The Kids Who Travel the World: Indonesia is out for the world to read today! I’ve got my hands on a copy, and you can get yours on Amazon!

This book is extra special to me for a few reasons. Depending how long you’ve been with me on social media, you might remember a big Mom-fail I had as soon as we moved to Congo. I wrote about it, but now that I’m thinking of it, I may have been too heart broken to press publish on the post.Within days of arriving at our new life in Congo I was heading out to meet some soon-to-be friends and thought I’d go to the bathroom before I left. Not remembering that I had my phone in the back pocket of my jeans, I haphazardly pulled down my jeans, peed, flushed and walked away.

A half hour later when I was finally trying to get out the door, I had searched high and low for my phone. Finally I saw it, jammed in the bottom of the toilet bowl, half way flushed down the toilet.

“GET THE RICE!!!!!” I shouted like a crazy person to my husband as I jammed my hand into the bowl to rescue my rather new, yet already cracked, iPhone.

I hurled it into the bowl of rice and buried it, feeling sick. Deep down, I knew then that the photos were lost. I could hear my husband’s voice ringing in my ears. He was constantly reminding me to back up my phone. He was anti-iCloud, so we weren’t set up on there back then, and being technologically lazy, I had not got around to backing up my phone in an embarrassingly long time.

Over 15,000 memories in pictures, gone.

Singapore. Thailand. Vietnam. Gone, gone, gone.

Christmas. Birthdays. A move across the planet.

Our entire year of living in Indonesia.

Gone.

Pictures of our house, the kids’ bedrooms, their school, friends, the neighbourhood, our house helpers. All gone.

It was no one’s fault but my own for not backing up my phone, and sure, I have the few albums of pictures that I put up on Facebook; but they aren’t good enough quality to print, and gone are the pictures of my kids running bare bum down the beaches of Asia, or sitting on my lap in the drivers seat while ‘driving’ through the compound, 1980’s style.

It breaks my heart a little, even now, to think of the memories that got flushed down the toilet that day. Memories that my kids are too young to ever recall on their own. Learning to use the bathroom on a squat toilet, and riding on a scooter with an Elsa helmet in a way that was totally unacceptable by North American standards, but perfectly normal for life in Asia. I had videos of the girls singing along with call to prayer without realizing they were doing it as it echoed from the mosques every night while while they ate dinner. But these are memories I’ll now just have to tell them the story of, instead of threatening to show their boyfriends one day.My kids know France; it’s where they were born, and was our home base while we lived in Africa. They remember Congo since we just left in June. But Indonesia…that was awhile ago; my youngest arrived in diapers. The only memories she would have had of our day to day life were lost in a toilet mishap those early days in Congo.

Forgive me if I’m being dramatic. I realize it’s a first-world problem(Trust me, I’ve lived third world problems!). Blame it on Mom-guilt. But this book is extra special to me. This book is for my girls; so that through the pages of this story, they might remember just a bit of the adventure we had together as a family, living in Indonesia.

You can share in our adventure by visiting an Amazon site near you!

Now go back up your phone!