I hear the piddle paddle of little feat on our bedroom’s faux marble floor. Elisa is gleefully chasing Yang as Yang makes her way to the restroom. Moments later, Yang is back to sleep but the piddle paddle continues. I lift my head up and see Elisa’s smiling face looking at me. I say Qù wán 去玩 (go play) to Elisa and she smiles, nods her head up and down, and grunts “ummm”. ...

It is 2pm and I am debating whether to ditch for the rest of the afternoon or not. I really need to write and I can seem to start a sentence. Maybe because I am on day five of an eight day consecutive work stretch, maybe it’s because I’m writing to the same level of challenge I had many years ago, but mostly because just because. I walk out to the 711 behind my office building and it is a glorious day. Bright sunshine, with interloping clouds to make it not too bright nor too hot. I buy a diet coke and m&ms and make my way back to my office. Stay or go. My irish (or is it catholic or is it sibling or is it middle class) guilt kicks in and I think it is too early to leave. True, I have been at the office since 7:20am, so technically, nearly a full day by most any standards except my own. But I really need to write, not write like I do in this blog, but write in a way that instructs our coders what they should write in order for them to write the code that makes our product what it is. I used to be one of those coders and miss that time and think what I do now would not be so useful to me if I was one of those coders. So I struggle with what is useful and what is not, and then next thing you know I checking email which is a complete waste of time. Then I decide that after a 1:1 I should keep with an intern, I will head out, on foot, and into the sunshine towards home. 4pm comes and I do just that. A quick subject only email to my co-workers that I’m leaving early leaving and then I am out. Onto the street, Zhichun Lu, headed east, head set on, listening to some old music that I recently rediscovered. This area of town doesn’t have a ton of foreigners yet on my walk, I encountered several, all white. First, late 20s woman, very fit, on bike and riding confidently. Then a series of old men, which is to say they are probably my age but looked a lot older to me. And they looked weird. One had orange hair. Another looked like he woke up on the street and hadn’t showed for days. Another was sun withered and smiled at me as I past. I was trying not to think of them as my future self-incarnated but the thought did cross my mind and linger for a block or two. Eventually, I walked into a subway station and took it to Sanyuanchao, my normal stop and then continued my trek home. Three of four or five times before, I had walked all the way from work to home. It isn’t actually that far – 9 miles as the crow flies – but long enough that I don’t do it often. It takes me 35 minutes to walk from subway station to home and I was enjoying some podcasts as I went. As I got close to home, three beggar women with three beggar children were walking in the opposite direction. The children looked oddly familiar. They had on old clothes that used to be Aidan, Lydia, or Elisa’s and which Lydia decided to give away a few weeks back. The beggar women smiled, didn’t asked for anything more, and recognized me as Lydia’s father. And then I was home. ...

The dentist is tell me to relax as she is poking me and asking me “does this hurt” when we both know that when she hits “the spot”, she won’t need to ask. She finally does with some kind of frozen Q-tip contraction and then for good measures verifies that it isn’t just one tooth that is causing pain, but two. It feels like a scene from Marathon Man where the Dustin Hoffman character is pursued to talk by a dentist with pliers. With the area of pain identified, I head for X-rays which are fairly painless but apparently not safe as the technician runs the triggering cord outside the office as he snaps the pictures. Then I sit and wait in the lobby while the film develops and the dentist figures out what it all means. I’m pretty sure what it will mean for me. ...

It is 6:32AM or there about and I leave the bedroom ready for a quick snack before taking Aidan to catch his shuttle bus. But Aidan is gone, having just left for the bus with Cui Ayi. I ask Yang’s mom Yihang why they left so early, that the bus won’t be there for another 10 minutes. She says “no problem, Cui Ayi can take him”. I say I know she can take him, but he will just be standing there and besides I actually like taking him. She repeats, “no problem, Cui Ayi can take him”. At which time I notice Lydia, standing on a chair, looking out her bedroom window for Aidan to pass below on his walk to the bus stop. ...

The happy couple got up in the morning and put on their loose fitting jeans and tees. They brushed their teeth and combed back their hair. Splashed a little water on their faces and left through the front door. They were of that age and of that look of love that meant they could leave the house without shower and still look put together. They walked the two blocks to their local coffee shop – starbucks had not taken occupancy yet – and ordered two cups of joe and a scone to share. He flipped through the sporting green while they talked about what to do with the rest of their day. ...

Lydia likes to draw and she works at it for hours at a time. As she’s gotten better at it, she asks for help less and less often which is good because her drawing long eclipsed anything I could do. We have drawings she’s made lying around our house and my office, her output is prolific enough and we are just lazy enough that we don’t capture them in a very formal way. Maybe someday we will regret that however I suspect not since we are such a transient tribe of five. ...

Last weekend was a three day weekend which I extended to four by taking Tuesday off. Some co-workers naturally asked where I was going but in fact there was no plan, just futz around, spend time with the kids and Yang, and decompress a bit. And the best thing about four day weekends is a three day work week the following week. So on the extra Tuesday I had off, I futzed around a bit, went to IKEA with Yang bought an unassembled chair that is actually comfortable so I can type these blog entries in style. We then planned lunch and immediately dismissed having lunch at IKEA. You might not think lunch and IKEA belong in the same sentence unless you are a termite, yet IKEA lunch is wildly popular here. In fact there were many more people in the IKEA lunch canteen when we left than the actual store. So we decided on a new place, a Belguim restaurant called Morel’s. Morel’s is not new to Beijing, we’ve noticed it since we moved her, but have never tried it. This would be the day. Yang’s friend’s Shirley met us there and for 88 RMB we got a three course meal, choice of beverage (beer, wine, cola), and coffee or tea. I ended up with two poached eggs on toast w/mushroom sauce, penne pasta, and desert. Around us were Europeans speaking French, none too skinny. It was a nice relaxed atmosphere, a fun experience, and reinforcing of why we live here. It made me glad I took the day off work. I noted as much to Yang. She said it was just a normal Tuesday. ...

The foreigner went to the foreign affairs section of the china DMV in order to take his driver’s test for the second time. The first time he took it was four years ago and he scored 92 out of a hundred with the passing score being 90. The foreigner needed to take the test again because he did a bad thing and that bad thing coincided with his having let a friend borrow points. The retest was part of the reeducation for the foreigner since he exceeded 12 points (after lending six) in one calendar year. ...

Five years ago today I checked two bags, boarded Air China flight 986 in SFO, and was on my way to Beijing. When I landed in Beijing Yang, Aidan, and Lydia met me at the airport to welcome me. I remember seeing Yang put Aidan on the ground, place a a flower in his hand, tell him to run to his father. Aidan ran straight to Jim Courier – the tennis pro – who also happened to be on my flight. Yang smiled, perhaps at Courier, and then it didn’t matter as I was reunited with them. It had been just over two months since they moved to Beijing and as you might imagine both Aidan and Lydia had changed a lot during that time. ...

She entered harvest house for her weekly shopping ritual. Grab a basket, down the aisle, pick up the lentils, pick up the tofu, pick up the vegetables, pick up the fruit, pick up the carrot juice, pick up the green tea, pick up the spice. After lingering in the vitamin aisle a bit too long she turned to see Steve, her old acquaintance from the bank. Steve was someone she knew from being in the same orientation program but they were never really close. Never really friends even though she tried. He was just too painfully shy for her to break through and he wasn’t worth the extra effort. Not when Eric was also in the class. Eric was simply a man. Confident, handsome, not always the brightest light but not dumb, and sure of his convictions. So she ended up in the same clique with Eric and eventually the other clique members drifted away and it was just him and her. And for some reason – she figured it was Eric’s father’s death – Eric became a hard ass. Hard ass as in environmental and ecological freak. He sold his car and biked everywhere. If the distance was too far, Eric would take public transportation. She was devoted to Eric and soon sold her car as well. Then Eric decided that a vegan lifestyle – mind you not diet, lifestyle – was the only socially responsible thing to do. So she ended up on the diet because, after all, she did most of the cooking. And it was this diet that caused her once bubbly personality to be subdued. More buddha like was how Eric called it. Others thought she had just lost her spirit, her life spirit. And it was true that Eric could be a bit harsh at times and that he liked it rough and that he liked her how he wanted her. And she did not like that at first but then was willing to try because she loved him so, and then once tried found relief in the submission. She then quit her job at the bank, after all the bank was some kind of evil company, and she dedicated herself to a simple life with her man. A simple life which included paying for these overpriced organic groceries. ...