Aidan wakes me up at 6:15am and I am a bit groggy but not as groggy as some mornings. He wants to read me his English homework. Good morning class. Today I want to tell you about father. He is my father. His name is Vince Allio. He is a writer. He writes books. He goes to work by taxi. My father is tall and strong. He has short hair. He can play football and basketball. I love my father. Thank you. ...

It is Saturday morning, early, and I am sitting on the coach because the kids always get up early. I hear the piddle paddle of little feat as Elisa is running from the back bedroom into the living room. She emerges, wide awake, with a huge smile on her face. In her hand is Aidan’s old toy again which she is relentlessly firing apparently practicing for the Al Zawahiri kill. She is giddy as she points the gun and hears the toy gun’s fire and then sees me pretend to be shot. She runs out of the room looking for more victims and after dispatching the rest of the household returns to the living room to make sure I’m dead dead. Apparently watching CNN doesn’t count as dead enough so she fires some more shots and I splay across the coach. ...

When I got Aidan a bike last fall Yang questioned my intelligence. She also questioned whether I should have gotten Aidan a bike. It was a bit too big for him and he after a few valiant attempts he wasn’t able to master it. Then winter came and the bike sat in the hallway month after month, a constant reminder of my judgment. With spring warming up to summer temperatures it was time to try the bike and Aidan pairing again. Aidan was eager to learn and I was pleased the bike didn’t seem too big for him anymore. At first Aidan found many excuses about why he could not ride the bike, my favorite was that the screw holding in the left hand brake was sticking out too far. I kept reminding him that he could do it and he had to keep working at it. And then I did what all good fathers do, I left him alone to figure it out on his own. ...

I’m sitting courtside with Aidan watching Yang play the finals of the Side Park woman’s tennis championship when Aidan asks me if I think “mommy will win”. Yang’s opponent, a tall and strong Canadian was about to go up 2-0 and in convincing fashion. My unedited response was “no, she’s getting blown off the court” but I edited it for Aidan’s consumption to “mom’s opponent is really strong so far but your mom competes really well”. ...

Yang asks Elisa if she wants to go to America with me. Elisa says yes because her baba will miss her. Then Elisa begins to pack her little backpack. A little bit later in the morning I’m sitting at Starbucks with Yang before heading to the airport and after a few minutes, Cui ayi arrives Elisa sitting in her stroller. She is looking sad, I want to say forlorn but I don’t really know what forlorn means. I ask her for a good-bye kiss not expecting one since she in general is pretty resistant to it. This time she puckers up and pecks me on the cheek. ...

I’m up at 6AM and driving to the Oakland airport, boarding a Southwest flight to Burbank airport. I was told to fly there because its and easy airport to get in and out of. This turns out to be true as the plane front and rear doors both open and the plane empties out quickly. Car pickup is fast and I’m off driving to the first of three (or was it four) customers’ sites that day. ...

Two weeks ago the devastating earthquake stuck Japan and CNN reported that it could be felt as far away as Beijing. Not that we felt anything or know anyone who did. At least directly. Elisa’s best friend is a Japanese girl of the same age named Weili. Every morning and afternoon for the past year they play together. When I used to come home from work Elisa would come running up to me happily yelling “baba, baba”. Weili started to run up to be saying “aisha baba, aisha baba” for “aisha” is how you would say Elisa’s Chinese name. Then Weili just dropped the “aisha” part. ...

Back around valentine’s day I saw an advertisement for the Eagles concert in Beijing and decided it would be a great valentines present for Yang. I thought it was a great idea because after all these years of valentines days with Yang I’ve flat run out of ideas and truth be told I never had a ton to begin with. Then I noticed the ticket prices – 2580 RMB ($400 USD) for floor seats and 2080 ($320) for the other decent seats. I figured for those prices Yang should get to have sex with one of the Eagles, the only question being which one. So I talked with Yang a bit and ended up getting her some face supplies at Sophia instead. ...

I got an email from my old company’s payroll person which said We were just informed by the bank that the deposit for your last month’s payroll was rejected. The reason is the bank account name is not correct. Can you please double check with your opening bank and confirm your account information as below? Thanks. Given that communicating with the bank is a bit difficult (see my previous posts) I responded that nothing had changed with my bank account except I updated my US passport number. They said that wasn’t it, so I checked my bank book and it had my name as “VINCENTALLIO” without the space and payroll was trying to deposit as “VINCENT ALLIO”. I figured that has to be it, as the confusion about whether this is space in name and name order has caused many problems in the past. (If you don’t know, the Chinese is written with0ut spaces which has side effects when Chinese people write English). ...

Unless you are delusional your kids intelligence is almost always more advanced than your perception of their intelligence. You keep having these little epiphanies. A few recent ones, one for each kid. Elisa watching the snake show in Phuket and listening to the snake shaman tell a long and winding store about another snake shaman. The story was told in a thai english accent and went on for a bit. That night at dinner Elisa told Yang about the snake shaman who died because he drank alcohol before riding his motorcycle home (strongly this was a joke, as in the shaman didn’t die from the snake byte). I had no idea that Elisa could follow or understand such a long story in English. For Lydia, the epiphanies for me most often come up when seeing how she builds her crafts, mostly drawings. For some time now, she has clear ideas about what she wants to draw our build and recently has been able to do more of this herself including a book of cat drawings she made last week. With Aidan, in the past month I’ve noticed he’s making some new cognitive leaps and is using more analogies which I hadn’t noticed before. ...