Wednesday was Olympics Day at P’s school, and all the parents were to come and participate in various relay races with their kids. I had no idea this was the plan – I only knew Chris and I were expected to be at her school wearing comfortable shoes that morning. We began to figure out what was going on when we saw the opening ceremonies. Here’s P’s class’ arrival.
P is learning a lot at school. As I was making her breakfast the other day, she decided to pass on some of her newly acquired knowledge to me and said, “If you have a thing sticking out, you have to use the boys’ potty, and if you don’t have a thing sticking out, you have to use the girls’ potty.” I asked her from where this thing typically sticks, and she replied, “You know, from the middle of your booty.” I asked her if she had a thing sticking out, and she promptly pulled down her pants, mooned me, and said, “You know I don’t. That’s why I use the girls’ potty.”
If only this were available in her size…
I just had a phone conversation with a Chinese woman, Bing, and the topic of Wee P’s missing kidney came up. Bing was clearly very interested and began asking me lots and lots of questions about exactly how and when the condition was diagnosed. I explained that the problem was missed at my 20 week prenatal ultrasound and detected at a 30 week ultrasound. Bing wanted to know if I thought Wee P’s doctors had made a mistake in reading the initial ultrasound images. I told her it’s possible a mistake was made but that I didn’t blame the doctors, because a) it’s possible that they mistook an adrenal gland for the left kidney (I understand that at such an early gestational age, that’s an easy mistake to make) and b) it’s possible that the kidney was actually there at 20 weeks and then stopped developing for some reason. Besides, what difference would it have made if I had found out ten weeks earlier than I did?
Too bad Melvil Dewey left out the first category (A) listed below.
I’ve known for a long time that the Chinese are not a cheese-loving people. We had a friend in grad school from Beijing whose first English sentence was, “I dunnah rike-ah cheese.” I now understand why he prioritized mastering those words – it’s very important when living in a foreign country to be able to have food you can stomach. If I could say one Mandarin sentence, it would be, “I don’t like organ meat, donkey, connective tissue, testicles, heads, feet, or anything other body part that reminds me that what I’m eating once walked (or galloped) the earth.”
P has always been a super sociable kid, but I was still a bit nervous about her friend-making abilities when she started going to daycare a couple of days a week last August. To my relief, she came home the first day talking about Kaden, her new best friend. From that point on, every time I asked P what she did at daycare, she’d tell me simply that she played with Kaden. One day, I asked a teacher to point out Kaden to me. The teacher looked confused and informed me that Kaden had moved away months ago. This made me very sad. My child’s “best friend” didn’t exist.
P’s school serves the kids three hot meals a day, but other than a few bites of rice and an occasional bun, P refuses to eat the school’s food. I’ve been really surprised by this – I was sure that within a week, peer pressure would kick in, and I could stop packing P’s supplemental peanut butter sandwiches. After all, look at how much the other kids seem to dig the food.
There are many, many things I will miss about China; however, bathing my children in a bucket on the bathroom floor is not one of those things. Wee P seems not to mind, though.
Chris and I take one day a week to do some local sightseeing sans kids. Yesterday, we visited the Lama Temple, the Temple of Confucius, and Beihai Park. Here are some shots from our day.
