The Ecstasy and the Agony, and the Miscellany

The Ecstasy: My Brilliant Child

Today Thea and I went out to run errands because Micah was down for a nap, and Steve wanted to follow suit. We went to Princeton Market Fair to do a little shopping and have ice cream, then to Staples to pick up another box of Kodak paper and printer cartridges. On a whim, and since we were parked right in front, I decided to go into Marshall's. We've been on the hunt for size 13 summer shoes for Thea and sandals for Micah.

We were scoping out the selection of girls' shoes when Thea looks at a box that has a large, red Chinese character on the lid and says, "That's Ai Li's name." (Sarah/Ai Li and Thea share a birthday, Thea's a year older. The name is pronounced Eye Lee in English.) Since what little Chinese I know, I know that "Ai" is "love" ('wo ai ni' is I love you) - and the brand name for the shoes was Like Love printed right there on the box. I was a little freaked out that after ten months of language immersion school (and zero reinforcement at home), Thea's teacher says that she can make and understand jokes with them in Mandarin. Now she recognizes a character in a completely random context just blew me away. My daughter is near brilliant, at least in my mind.

The Agony: Despite her numerous flashes of brilliance, she's an airhead.

Sometimes brilliant people have disorganized little brains. . . .this afternoon on our errands, Thea took one of her white tigers along, and wanted to schlep him into the stores. This was common up until last year or so, but now she rarely takes them along in the car and even more infrequently does one or the other actually leave the car to go into a store. And I brought the curse down upon her by saying to her as we were traversing the parking lot to enter Barnes & Noble, "Don't be a Micah and have me hunting that thing down after you've left him somewhere." Micah constantly is leaving his smelly old Bunny Bear everywhere: he has filed Bunny Bear amongst the 15,000+ charts at my office, nearly tossed him out the window of the car, when Bunny Bear goes for the permanent Buh-Bye, I won't be terribly surprised. In Micah's hands, BB's day are numbered. But Thea is usually the more responsible of the two, especially where the tigers are concerned.

And our excursion proceeded as detailed above.

Until bedtime tonight. One tiger on her pallet on the floor, one tiger allegedly in my car. Until I go out to the car and turn on the interior light. About that instant that the back seat was illuminated, my brain received the thought that I don't remember tiger coming back into the car. I don't remember the tiger being with us since we were at our first stop, the Gymboree store or perhaps our second stop, Barnes & Noble. Damn, damn and double damn. That tiger has made innumerable trips to Maryland, to Indiana/Illinois, to Florida, to South Carolina/Georgia, to the beach in Delaware and has never been lost. Those tigers went to CHINA and back.

So I grab the phone and call Barnes & Noble - we found a Spy Case with a periscope in it, a cause of much excitement since she's been bugging me to build one just like Curious George did in the Spy Monkey episode (damn simian) and I haven't a clue. There it was right in front of me ready to go, if I'd had to I would have auctioned one of Steve's kidneys on eBay to get it. So perhaps in our mutual excitement over the periscope, Tiger got left behind. No dice. Not in the Lost and Found, not in the Children's section. (And might I add that calling Directory Assistance and asking for the telephone number of the local Barnes & Noble only to be given a toll-free number is not what I wanted at 9:50 pm when I was under the assumption that the store closed at 10 pm. (My bad on that one, it closes at 11 pm on weekends.) I had to run downstairs to the computer to look up the phone number.

So I called Gymboree, which was closed, though one of its staff is still there. As is Tiger. He'll be partying overnight at the Gymboree and I'll be darkening its door at 11 am when they open. I could have kissed the girl who answered the phone, and she was nice enough to put Thea's name on the tiger.

And when I went upstairs to tell her, the brilliant airhead was already 95% asleep.

I'm sure my headache and palpitations will eventually subside.

Other miscellany: We got our one-year post-placement packet from our adoption agency. In about 75 days it will be one year since we returned from China - and that's when the report is due. So I've already emailed our social worker to get the ball rolling. One that report is in, then we are DONE, DONE, DONE with our adoption agency. I think even if we were to consider adding another child, I don't think we could bring ourselves to use this agency in spite of a 'discount' it gives to returning adoptive families. I'll tell all once the final paperwork is submitted, approved and there are no further ties - but it's nothing more than what has been written about the agency on a number of adoption-related web discussion groups many, many times before.

Today marks ten months since Micah's adoption, yesterday was ten months since we actually signed a 24-hour custody agreement and brought him back to the Cruella DaVille room at the White Rose Hotel.

Yesterday we went to the Duke Farms Indoor Gardens for a tour with Thea's school. Micah and I have driven past this estate every week that we go to Summit School and I've always wondered about it, so this was the first chance to see at least a small part of the grounds. The indoor gardens are going to close for renovations at the end of this month, and won't reopen until 2010. The greenhouses were beautiful; orginally they were used by J.B. Duke to grow foods for the estate - both the family and the workers. After his death in the 1920s the greenhouses were unused until his daughter, Doris Duke renovated them in the 1950s. There is an Italian garden, an Edwardian garden, an English garden, a French garden, a Chinese garden, a Japanese garden, a Persian garden, a desert - and probably something else. Our guide was very good at bringing it down to school-age level. She also claimed to have an accent because she was born in England. I heard nothing vaguely English about her speech whatsoever - what came out her mouth sounded pure northern New Jersey/metro New York to me. Micah loved the fish in the Chinese garden's ponds. Fish-EEEEEE, fish-EEEEE he kept warbling as he was being dragged to the next display. Despite the day being cold and grey, there were a few frogs in the ponds as well.

Since we were just joining the field trip because Fridays aren't a regular school day for Thea, we went home to have lunch and hang out. The weather was dismal and rainy, so there weren't too many options for the afternoon other than going back to school for Spencer's birthday celebration, which featured an appearance from Silly Billy, the Lizard Guy (see http://www.thelizardguys.com/ if you doubt me). It was all pretty cool stuff: a Dumpy Tree Frog from Australia, a blue-tongued skink, a snake from the Everglades, an African tortoise, an albino Burmese python and a giant millipede (which only had 700 legs, the liar - and it would have been a candidate for a can of Raid, IMHO). My kids were willing to touch everything that was offered up for a one-finger inspection. I was delighted in a very secretive, evil sort of way that the boy who was part of a twosome who called Thea a baby enough that it bothered her and became an 'issue' was a total wimp about touching the animals. Insert evil demented laugh here.

Silly Billy himself was quite a sight. Think late 1970s/early 1980s. Think Styx, Journey or any other band with long hair. Except that with his rather slight frame, all that hair made this dude look like a pale yeti. Again, if you doubt me, check out the web site. I got nostalgic for music from my high school and college years and am that much closer to getting myself an iPod.