Home

Coming back to New Delhi after our wonderful summer in California is truly a mixed experience.  It is nothing like last year, moving to a new place with no friends, none of our things, and an entirely new routine to learn.  This year we come back to our home, or at least one of our homes.  The kids were welcomed back to the neighborhood and to school by returning friends and teachers. Familiar faces meet us around every corner, and we have the strange experience of being the experienced Delhi residents now.  We have the added pleasure this year of a family of friends who we met in China, and who we connected with again in Falls Church, joining us here.  Sharing my favorite stores and neighborhoods with my friend is so much fun, and it makes me very excited about having friends and family visit us as well.  Jet lag was still a bear, but somehow because we all had our own beds and pillows and rooms with familiar surroundings it wasn't as hard.  We really did "come home" when we came back to Delhi, even though we also "went home" for the summer, so try to make sense out of that!  If you ask the boys where they are from they say "California" or "Big Bear."  Where do you live is "New Delhi."  Where is home is a much more difficult question to answer.  The simplest way to answer it would be that home is where we are together, but that doesn't quite fit when we travel as much as we do.  Home could be where we feel the most rooted (California) or where our stuff is (New Delhi) or where our school and work is (New Delhi) or where our friends are (New Delhi/California/ The World!)  Whatever the definition, I have failed to post pictures of our New Delhi home, and today I will make up for that.

The first thing to say about our home is that it is on the US Embassy compound, so we live in a gated community with open spaces for the kids to run around and play, and there are lots of neighborhood kids to play with.

This is the back of our house.  We are in the end unit, and I love that we have this huge tree which provides lots of shade for our yard.  The tree is also home to a flock of green parakeets during parts of the year.  It must be a great tree because the parakeets have to fight the crows and pigeons and mynas for possession and yet they keep coming back. 

Take a short walk down this path...

and you get to the community green space which is where kids are found every afternoon playing soccer or tag, driving remote control cars, flying kites or just running around.  It is also a very popular place for birthday parties and for quite a long time running last year there was a bouncy house here almost every weekend.

Our neighborhood also has a pool, and Greg counted, so we know, it takes only 57 steps to get from our back gate to the pool.  We can also order food from the restaurant here, so if I am feeling particularly lazy on a weekend day this is where we end up. I was feeling particularly lazy Sunday!

We also have a nice tennis court.

 And a baseball field where little league and an adult league play.

 And we have our very own bowling alley where we can bowl for about $5/hour!

But enough about the neighborhood, here are some pictures of our house!

The entry way, with our India bench.  I found the bench at a furniture shop and had the cushion made from a kilim rug I bought here.

Living Room

From the living room you can see through to the dining room. We use the awkward little connecting hallway for a computer desk.  Its actually where I am sitting right now typing this!

Kitchen

The kitchen is huge, and I have so much storage. We've gotten lucky at the last two posts with storage in the kitchens... someday I am going to get a tiny one again and have to do some serious culling!

Master Bedroom

Our room is nice, with a window that looks out over our backyard and the compound. It's useful for checking on where the boys are when they are outside playing, and a great place to spot parakeets in the trees.


Ryan's Room

Ryan's room is really big, with two twin beds that come in handy when we have sleepovers.  Also, when we have visitors we can kick Conor out of his room and he can sleep with Ryan so go ahead and start planning your trip!

Ryan loves these colorful little wicker chairs/stools that we bought here in India.  He has them in his classroom and loved them so he asked me to get some for his room and they are so useful!  Turn them over and they are bins you can use to store and tote around things like cars and stuffed animals.  Right side up they can be chairs or step stools for getting things off of the higher shelves. He has a mixture of three different sizes and loves them all.

Conor's Room

Conor picked out all of the decorations in his room, including the really cool wall decal over his bed and the prayer flags we brought back from Bhutan.  The Escher prints I had hanging on my walls through high school and college, and the spirograph Conor made at the explOratorium in 2014.  He's got a large room (we all do!) so he has plenty of space for playing Wii and darts.  

Our stairway has artwork from China and I love it all. I only wish we had gotten more while we were there.  I probably should take that lesson to heart and get shopping so that in a few years when I am writing a post about our den that we decorated with artwork from India I won't have to say "I only wish I had more!"