It is a lazy, hot, August afternoon and I ask the girls if they want to go for a bike ride to Jenny Lou’s. I need to buy some food for my latest daily diet experiment and I need to get the girls out of the house. Two birds, one stone. One stone, two birds. Aidan is attending the last day of the summer snowboarding camp in the outskirts of Beijing so for the fourth weekend in a row it is just the girls and I.

We get Jenny Lou’s and Lydia looks and finds the oatmeal which was her target. She like plain oatmeal with one packet of sugar. At 11, her mind is complex in a way adults can start to understand. When she grows up, thanks to minecraft, she wants to design houses. Her summer life is spent in large part on her iPad playing minecraft or watching videos. She occasionally draws. For her birthday I got her some proper sketch pencils and proper sketch paper. She drew this:

On the ride to and from the store I was paying super close attention to Elisa as I live in one of the most crowded sections of Beijing. Bike lanes converted to double parking lanes, scooters going against traffic, cars owning the right of way. Elisa likes to ride fast and mostly straight but she listens to me well and stopped at every intersection. She turned seven this week, maybe the most expressingly loving of the three kids. She will just walk up to me, hug me, and say she loves me where-as you see Lydia’s feelings, just as strong, more indirectly. Both kids are a lot like me. I think. I hope. I feel good thinking that they are like me. Elisa isn’t sure what she wants to do when she grows up, which is good, since she’s seven. On the bike ride home we hit an empty stretch of bike lane west of the North Korean embassy so I let Elisa speed ahead, piecing the air, with only her hair trailing.