Family

Our family will make five soon and while Yang always wanted three kids, I had my doubts. Mainly around the numbers. Think about this: Five means longer waits at restaurants for a table. Five means two hotel rooms instead of two queen beds in one room. Five means two taxis or someone sitting on a lap. Five means a bigger car. Five means 2x2x1 seating on plane rides. Five means three bicycles instead of two w/kids seats. Five means a three bedroom house instead of two bedroom and forget about a den. And the topper ...

What is a man’s form of nesting? I’ve been wanting to buy some things for a few weeks now. Some out of need (cell phone, bike bag), some out of vanity (tee shirts), some out of obsession (head phones), and some out of insanity (R9 honda scooter). I was able to accomplish nearly all of these goals, minus the scooter which Yang told me was pure insanity in Beijing and if I were to be that insane the least I could do is buy a real bike. This way our kids would have some semblance of pride in describing their father’s death (“Well, you see, he was crossing on his scooter sanyuanqiao when his murse got entangled with a taxi’s mirror and the subsequent fall from the overpass led to his death”). ...

I read that the elusive northern passage was first navigated last summer due to global warming. Seems the ice in the Arctic melted enough that a ship could make it through without incident. The European explorers tried 600 years too early. When we moved to Lido, I looked on google earth to see how far away my office was and what the best path to it. The map revealed something interesting. We live just outside of the 4th ring road on the northeast corner of town and my office is on what is essentially 3.5 ring road in the northwest section. In my mind’s eye, I would bike directly west and then drop down south to reach my office. Instead, Google Maps revealed that my office is directly west of our home. This would be great if I was a bird. And since I am not a bird and even if I was, likely I would not be of the flying variety. Given these facts, I needed to find a roads. The problem is google earth did not show the perfect path and all the maps here are in chinese. ...

As Beijing makes its final Olympic preparations, we are making ours. Our major Olympic event will be the birth of child number three, with the tentative English name of Melissa Anne Allio and a Chinese name of 巢 where the first character is Yang’s Chao and the 2nd isn’t something I quite have a handle on yet. In addition to number three’s arrival, I do have a single Olympic ticket, for the closing ceremonies. Here is the story of how “easy” it was to obtain such a ticket. But first, a couple of Aidan/Lydia pictures just for fun. ...

I am five or six or seven or eight and in the swimming pool at South San Francisco High School, learning to swim, being rolled onto my back and flapping my arms unwilling to trust in buoyancy. I guess I should say five and six and seven and eight as I learned and failed every year took the same lessons and every year I flunked until they gave up and promoted me to the next level. That first level was called “sand flies” and the second level “dunkers”. I didn’t enroll in dunkers and I officially became a swimming school dropout. ...

It is 8:30am Saturday morning and Yang and I head to AmCare, the children’s and maternity hospital across the street from us. It is so close that having Yang walk there when labor comes seems like a reasonable option. It certainly seems safer than having her drive which she may end up wanting to do. An aside: In the states, I was the clearly the better driver. We go anywhere in the car, there was no doubt it was me driving. Here, well, I can’t say Yang’s driving has improved but her driving “fits” more with the rest of the drivers. Mine can seem like a nervous teenager by comparison. ...

We are not the type of family that works out everything out in advance. Take the case of Aidan’s and Lydia’s pre-school. When we moved to Lido we did not have a new school lined up for them. Yang did some initial research and didn’t find a school to our liking. Either not local hire friendly (read expensive, unless you have a fat expat packages) or too local. For a few weeks Yang drove the kids to their Chaoyangmen Wai school called Sanliturn kindergarten. The 30-60 minute drive each way was far from perfect. ...

June 1st is Children’s Day in China and Wikipedia tells me it is a common holiday in many counties although the only recollection I have of it is from China. Here it is bigger than Father or Mother’s Day, as children are such a focus. Since China instituted the one child policy, there are typically at least six adults looking after the one child. The two parents plus four grandparents. In many cases there is also an Ayi or two. It is not much of a surprise that the kids grow up thinking they are the center of the universe. I thought I was the center, and I was number seven of eight. The terms for older/younger brother (gege 哥哥, didi 弟弟) and sister (jiejie 姐姐, meimei 妹妹) have been extended to beyond the immediate family as practically no one’s immediate family has siblings anymore. ...

Aidan is sitting on our bed and telling me about the earthquake. He holds his hands our in front of him and shakes them side by side. He says the ground moves like this. Then he raises his hands face level and says the roof falls. And that many, many si le 死了 (dead). Schools where hit the hardest and after my last post I looked at pictures of small children lying side by side in the rubble and one picture simply of their backpacks. And if that doesn’t get to you, nothing will. ...

It’s Monday, and Aidan comes to our bed at 6:30am and tells me he wants to watch cartoons. I’m somewhere still lost in a dream about something most definitely not a cartoon but still manage to find the remote and tune into channel 42 – Kaku – the cartoon channel. I see a news broadcast, in Chinese of course since we are in China after all. The strange thing is the Kaku channel logo is visible so it must be the right channel. Aidan repeats his request for Cartoons so I flip through each channel one by one more so because I want sleep than I want him to have cartoons. They are all showing the same news broadcast. All 60 or so cable channels we have. ...