Friday, September 16: Tim's birthday! Tim has been dreaming of putting a game table (most likely pool or ping-pong) in our basement since the day we chose this house, and was talking about how much he'd love to own one even before that. So we took the plunge and ordered a convertible pool/ping-pong table, to arrive on his birthday. It is not full-size, but it's just for fun, and it's plenty big enough for that! The table came in the morning, so Tim and Esther got started on putting it together. Tim had to teach labs all afternoon, followed by a meeting, so he came home a little late. By this time Daniel was home and eager to work on a project (he loves projects!). So Tim and Daniel continued the work of putting the table together while I made Tim's special-request birthday dinner, a dish he invented and calls cheesy chicken and rice. (It's chicken cut into bite-size pieces and fried with garlic and salt, then stirred together with shredded cheddar cheese and brown rice. Yum!) For dessert, gluten-free yellow cake with strawberry icing. Esther apparently likes that recipe, because she ate more of it than I've ever seen her eat of a cake before.
Saturday, September 17: In honor of National Gymnastics Day, Esther's gym put on an exhibition at the mall. Esther's class went through a warm-up routine and then showed off some of the moves they have been learning. Esther is one of the best at doing the moves, but still needs some work on paying attention to what she is supposed to be doing! She loved all of the attention and excitement and was awfully cute, even dancing for a while to the music they had on, and doing cartwheels off over by herself when her class wasn't doing anything. The more advanced classes also demonstrated their warm-ups and some of their skills, and the team gymnasts performed routines. A couple of the girls (daughters of the gym owners) are performing rhythmic gymnastics at level 9, the highest level. It was super cool to watch them! I kept thinking that this was a level of performance I would normally only get to see on TV, and here I was sitting on the floor five feet away! Esther loved watching everything--she has long had ambitions to be like "the big girls," and is now bugging me non-stop for gymnastics shoes and a ribbon. :-) She already has a hoop, which she is practicing throwing and catching like the big girls. Daniel was bored out of his gourd, felt that we were showing rank favoritism to Esther by spending so long on her activity when we had never spent so long watching him do something (never mind that we haven't had the opportunity yet!), and alternated between grouching at me and sleeping with his head in my lap. At one point when Esther got up from my lap to go talk to somebody, he got ready to take over her spot--more, I think, as an act of territoriality than as an act of affection, although there are times at home when he does like to sit in my lap just to be close to me. Except for his attitude, it was a really fun afternoon.
Tuesday, September 20: We had a Chinese student from Tim's university over for dinner. Last year there was no student from China there; this year she is the only one. She is a little bit of a non-traditional student, who has already been working for several years but wants to further her skills in graphic design and is doing so by taking classes in the U.S. She chose this university because she knew there were not many Chinese people in the area and she would be forced to speak English. Our dinner-table conversation was partly in English and partly in Chinese. She and Daniel at one point bonded over imitating friends who speak with a "Dongbei" accent ("Dongbei" means "Northeast," but apparently when you're talking about accents it refers to something quite specific, not just someone who hails from the northeastern part of China). Esther was very zealous for "auntie's" attention. At one point Esther got down from her chair, walked over to auntie's seat, took her hair in one hand and auntie's in the other and compared them. Ever since we moved to this area Esther has been very aware of anyone else who has black hair like her.
Thursday, September 22: Tim's university had their annual parade as part of homecoming weekend. Various community organizations marched in the parade, including Esther's gym. So she was invited to come march and throw candy. Parents were allowed to march along with smaller kids. Then Daniel said that he wanted to march too, and I figured it would be okay, so all four of us came to the gathering place. It turned out that they needed someone to carry the sign, so Daniel and I volunteered for that job, while Tim marched with Esther. It was fun! Although unfortunately, I forgot to bring a camera. I especially enjoyed looking at the creative costumes of the college student organizations in the parade, and watching the older gymnasts flip their way down the street. Esther loved throwing candy, and apparently went through it all before they had gone very far. Towards the end of the parade she did a little dance for the crowd. (I didn't see this, but Tim told me.) When we got to the ending point, we got off the road into the grass and watched the rest of the parade go by. Daniel especially loved the fire engines rolling by blaring their sirens and throwing candy out the windows. Afterwards we got to talk to a play-date friend of Esther's and to our Chinese student friend. I overheard Daniel asking her what she thinks about learning English, and whether she thinks it's difficult.
Saturday, September 24, morning: Our town has an annual festival. There are some booths up and down the main street, and rides set up in the post office parking lot. I took Esther last year, and she had been talking about it ever since. So this year I took both kids, while Tim stayed home to work. Even a month ago I'm not sure I would have dared to take both kids out to an exciting environment by myself, but it went great!! Daniel was rather impatient about me stopping to talk to people that we met among the booths, but once we got to the rides he was a very happy camper. The first one he picked was a sort of ferris wheel shape, but it goes around much faster and you can swing your seat back and forth and even do a complete flip in it. Then he went on a super-fast rotating ride with Esther (I went with her on it last year, and was quite happy not to repeat the experience!), and then back to the ferris wheel. Esther did her rotating ride, then a stint in the bounce house, and then a different rotating ride. (I remember those days when I actually liked being dizzy...but they are long gone!) Then she really, really, really wanted one more ride, so she used her own money to buy tickets for a ride where you sit in a swing and then the ride goes around and around and the swings fly out sideways. Meanwhile, Daniel's middle school band had a scheduled performance around the time we were there, and I cannot tell you how many kids yelled out, "Hi Daniel!!" He truly seems to be popular! A couple of girls were trying to teach him their names, and asking him if he had seen another student who is a friend of his. Esther and I saw some people who we knew, as well.
Saturday, September 24, afternoon: We rushed home from the festival to get ready for an afternoon birthday party that Esther had been invited to. We had already wrapped the present and painted Esther's fingernails and toenails (it was a teaparty, fancy dress encouraged!), but we had to get her into her dress. By the time we were ready, it was clear that I didn't have time to cook lunch, so we decided to pick up fast food on our way over. Well, that didn't happen. About halfway there, somebody in a gold SUV decided it would be a bright idea to go zipping across the highway and try to enter the cross street before the two cars in front of us, who were both turning right into that same place. I was just commenting to Tim what a crazy idea that was when--BOOM--we heard the sound of the gold SUV crunching into the driver-side door of the first of the two turning vehicles. Tim swerved as far left as he could to try to get away and ahead of the accident. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a large object approaching, and then the second of the turning vehicles collided into Daniel's door. By the time I registered what was happening, it was already over, and I knew we were all okay (it had just felt like a hard bump). Tim pulled over to the shoulder on the other side of the highway and checked out the situation, and then we resigned ourselves to waiting while everything got sorted out. Amazingly, no-one in any of the vehicles seemed to be seriously hurt. The driver of the first turning car, a red SUV, was complaining of arm pain, but otherwise all right. Everyone else was able to get out of their vehicles and walk around. A person who had witnessed the accident but not been involved waited with the driver of the red SUV and talked to her to help keep her calm. We used our cellphone to leave a message for birthday friend's mom, letting her know that everyone was fine but we might not make it to the party. Eventually firefighters showed up, cut the driver's-side door off of the red SUV, and took the driver away in a neck brace (I think just as a precautionary measure). Another woman appeared near the gold SUV and the group of unhappy looking young men who had piled out of it. A woman with magenta hair arrived and put her arm around the driver of the car that had hit us, who was looking quite distraught. Two police cars showed up with sirens blaring and an officer started getting down everybody's registration information and recording our accounts of events. At some point in these proceedings a tow truck had come. The driver came to look our car over, asked Tim what year it was, and commented, "They may just decide to total it." What?!? So we started taking everything out of our car, just in case. Esther's friend's mom called back to see how we were and to offer any assistance, including borrowing her car. Once we knew that we were not going to be driving anywhere in ours, we called her back and asked if she could possibly pick us up. I hated to do that in the middle of a birthday party, but we absolutely did not know anyone else's phone number. She graciously agreed, and so after all the emergency vehicles had gone on their way and the other people involved in the accident had been picked up, we stood by the side of the road in a pile of our random car stuff and waited for our ride. The tow truck driver kindly waited with us. The kids were champs throughout this whole ordeal (especially considering that we hadn't eaten lunch!) Daniel was pretty shook up--he had been sleeping before the accident occurred, and woke up to loud noises and sensations of swerving and bumping. But he acted calm, followed directions, and was a huge help getting all of our stuff out of the car and making sure Esther stayed away from the road. Esther was cheerfully interested in the whole thing, although she did start complaining of hunger during the latter part of our wait. Eventually, our friend arrived to pick us up, and we went on to the birthday party for a brief while before borrowing her car and heading back home to make insurance phone calls. And boy, did we enjoy the heart-shaped chicken salad sandwiches, the cheese cubes, the strawberries and the cupcakes! Although it was an unpleasant experience, and is continuing to be so, I am mostly thankful. Thankful that we are all okay. Thankful for a stranger who cared enough to stay and keep a rattled driver calm, and help the police sort out what happened. Thankful for a friend who left in the middle of her own child's birthday party! to pick us up by the side of the road, and who moreover let us use her car until we could get a rental figured out. Thankful for the other mom at the birthday party who watched all seven kids while our friend was picking us up (I didn't even know when I asked that favor that Dad wasn't home). Thankful for the mom of Esther's former daycare buddy who happened to drive past us and turned around to come back and check on us. Thankful for the tow truck drivers who wouldn't leave us to wait alone. And thankful that we have insurance. (The driver of the gold SUV, as far as anybody can tell, did not. Nor are they making themselves easy to find.)
Sunday, September 25: A family at our church sponsored a youth outing, which mostly ended up being their kids, but Daniel and another church friend of his went along. Daniel was so excited that he was practically dancing in the parking lot before they left! It was his first ever outing without us, except for school, so it was a big deal. And it went well! They went for a buffet lunch (I heard that Daniel was particularly fond of the ice-cream bar, no surprise!), waded in a waterfall, rode the cable car at a state park, and stopped at Dairy Queen on the way back. Daniel tried to buy a soft drink at a vending machine and got back more change than he put in, so he got all excited and turned most of his paper money (that we had given him for the trip) into coins in hopes that it would happen again. Later, at Dairy Queen, he had a hard time picking out which flavor of blizzard to get, so the adults had him try a bite of their youngest son's blizzard, leading younger son to burst into tears. So Daniel quickly dug out fifty cents and bought younger son a treat, making everybody happy again. Daniel told me at the end of the day that he had had a really good time.
And there you have it: two birthday celebrations, a gymnastics exhibition, a new friend, a parade, a festival, a car accident, and an outing, all in a week and two days.
1 comment:
wow. I'm sorry to hear about the wreck, but I am happy that you had help.
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