McCainiaks in BKK

 Braden has expressed interest in Track and Field, but never had the confidence to give it a real shot until we got here.  The Athletics program at ISB is extremely welcoming and the coaches did a great job of encouraging Braden to try new things. During the season, he competed in two competitive meets. The first was a dual meet against one other school, NIST.  During this meet, Braden competed in 4 events (High Jump, 100M Hurdles, 200M Dash, and 100M Dash).  He finished 6th, 3rd, 4th, and 4th respectively.  By placing 3rd overall in one of the events and at least 3rd of ISB athletes in 2 other events, Braden qualified to represent ISB at the Bangkok Metropolitan Athletic Conference (BMAC) meet on 26 Mar. There were athletes from 6 schools participating in the meet. One of the requirements was the athletes needed to compete in at least 3 events and they needed to do both track and field; either 2 track and 1 field or 2 field and 1 track event.  The coaches decided that Braden should gi

 Over the last few weeks, I've gotten to enjoy some outings with some friends from the neighborhood.   We also got to do some shopping... Entrance to the Benjarong Village Handpainting porcelain A few of my purchases from the Pottery market

 Soi (street) cats and dogs are very common in Nichada and there are few amazing people who strive to find homes for as many as they can and to keep the ones they can't home as healthy as possible by doing a TNR (trap, neuter, release).  Despite all these efforts, there are still so many animals around. Around mid-March a soi cat gave birth to kittens in the roof line of the house across the street. Where the kittens were born Mama cat heading to her babies About 3 weeks later, one of the kittens fell from the gutter onto the roof of the porch below.  We could hear the kitten meowing Saturday night/Sunday morning, but couldn't see it.  We finally found him in the leaves and one of the neighbor kids was able to get him down. Because of where mama gave birth, there was no way to put him back and she couldn't get him back up the tree herself.  The neighbors already have two cats and couldn't keep the kitten with them, so I took him in and contacted the my friend, Liz, the

 So... way back in October 2020, we took a trip back to Port Douglas, QLD and went out on a cruise to the Great Barrier Reef.  While on the cruise, Braden, Gavin and I went snorkeling.  Ian did SCUBA and Jamie was able to join a introductory SCUBA dive with an instructor.  Ever since then, Jamie has talked about getting certified.  Of course, living in the middle of the desert made that impossible and COVID didn't help.  We promised that once we move to Thailand that we would look into it. Fortunately, here in our community there is local dive shop called Dive Me Crazy and all 3 boys were able to start the process.  They completed the online course and did their pool work here in Nichada. Someone needed to supervise Once they completed their pool work, we traveled south to Sutahip for the boys to do 4 Open Water dives.  In addition to completing their certification, they participated in some conservation efforts.  First, the boat owners go down to the wet markets in the morning and