It is Saturday morning and Yang tells me that we are going to Xie Dao (crab island) water park with Lydia's friend's family at 10am. I am 48 hours away from ending my oncall rotation and my initial thought is to play it safe and stay near an internet connection but it's been a quiet week so I decide to just go ahead and go.

Lydia's friend's parents are known to me as "Naomi's mom" and "Naomi's dad". They have three kids, all girls, with a fourth on the way, also a girl. In the five years we've lived in our apartment Lydia's been best friends with Naomi and then Naomi's younger sister Emily. We've had a family outing with them maybe once or twice a year; mostly it is just the kids playing with each other. The Naomi family is moving back to France after seven years in Beijing and have sold their car so I drive them in one of our cars while Yang drives the rest of the Allio clan in the other. Stuck in traffic on the Airport Expressway on the way to Xie Dao my work ankle bracelet kicks in and I get an automated page from work saying there is a problem which needs my "immediate" attention. The voice response system doesn't accept my acknowledgement so my backup is paged. My backup is also driving and the voice response system doesn't recognize his acknowledgement either. This causes the incident manager to get paged, which is not a good thing. Knowing this, I frantically go nowhere in traffic eventually making it to Xie Dao which is a zoo. It's not a water park, it's a people park. I park and the families minus me head to the water park. I spend the next three hours hunched over the computer, in the suburbs of Beijing, trying to resolve the problem in Latin America which I eventually do. It is not my first wasted Saturday with the kids but my first for this reason and it's not a good favorite feeling.

On Thursday the Naomi family left for France. They came by are apartment and had an early birthday party for Lydia who turns nine later this week. Lydia is old enough she will remember Naomi and Emily for the rest of her life, and they her. I still remember my best friend from the third grade. And just in case I didn't, he's on facebook. But unlike my early friendships which drifted apart naturally, Lydia's is being lost due to the nomadic nature of expatriates. The youngest of the three Naomi family children, Mililani, is two years old. She cried when she said goodbye to Lydia and Elisa.

This was also the week of my mom's birthday. My mom's first birthday without my mom actually around. I know it is sad for my dad. I know it is sad for me. I think about how proud my mom would be of my kids. About how lovely my kids are. About how lucky I am. Work ankle bracelet or not.