This last week was a fun one for everybody--once we got over the minor stomach bug that circulated throughout at least some of the household! After Kevin and Eli recovered, I had a brief bout with (I'm assuming) the same bug that the boys had, but bounced back after missing only one day of class. We were able to resume normal weekly activities, and everyone even made it to International Day at TIS, where Karis performed with her 1st grade class (they were focusing on South Africa this year). It was so cute to see her dressed as an American (in her jeans and bandanna around her neck) amongst all of her classmates from different countries. The boys also wanted to get into the dressing-up, so we convinced them to wear their baseball uniforms (rather than the Kung Fu outfit Eli really wanted to put on, but was eventually convinced really had very little to do with his own home country's culture!)
The photos are of Karis during the performance and of the three oldest kids with Ms. Barbara (also dressed up for a performance), their surrogate grandmother here in China with G-Ma and Nana so far away.
We went to the park with another family on Saturday and endured several well-meaning Chinese grandmothers and their insistence that the kids were not dressed warmly enough, that their pants were too thin, and that Noah needed to have on some sort of body suit to ensure that his mid-drift did not get cold, thus resulting in a tummy ache for him! (Can't say I handled the badgering with as much grace rolling off of my tongue as I probably should have... Probably good that I'm still pretty limited linguistically as far as what I can say!) We had several Chinese friends over for dinner and a movie on Saturday night, and then taught the kids' SS class again on Sunday and had time to rest and study.
Each of the kids had a cute "something" this week that I thought was worth mentioning (at least for the grandparent's sake, right?!)
- Noah--walked across the apartment to come find me in the kitchen (while doing dishes) with Bo (the bunny) suspended in mid-air by Noah's clinched fists holding onto the fur on his back! Noah was excitedly squealing, obviously pleased by the fact that he had managed to open the rabbit cage, remove the small (and frightened!) animal, and make it to my said location. All survived without injury (except for me, who's heart definitely skipped a beat!).
- Hudson--discovered the best place to warm his hands during a cold ride while on the back of a bicycle is his mom's bare lower back (under her jacket and shirt)! Mom, however, is not so sure that maybe just wearing gloves isn't a better solution...
- Eli--introduced a new term to our family. After hearing me use the word "queasy" while talking to Kevin to describe how I felt on Wednesday when I came down with the before-mentioned bug, he tried to mimic this new addition to his vocabulary, saying, "Mom, I felt squeezy too on Sunday."
- Karis--at school, she uses a small piece of lined paper in order to write her spelling test each week. (As you can imagine, in a world where Chinese characters are the main form of written communication, there is not much need for lined paper, making it therefore a little hard to come by. So she's not totally well-practiced in this paper's use, and the pieces of paper themselves are quite small.) Since she is unable to write all 12 words down one side of the paper, the teacher has the class make two columns, with the numbers 1-6 down the right-hand side and 7-12 down the left. Karis has evidently gotten confused about this layout, however, and when she writes the numbers down the right-hand side of the page (rather than down the middle of the page), she ends up writing each of those words backwards. For example, this week's paper looked like this:
edir 2.
elims 3.
I thought it was so cute and impressive that she could see the words backwards as well as forwards that I considered not correcting her, but decided that not encouraging any dyslexic habits was probably a better long-term decision. We'll see what next week's test holds!
