I am finally getting back to finishing up the story of our road trip back in...oh, October? Yeah, I'm a little behind!
That Friday night at Grace Fellowship was a really significant time for us. On Saturday morning we got up (Daniel did not want to get up!) and after a delicious breakfast with the friends who were hosting us, we headed out to the zoo to meet up with another family. The wife and I have been good friends since high-school, and their older son is one of Esther's very best friends, whom she was very sad to leave behind her when we moved. It turned out that my dear friend had a conference and couldn't come, but her husband and two boys made it.
When we got to the zoo, we arrived at just the right place and time to see two orangutans crossing the O-line. This is always one of the highlights of the zoo, and I was thrilled to have caught it! That was one of the few fun parts of my morning, though. Daniel was briefly interested in the orangutans, then wanted me to give him change to put into the vending machine. A couple of times he has put money in just to make change and gotten more out than he put in, so he was convinced he could make some money. I refused to give him my change, and he got highly irritated. I think he was already exhausted from the intensity of the couple of days before, and hadn't gotten enough sleep. I had envisioned the zoo trip as being us adults chatting and getting caught up while kids ran around and enjoyed animals, but it happened to be an unusually warm Saturday and the zoo was as crowded as I have ever seen it, so the kids had to stick close to us. And I discovered that Daniel couldn't actually see some of the animals. The half-grown lion cubs were out and were chasing each other, batting at things, and acting like playful kittens--but Daniel literally could not see them. They were only about 30 feet away, and he was using the zoom focus on our camera to try to figure out where they were. He did manage to make out the elephant later on (and I was delighted to see the new habitat!), but he was not having a particularly good time and made sure I knew it. So for me, most of the zoo trip was occupied by Daniel hanging onto my arm, voicing a steady stream of complaints, and making it very difficult for me to talk to anyone else. Tim and our friend did get caught up, and Esther loved, loved, loved seeing her good friend. They grabbed hands almost as soon as they saw each other and held hands most of the way through the zoo. Soooo cute! So we were glad we came, but sorry we couldn't show our friends the funny, friendly side of our boy. By the time we were walking back to our parking lot, he was lagging about ten steps behind me (no matter how much I slowed down!) and walking like a zombie. He and Esther both fell asleep promptly in the car.
We went straight on from the zoo to a Sichuan restaurant to meet our good Chinese friend from the night before. She treated us to a delicious lunch, which Daniel especially savored. Daniel did not have any more profound problems or observations that he wanted to share, but he did perk up and was pleasant to be with.
We had been going to try to do an afternoon activity with the friends we were staying with, but by the time we got back it was late afternoon and we ended up just hanging out at their house instead. I'm sure that was better for Daniel. There were lots of other people that we really wished we could have seen while we were in DC, but we had to accept that we couldn't see everyone in one short trip, especially not without stressing out both kids!
We had debated going to our old church on Sunday morning, or trying out a Chinese church, but decided that that would be too much for this point in time. So on Sunday morning we set out towards home. We managed to make a quick detour to see a good friend and her baby. Daniel was, once again, not his most pleasant self, but it was a short visit.
On the way home we decided to cut over to the Blue Ridge Parkway for part of our drive. It was close enough to fall that there were some beautiful leaves, while the weather was still warm and pleasant. Daniel was quite grumpy about our stops at first, and insisted that he would stay in the car. But at one stop we wanted to go for a little walk, so he decided to get out with us. At the edge of the parking lot there was a bear-proof garbage can. Daniel, naturally, noticed that the can was different from ones he has seen before and wanted to know why. I replied that it was because there were bears in the area and the can was specially made so that they can't get into it to eat garbage. He was amazed. "There are bears here? Who put them here?" (Can you tell that he's a city boy?) I explained that the bears just live here. He wanted to know what they eat. I explained that they eat lots of things that they can find in the woods, like berries from bushes or fish from a stream. Again, he was amazed. "There are fish in the stream? Who put them there?" Hmm, it seems to me that somebody needs some natural science education! He did seem to find the walk interesting and pleasant, so maybe there's still hope that we can turn him into an outdoors boy...at least a little more than he is right now!
Later we went for a walk that included a bridge over a fairly big river, and Daniel particularly enjoyed watching (and listening to!) a motorboat zooming under us. That was the stop where, when we got back in the car afterwards, we had an "incident." The kids had been picking at each other the whole drive and making both of us crazy. Esther was fueling a great deal of it, by contradicting every. single. thing. that Daniel said. (If he said, "I'm hungry," she would say, "You're not hungry." Very annoying.) So at this stop, just as Tim was getting ready to pull out of our parking spot, Esther let loose with a blood-curdling wail of anguish, which seemed to be directed at Daniel. Once she calmed down enough to talk, we discovered that it had to do with a rock. I had given her permission to keep one of the pieces of gravel that she had picked up on the walk. Daniel had seen her holding it, assumed it was not permitted in the car, and taken it upon himself to grab it from her and toss it out the door. So we retrieved the rock, suggested to Esther that using her words to tell us about a problem was preferable to shrieking, and suggested to Daniel that it would be better to tell us if he thought Esther was doing something she shouldn't rather than taking care of it himself. Argh. Helping kids who are not used to having a sibling relationship learn how to navigate one is hard! Not that sibling relationships are easy to start out with.
After that incident the rest of the trip went pretty smoothly. And by Sunday evening we arrived home with a very full and mostly good four days behind us.
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