grandparent visit

My parents arrived for their first visit with Daniel last Sunday, which just happened to be Grandparents Day!  They were supposed to arrive on Saturday, but a delayed plane left them stranded in Philadelphia overnight.  :-(  Both kids were sick; Esther had been dragging around with a cold for a week, but was mostly acting like herself, while Daniel had picked up some stomach bug that made him horribly dizzy and was crawling around the house instead of walking.  (A side note on Daniel: he didn't feel like eating from Friday afternoon till Saturday afternoon, but then he broke his "fast" with several handfuls of potato chips, a tomato, and a bowl of ice-cream.  He's a teenager all right!)  So Sunday afternoon my parents mostly played with Esther while Daniel lay flat on his tummy and watched Chinese cartoons on the laptop.  I kept him home from school on Monday, both to make sure he was recovered and to give him some grandparent time.  He slept in and woke up unsure of whether or not he was better, but some airplane toys brought about a miraculous recovery and he was able to enjoy the rest of the day.  He especially enjoyed a shopping trip with Grandpa, which yielded one of the desires of his heart: a wireless computer mouse!  He is still rejoicing in that; he thinks it's great fun to be able to adjust the volume on his cartoons from five feet away.  On Monday evening we celebrated Mid-Autumn Day (aka Moon Festival) by eating a yummy Chinese meal followed by mooncakes, and looking at the moon.  Daniel made a call or two to China to wish people a happy festival and discovered that most of his friends in China had been unable to see the moon because of cloud cover.  We, however, had a spectacular bright full moon to enjoy.  My parents had to leave on Tuesday morning, so it was a short visit.  But it was good for them to be able to meet Daniel, and for him to now know who I am talking about when I talk about them!  Esther, of course, loved having them here as well.  She was so sad when they left that she told me, "Mommy, I think I'm going to cry!"

Along with my parents came: my dad's camera!  So we finally have some good-quality pictures of our kids.  Our own camera, now repaired, came back to us in the mail the day my parents left.  But in the meantime, my dad managed to take over 300 pictures during the less-than-48-hours that they were here.  Here are some of them, for your viewing pleasure!  Note Esther's chopstick technique in the dinner picture: it looks bizarre, but she actually manages to get food into her mouth.  The red box next to Daniel in the following picture is a box of mooncakes, and he is holding up the half-mooncake that he's eating.  In the last picture, that's my dad riding a scooter with Esther.  Go, Grandpa, go!!  :-)