesco for some bread and milk and KFC for some fish fingers.  When we got home I fell asleep on the sofa for about 90 minutes while Megan watched Pooh Bear again.  We then went to the club house in the village and played with some of the other kids for a couple of hours.

All in all it was really easy and enjoyable just being the two of us.  Nok thinks I am a crap dad anyway so I think she was surprised that I could cope.  She did complain because there was some dishes in the sink that I hadn’t cleaned so she told me that I was crap anyway because I couldn’t look after the house and Megan at the same time.

Megan is almost at the end of her first semester at kindergarten and I think she has actually settled in much better than we all thought that she would.  She started there with a week during the holiday break so it was a good time to introduce her without the pressure of everyone being there around her and loads of new kids all starting at the same time.

This week we got her first report card and I must admit I was a little nervous to know what her teachers think about her and the progress that she has made.  To be honest I as a little surprised just how well she is doing and how positive the made her report.

Her report card is basically put into 2 sections as she has 2 teachers, one teaches English and the other is Thai.  I have scanned the English part of her report and you can have a look at just how well she is doing.  It looks like she is still a little shy to talk English at school but I think that this is understandable because she does not have too much exposure to speaking English except with her dear old daddy.  Maybe different accents make her less confident and maybe the teacher struggles with what Megan is saying because she speaks a bit too fast sometimes.  All of this could affect her confidence. 

Overall, we are really proud of her and hope that she continues to progress as well as she has over the past 4 months.  I also think that her progress at kindergarten is also helping her outside of school because she seems to be less naughty and she is beginning to understand more about what is the right things she should be doing.

Download Report Card