Where I’ve been recovering from jet lag, getting some last minute things taken care of, visiting friends, and of course, spending time with all of these wonderful children. I came in perfect timing. The kids had a four day holiday so I’ve really gotten to spend some quality time with them. There’s been six months worth of catching up to do, lots of stories, and lots of hugs and kisses. My friend Napur who lives next door just had her first baby, who happened to be born on MY BIRTHDAY! He’s beautiful and I can’t stop holding him.

Rishikesh is incredible this time of year. The rice paddies are all bare now, leaving lots of open space and fields for playing cricket, dodgeball, and soccer. It’s also the season for kite flying! All of the kids are flying their kites and in the city you can see dozens of children on rooftops, doing the same. I can’t get the song, “let’s go fly a kite” from Mary Poppins out of my head and now all of the children have also started to sing it. When was the last time any of us flew a kite, or even woke up in the morning and thought, “gee, this is a perfect day to fly a kite!?”

I’ll be leaving for Nepal early tomorrow morning. It’ll be a long journey so I’m really happy I took these past few days to split the travel up, reflect and regroup.

Last year 5 of my closest girlfriends and I started a new tradition. Now that we are all so far from one another and hardly get to catch up, we started an e-mail chain. At the end of every week, we write a short synopsis of anything exciting that happened. One of the mandatory categories is that each of us chooses a “song of the week.” This could be a new song that we’re obsessed with and can’t stop listening to, an old song that we happened to hear that reminded us of something, or just a song that represents how we feel in that given moment, or the week that passed. This week I chose a new favorite song that a good friend of mine sent me just before I left. “Bottle it up” the live version by Sara Bareilles. I’ve been listening to every morning when I wake up. It’s definitely worth a download.