It was Sunday so my relatives went to religious services while my cousin's husband and I watched grandma and my cousins' kids.
We read a Diary in the Life of a Spider in English and translated it into Chinese for my grandmother. It's definitely not my favorite kids' book of all time. But like I've said before, this summer is turning into good exposure therapy. Ahem. We also practiced having her look for the "I"'s in the book. There was also some princessish mermaid book with obscenely anorexic Caucasian characters. Le sigh. We tried charades--my grandmother thought it was hilarious to see the little ones pretending to be crocodiles and bunnies and elephants. We colored. Markers these days are a.m.a.z.i.n.g. Even my grandmother had fun. Hangman proved to be a bit tough for the pre kindergartener and 3yo but I was impressed with how much they could do. Then we eventually made our own pizza dough.
We had an enormous lunch with vegetarian food from the temple. For an afternoon snack, after the kids swam and I went to retrieve belongings chez moi, we made silly faced-pizzas with zucchini and carrots. It's amazing how when you're not the parent, it's so much easier to get kids to think cleaning up as a special helper is the most fun thing in the world. We also did a dose of calcium via yogurt. And I had my cousin's daughter pick out her favorite carrot to snack on--I love that the Boston organics sometimes come with carrots with the leaves still on top. They're delicious in salad and soup stocks! And so pretty!
For dinner, after everyone else left, I made lettuce wraps with fresh sauteed carrots, zucchinis and garlic scapes with sesame oil, focaccia pizzas, and some other veggies. And half a bottle of heffenweizen each. Bliss.
Grandmum's now on her evening snack of mango sorbet and trying to get me to eat ice cream. We have an awesome adapted post-it note written communication system going for times she can't hear. She sang me her favorite song.
I'm exhausted. But it's a good kind of exhaustion.
Word of the day: Tomorrow
Lessons learned of the day: Parchment paper and toaster ovens do not get along. Thankfully, toaster oven fires are also easy to put out. Oy vey.
Gram's story of the day: http://insearchofanothertime.blogspot.com/2011/07/grams-story-of-day.html#links
Current Read: It's kind of funny that I'm concurrently reading The Proust Project...Edited by Andre Aciman... 28 authors were asked to choose a favorite passage from In Search of Lost Time and comment on it in essay format. There's a certain level of parallel universe irony going on within the passages chosen that does not escape me.
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