Thanksgiving 2009

My mom equates this thanksgiving with Mary Tyler Moore's dinner parties.

This would be our first Thanksgiving without dad. Enough said.

Mom worked like a dog, cooking cleaning ironing(her favorite). New table linens were purchased, laundered and pressed for the expected 21 guests.
I brined and roasted a ton of turkey and there were 2 kinds of cranberry sauce.
When all was said and done, we had ten guests for dinner and we are now doing a million different dishes with turkey leftovers.
I woke the next day to find that there are almost no photos of people. In my tryptophan haze, it feels as if the day was all a dream.

zelda, ohhh zelda.

Hello lovers and friends,

Jiej here. Bill and I are heading back to Wisconsin today after a long Thanksgiving weekend. 'Twas hardly long enough. Baby Django is really taken with Zelda, I am really taken with having other people cook me food and bring it to me on the couch, and Bill is taken with MiMi (as usual).

We'll be back in a few weeks for a whole MONTH to vacation at Sipes Manor.

I leave you with a clip from one of my top-5 films (a very topical one at that).

Revenge of the nerds

Mimi loves candy... there is no question that my daughter has an unquenchable desire to eat candy all day every day.
Halloween presents a full package of bribing, deal making, embezzling and other crimes all in the name of candy.
Mimi asked me one day, when JieJie was little, how many pieces of candy did I let her have per day after Halloween.
Knowing that Jiej was far away, I bent the truth slightly.

"Jie Jie was only allowed one piece of candy per day", I stated.

Then , a few hours later, I hear Mimi on the phone with her sister on the phone.
Jie Jie is telling Mimi that I let her have five pieces of candy per day.

I grabbed the phone and asked Jiej why she would say such a thing.

"I just want Mimi to like me", was her reply. The candy battle rages on.



We have a huge amount of tiny boxes of nerds.

I find myself talking about nerds a lot lately and whenever I say the word, I think of this classic scene from American Splendor.
Mimi now says "revenge of the nerds" just like Toby.

Chinese New Year song

The children are preparing a song for Chinese New Year. The song is sung to the tune, "Darling Clementine". The choreography is pure opening cermonies at the Beijing Olympics.

I want to cry when I hear their sweet little voices.

Chinese school dodge ball

Mimi and I attend Chinese as a second language at University of Michigan. We go to school every Sunday afternoon from 3:00 until 5:oo.

Our dear friends, the Zini's attend as well. Six year old Anna Zini and Mimi spent their first 2 years together in Maoming.

The normal protocol for class is serious learning for the first hour and playing and learning for the second.

Our teacher, Miss May, always has a fun activity planned for the kids.
This week was no exception. Miss May gave each child a bean bag with numbers 1- 20 written on them in English.

She made them into 2 teams and put one team on either side of the room.

She would then call out the numbers in Chinese and the person holding that number could throw the bean bag at an unsuspectiing member of the opposite team. If someone got hit, they were out.

As parents, we laughed in disbelief, that she was going to give a group of kids permission to hit each other with bags of sand. The kids loved it, and they learned their numbers.

The Little Mermaid and her Prince

I got tickets for Mimi and Annabel to see the play "The Little Mermaid and Her Prince".

It was a tiny production, four castmates in all. The staging was very simple and they incorporated a lot of audience participation.
It was all children's theater should be, overacted, over the top, and very short. Whenever the lights went down for a scene change(three in all), Mimi would reach over to Annabel and whisper" I can see you". I think that she was making herself comfortable with the darkness. Darkness is a new fear in Mimi's repertoire.
Fun was had by all.

The Artist Always Known as Mimi

Mimi loves to take photos. My iphone is used most of the time, but there are occasions when she finds Terry's camera and proceeds to take 60 pictures of her nostrils.

Every once in a while , I will find some gems.
Mimi has great prospective and an eye for detail.
At Burton Elementary they have an art contest. This year the theme is "Beauty is"....

Here are some entry possibilities, I am thinking of(being the stage mother that I am.)