GRIZZLY PEAR
Last night, I went to sleep early, while my wife stayed up to exercise.
The boy sleeps between us.
He woke up and realized she wasn’t here.
He started bawling and ran to the top of the stairs calling for her.
During the day, my boy shamelessly claims a preference for 爸爸.
But when things really matter, we know who really matters.
He can pedal the himself now, but he still enjoys being pushed around for a ride.
Soon enough, he was enthusiastically leaning into the turns as we did loops around ground floor.
Nope, something didn’t seem quite right. He was asleep.
It’s been months since he fell asleep riding the tricycle.
A parent learns to wonder if this will be the last time.
My boy had picked up an odd habit of skipping the number fourteen when counting to twenty, while washing his hands in this COVID shaped world.
On the one hand, that makes him a good Asian (14 is an unlucky number that is a homonym with death in Chinese). However, we have no idea where that came from because we aren’t a superstitious household.
We didn’t make a big deal about it. He hasn’t even turned three, so we’d rather celebrate that he’s nailed nineteen of the numbers on the way up to 20. Then again, we couldn’t just let this mistake stand, so we would correct him every time as he washed up for a meal.
Yesterday he got it right.
He was so pleased with himself he stumbled past sixteen through twenty.
Meanwhile, I stood at the sink, struck with a lingering sadness as another phase of his life suddenly came to an abrupt end.
As we let our daughter revel in the black box of kindergarten, I’ve realized how little control we have over her day to day experience at school.
We were given five years to get things started, but then you let her go into the world and she’s off to make her own little universe.
You hope the choices you make along the way were the right selections. But some of them, such as speaking primarily Chinese at home, are long term plays which may not aid her immediate social experience at the playground.
You’re pretty sure it will pay off, but it’s still a tradeoff. One where she had no say in the matter.
The girl and I were folding up the clean laundry when the boy decided to help out.
So he walked over to his dresser, opened up the drawer and started pulling out his clothes, putting them on the bed with with the big pile of freshly washed laundry.
Once completed, he then started to take folded clothes and put them back in the laundry basket.
It was at this point when my daughter was released from clothes folding duty so she could play with her brother.
No that I taught my girl Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) I’m getting greedy and I want to teach her Weiqi (Go).
I guess I need to be careful that I’m not transmorgifying my general acquisitiveness for games into forcing her to play different new games all the time.
That said, I think she did enjoy playing Xiangqi. She didn’t really enjoy the initial teaching part, but she did like moving pieces around and eating my pieces that I offered up to her by purposely bad plays.
Even though I’m naturally quite bad at Xiangqi, at least I’ve played it quite a bit and know how it works. But Weiqi is not a game I’ve played much, so I guess I need to play a bit online and then once I’ve at least gotten the rules worked out, then I’ll drag out a chess board (9×9 vertexes) and we’ll see where it goes.
Our girl’s school had a event to go to In-N-Out where 20% of the proceeds would get funneled back to the school that evening.
We were going to ignore it, but they passed around In-N-Out hats and she really really wanted to go. (propaganda works!)
What the heck, it was our first one of these events, she loves to eat out, so let’s see what happens.
It was packed. There were no seats available, but one lady was gracious enough to share her table with us. A few moments later, one of the girls our daughter has come to know over the past two weeks ended up sitting at the table next to us!
These first few weeks in Kindergarten has been a bit fraught with anxiousness over our girl’s social life, so getting to know one of her friends (and her parents) was quite a relief!
Unfortunately I suspect this means we’ll be dragged into more of these events into the near future.
Our boy got his T-shirt dirty and wet from dinner, an hour before bedtime.
And it’s really hot out…and warm inside.
(we keep the AC at 81)
So I just took his shirt off and let him run around in his shorts.
Sagging down below his diaper.
His big paunch hanging over the waistband.
Super cute.
Driving up McLeod after lunch, I noticed a man on a bicycle with a couple foil balloons.
One each side of him were his two kids.
A trio in the heat, slowly heading home from the dollar store.
The practical man questions such fleeting luxuries.
The father in me knows he’s done right.
I pulled out my long forgotten harmonica and played it while watching the kids run around the yard in the lingering evening heat of the back yard as my wife picked tomatoes off the vine.
I can make noises that sound like blues and bend a little to boot, but honestly I don’t know what I’m doing.
Just pushing some fresh air around, entertaining myself and the kids as the last bits of daylight disappears behind the masonry wall.