The first night I am back from my two weeks in the states Elisa walks towards the front door and asks our ayi to put on her jacket. She says she wants to go to “jenny lous” the small expat grocery store located on the first floor of our complex. Yang tells me this is my fault, that Elisa has been wanting to go to Jenny Lous every night. So I volunteer to take her and we have a nice father/two year old moment on that walk to the store. When we get there it turns out she wanted some candy, I of course oblige and she is happy.

There was a situation at Lydia’s and Aidan school that was anything but happy. A boy in Lydia’s grade (but separate class) was at recess and resting on top of some jackets in the playground. A driver leaving the playground was trying to take a bit of a short cut, didn’t see the boy, and dragged him under his car for 25 feet or do. The clearance of the car is smaller than the boy’s head. Cut a long story short, the boy by some miracle is “ok” if you consider being alive and not paralyzed despite three broken vertebrae in his neck and numerous internal injuries as “ok”. Meanwhile the school did not inform parents of the accident for two weeks and appeared to take efforts to cover it up. Parents found out about it when the father of the child blogged about it, here http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_6e64d4830100mkl6.html. I asked Lydia if she new about what happened, if she was in the playground. She said she saw it from the window and that the boy was ok. She didn’t seem upset or worried about it.

This morning at 8am Lydia pulled an Elisa.  She put on her jacket and was heading off to Jenny Lous. I went with her and on the way asked her what she wanted at Jenny Lous. She said she did not know what to call it in English. When we got there she led me up to the second floor walking up the escalator stairs since the store hadn’t started the escalator for the day quite yet. She knew what she was looking for but not where to find it at first. Then she pointed at a some cake mix, Betty Croker’s chocolate cake. I told her frosting would be good and she went with a milk chocolate mix. We then spent the next part of the morning making the cake with Aidan chipping in to beat the eggs. I was reminded of a story I heard on a TV show, that the reason you need to add egg to cake mixes is that it makes the cake mixes sell better. That that little bit of extra work makes the parent feel better; that they are actually adding value to the process.

We baked the cake, waited and hour for it to cool, then Lydia frosted it. Then we ate it. Well, most if it.