I'm sitting on our bed watching the 2007 baseball playoff highlights. This is the first time I've watched baseball highlights in Beijing since I lived here. At least baseball highlights in English. And of American baseball, not Japanese baseball highlights shown during NHKs English news broadcast. The highlights come over the computer, on this new service called Joost, through a deal with MLB. It's the only thing on Joost worth viewing.

I'm watching as Yang gives the kids a bath. She normally does this, when she's home, although most mothers of her status in China defer this task to the Ayis. Aidan is first out of the bath, wrapped in towel. A few minutes later I hear something being dragged across our faux wood floor. Coming down the hall...past the bathroom...into the entryway of the bedroom..and then finally visible by me on the coach. At no time did I consider standing up to take a look, MLB highlights and all. Then I see Aidan, dragging his latest lego creation into the bedroom. He says, "look bobbi, I made ship". And the damndest thing is, it does look like a ship. See for yourself:

And the second damndest thing is, I have no idea where he learned how to do that. I know for sure, it wasn't from me. Once, he asked me to make him a house out of legos and what I came up with could only be called a house in abstract art terms. I'm also pretty sure he didn't learn how to do this from Yang. Or inherit the skills from either one of us. Somewhere in the Chinese/Italian/Irish gene mix, he must have gotten the lego gene.

Then Lydia is out of the bath and once dressed decides to drag her toy teddy bear to me. I'm still watching baseball highlights. Lydia's teddy bear is about twice her size, one of these big fluffy bears. She drags her bear right over Aidan's ship and the ship breaks. Aidan screams and Lydia says sorry, not on purpose. She doesn't seem terribly sincere. Aidan has a murderous look in his eyes and walks towards her, but then thinks better of it. Aidan is ultimately a sweetheart. And besides, Lydia probably would have whacked him.

Today when I came home, Aidan ran up to me, wrapped his arms around my legs, and swung like a monkey. Then he guided me to the collection of plastic animals he layed out on our living room floor. Let me just say, we have lots and lots of these plastic animals. And I'm not entirely sure where they all came from. Maybe they mate. Anyway, Aidan said he made a zoo, and it did kind of look like one, with animals grouped together they way he had them. Elephants with elephants, tigers with tigers, giraffes with giraffes.

(Aidan and his animals. The ping horse is Lydia's contribution)

All this toy stuff gets me to thinking of when I was a kid, and Yang was a kid, what did we play with? I'm pretty sure I didn't do much with legos or have a suitcase full of plastic animals (suitcase is not an exaggeration). I remember being bored playing with plastic soldiers. I remember a bunch of games in the game room. I remember being excited by the toy gifts at Christmas and birthday  -- but I can't quite put my finger on specific toys I played with at Aidan's age. For Yang's part, she tells me she had like one rag doll and sticks to play with as a kid.

I'm not sure what this all means, if it means anything at all, but I think our kids have a fairly high Toy IQ and I think this is a good thing.