Poll Pictures

Who do you think I most resemble?

Dad

Mom

Me

Notes on Hair After Viewing My Parents' Wedding Slideshow Pictures

I think Mom should cut hers like this again.

 Dad should get this haircut again.

 And Most Exalted Grandfather should grow facial hair.

What are your opinions?

Car Seats are for the Weak

This week's (9 months and 2 weeks!) Baby Center email to Mom featured an article about whether it is ever OK to let me ride out of a car seat.  The response was that, no, it is not OK even in a taxi or bus.  She now feels fairly guilty for the ways I've been getting around for the last six months of my life.  I, on the other hand, have loved it.

disembarking from the plane to Nepal

on the plane to Dhaka

out and about with Dad

getting from the trailhead to Pokhara, Nepal

wrapping up a church and shopping morning in Dhaka

and my most common mode of transport - the rickshaw

None of these involve anything remotely like a car seat.  I wonder what I'll think of them this summer when I'm road-tripping around America.

Bowman into Books

Having read all of my books on the lowest shelf, 

 and most of the ones on the bottom shelf of the library at Dad's school,

I decided to start on Mom and Dad's books on the second shelf.

Unfortunately, they don't like reading their Westerns and immigrant novels and then finding missing pages.  Good thing I got a couple of new books for Christmas.  Thanks, Mormor and Grandpa!

Bowman with Nepali Buddies

We met Mr. Pepi on a day hike from Pokhara to a small village called Bhumdi.  We were eating our honey sandwiches and bananas in a field when he invited us to his house for ginger tea.  We sat on a straw mat outside between his two-cow stable, his onion and potato garden, and his small two-floor house while his wife chopped fresh ginger and boiled water.  Dad said it was the best tea he had in Nepal, and he had a lot of tea on this trip!

These women were clearly grandmothers at heart, and stopped us on a bike trip so they could give me a few cuddles.  I had to stay with the one on the left because I was a bit too fascinated with the taller woman's nose ring.

Here I am with one of the kids from the Shangri-La Children's Home in Pokhara.

Finally, here is the first woman I ever kissed.  She gave me her crackers at a lunch stop on our trek, so I thanked her with a peck on the nose!

Bowman on a Budget

Mom spends a lot of time on our vacation writing down how much money we have and how much we spend and how much she thinks we might still need.  What I learned on this last trip to Nepal is that if you want to buy a lot of these

because good espresso is rare (if existent) in Bangladesh, then you can save money be eating these

in your hotel room for dinner.  Mmmm...Thai food.

Bowman in a Backpack, Again

Since my backpacking career started at two and a half months in Glacier and continued at six months in Darjeeling, India, we couldn't pass up the chance to do some trekking in Nepal.  On the day after my first Christmas, off we went for a five-day trek from Khara (about an hour's taxi ride outside of Pokhara) to Poon Hill and out to Bierthanti (where Dad started the trek he did six years ago in Nepal).  

Hooray for a first look at Annapurna South!

Since I've done this a couple of times now, the trekking seems pretty normal to me, but I know not all of you have gotten to ride around in a backpack in the Himalayas, so I'm going to explain a little of how it works.  First, when you hear someone say they went trekking in Nepal, don't think hiking.  Instead, think climbing and descending stairs for five to seven hours a day.  In the next picture you can see me sleeping and mom smiling because this was part of our almost 1000 foot descent on the second day.  After we crossed that bridge, we then had to go up 3000 some feet.  She ended up trading my wiggling weight for our guide's lighter pack for some of that, and still wasn't smiling for most of it.  

After you've gone up and down a few thousand feet (everyone speaks in meters there, so it never sounds as bad as it's going to be when they're telling you about the day ahead), you get to a teahouse, which is more of a bed and breakfast on the rustic side.  The rooms we stayed in looked like this 

with simple two-by four beds that we just pushed together and shared for warmth each night.  On this trek, each room was 200-250 rupees, which is about $3.  They charge so little because you are expected to eat in the restaurant of the tea house where you sleep, and they charge more for food than the rooms.  We had dal baht (rice and lentils) with various veggies each night, porridge and naan (Tibetan bread that looks and tastes surprisingly like Indian fry bread from the Backroom in Columbia Falls) for breakfast and fried rice or noodles with fresh vegetables for lunch.  By that I mean that I mostly picked the carrots off of Mom and Dad's plates and chewed on them for a long time before spitting them back out.

While the insides of these teahouses were fairly nondescript, here is a view from the front of one of them.  Totally worth the $3, huh?

Overall, I'd recommend the Poon Hill trek, especially if you can sucker someone into carrying you the whole time.  Just make sure not to fall asleep when the clouds clear!

Mom, me, Dipes (our guide) and Dad looking at another angle of Annapurna South

Christmas in Nepal

Mom and Dad tell me that this Christmas with its pink and teal streamer decorated palm trees and techno "Silent Night" blaring from one of the tourist CD stores was a bit unconventional, but it was my first one so I still want to share it with you.

We started with breakfast at our hotel because it was included, and who wants to pass up free toast on vacation?  Then, we had second breakfasts at a restaurant with chairs on the beach of Phewa Lake where Billy Bowman played in the Christmas-light adorned cactus and I tried to eat the cactus.

Mom and Dad ate crepes and good coffee instead of the cactus.  Then, we went back to the Shangri-La Children's Home where we'd met ten beautiful kids and played games the day before.  They had shared their dal baht with us for Christmas Eve supper.  For Christmas, we brought some little school things and helped them decorate a sign for the house.  Their smiles were a great gift!

Later, Mom and Dad packed for their trek and ate pepperoni pizza in the hotel room while I gave them the gift of an early bed time.

Like I said, Mom and Dad thought it strange with no tree or snow or carols, but it was nice to get to listen to the Christmas stories without thinking about unwrapping things.  I have to say, I really would have liked to be with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins and to eat those Ritz-peanut butter-chocolate cookies, keuken and maybe even fruit soup.  Hopefully this just makes my first Christmas with extended family even more special.  What do you say Carlson and Davidson families, December 2012 here?

A Sneak Peak at What I Did in Nepal

In Kathmandu, we tried to volunteer with the

but no nuns were there that day and no one we found could speak enough English to understand that I just wanted to use my baby charm to cheer some people up.

In Pokhara, we got to rent bikes for about $1.40 for the whole day.  Mom and Dad did ride them while I rode on Dad's back most of the day, but for a while Dad had to walk with them since the brakes were only somewhat trustworthy and this was a steep hill!

In Pokhara we also spent quite a bit of time with some really fun kids from the Shangri-La Children's Home.  We did a lot of laughing at my lack of hair, made a little art, and even invented a new game: Soccerminton!

We went for a hike to the World Peace Pagoda and on to the town of Bhumdi, and then took a boat part of the way back to our hotel in Pokhara.

And, of course, we did a five day trek whose high point was the views from Poon Hill.  What fun we had feeling cold for a change!

Bowman Telling the Back-Story

I think I can safely assume that all three of you reading this (Nana, Mormor and Mishi Angie, thanks to all three of you for reading!) have heard this story and probably told it yourselves, but I still want to write down the version I've learned.  It explains why I am here (on earth and in Bangladesh) and where my name comes from.

Mom and Dad met in Glacier National Park.  They're pretty obsessed with the place actually.  They talk about it all the time, especially when they are saddest and wanting to go there and happiest and remembering their favorite times.  They even named me after one of their favorite lakes there.  They often debate what has been the best summer of their lives and the talk focuses on the summer of 2005, which I'm about describe; the summer of 2006 after they got married; and the summer of 2009 when they both took full advantage of their teachers' schedules and spent the summer climbing and camping.  All three took place in Glacier.  They can't get enough of the place.  

During the summer of 2005, Mom and Dad both worked in Glacier.  There's some debate as to when they met, but the stories agree that Dad thought Mom was cute and she thought he was stuck-up when they did meet.  Either way, they had hours and hours after their shifts at the pizzeria and camp supply store on the Lake McDonald property to get to know one another.

As they started to hang out in the same circle of friends and realized that both had come for the hiking and not the other shenanigans that go along with seasonal work, they found themselves spending quite a bit of time together.  Although it was awkward at first and complicated by a boyfriend Mom had,

they soon realized that not much could keep them apart, and it was less than a year after they met that they were back in Glacier, this time working together at Eddie's Cafe as Mr. and Mrs. Carlson.

The reason I feel like I have to tell you all of that now is that the actual first conversation that Mom and Dad had all started because of Nepal.  In 2000, Mom ended up on a Royal Servants trip to Nepal because SARS cancelled the trip she wanted to take to China.  She learned heaps about how much Jesus loves her and the people of Nepal.  Then, four years later, Dad went on a Peak Performance trip to Nepal because his school schedule didn't allow him to go to Patagonia like he had planned.  He realized he had a heart for serving God cross-culturally.  So, during that first Glacier summer, that's why Dad had a Nepali flag on the back of his Ford Taurus that made Mom think twice about assuming he was just a stuck-up climber.

Whew.  I meant to keep that short, but I just thought you needed to know all the details.  I've really begun to master this typing thing lately, which is one reason I'm rambling on so!

So, now you know why Mom and Dad wanted to go to Nepal over our Christmas break.  In fact, now you know why we live in Bangladesh.  Ever since that first conversation, they've agreed that they wanted to spend at least part of their married life seeing what God might have for them in Asia.  Once I came along, they decided they'd better get going before more of life's little surprises popped up and changed their plans.

The Colors of Nepal