She’s heard that before
I went downstairs to get Eliana from KidsPlace after our church service tonight. As we walked, Eliana was twirling and jumping and bouncing off the walls and tossing her stuffed animal that she brought and generally just being quite loud. Nothing out of the ordinary, mind you, but still loud.
About a third of the way down the hallway, she stopped dead in her tracks to whirl around and confess while catching a breath, “I am W-I-R-E-D tonight!”
She’s heard that a few times before.
Buddha belly
I woke up this morning fever-free...that’s the good news. Bad news is that I had to go back to work and found that the company did manage to survive without me for a few days.
After work this afternoon, Eliana was chattering away and keeping me company while I wasted time worked on our computer at the house. At one point, I stretched out in the chair with my interlocked fingers resting on my chest and legs crossed. Little Miss Smarty Britches walked over beside me, grabbed a hunk of my stomach with each of her two ‘tiny’ hands and rhythmically squeezed/released the aforementioned handfuls of stomach while gleefully chanting, “Buddha belly...buddha belly...buddha, buddha, buddha belly!”
Ah, kids. They’re great confidence builders.
She’s fearless like that
Well crud...literally. My temperature is 101.6 again this morning so I’ll be home yet another day.
I was talking with Eliana’s former daycare provider last night and she offered to come by this morning to pick Eliana up and take her to preschool. That was a blessing. I love having Eliana here but she needs to interact with her friends. Besides, some people from a local company called “Animal Planet” are bringing a honey bear, ferret and snake to the preschool today for the kids to see. If they allow it, I guarantee you that Eliana will handle the snake. She’s fearless like that.
Wanted: Grown woman for adoption
Source article by Zou Huilin for China Daily
A well-educated retired couple in Wuhan want to adopt a daughter.
Nothing wrong with that, except that they want a grown-up and well-educated woman and their criteria are as tough as those, as many people say, for the “Super Girls” competition.
It’s not that former Ministry of Construction expert Tian Zhendong and wife Ding Shuhui, a retired professor, don’t have an offspring.
In fact, their son is a computer science major who joined IBM’s Chinese branch after graduation. He is married to a woman who is highly educated, too. She is a dentist. But the two emigrated to Canada in 2000.
The elderly couple want their adopted daughter to be between 25 and 40, with a college or higher degree, but without living parents. She should be cheerful, kind-hearted, caring and unmarried. And she has to be living in the capital of Hubei Province.
But there’s more than something for the adopted daughter, too, in the bargain. The couple have vowed to leave their 96-square-meter apartment to her after “living happily” with her for three years. Such a house in Wuhan is worth 400,000 yuan ($51,282).
Till date, 103 women have attended the selection process, and the couple have shortlisted five of them.
“My son was 30 years old when he emigrated to Canada. Initially, I didn’t want him to leave China,” Ding told Wuhan Morning Post recently.
“But then my husband and I thought that as parents we should not be selfish, instead we should support him to develop his career abroad.”
But after he left, Ding began feeling lonely, especially when her husband was invited to deliver lecturers in other cities.
Her decision to let her son shift to Canada was not right after all, she thought. To overcome their loneliness, Ding and Tian talk to their son and daughter-in-law for up to two hours at times on the weekends.
But even that cannot fill the void left behind by their son and daughter-in-law. For six years, they have suffered their loneliness. And during one such moment they decided to adopt a daughter with the help of the local media.
Some people have alleged that the couple have used their apartment as a bait to get a daughter, and the women who want to become that have bitten it. But the couple deny the charge, saying that most candidates have done so because they were seeking parental love.
Wuhan Senior Resident Affairs Office officials believe adopting children is a good solution for such couples. Along with the local civil affair bureau, the office is working out ways to help them.
But Wuhan has 300,000 senior citizens who lead lonely lives, and most of them are resigned to their loneliness because, unlike the Tian-Ding couple, they cannot afford or would not like to go in for adoption.
Or so they said
I woke up yesterday morning at 6:00 am with a temperature of 101.2 and the chills. Being the company man that I am [gag], I swallowed a couple of excedrin to squelch the fever, took Eliana to preschool and headed over to work with the intention of holding out until lunch. My supervisor, the plant engineer, quit last week which leaves me as the only one in the engineering department and there were some things I really needed to take care of.
By 10:00 am, I was shaking so uncontrollably that I said “The heck with this” and went home.
I piled on a couple of quilts in my recliner and called Carmi to let her know that I was home. She wasn’t in her office at the time but I left a message on her voicemail. Around 11:00ish, she called back and greeted me with the news that she had arranged for me to go to the doctor at 2:00 pm. Thanks Mom #2! The way I felt at the moment, I didn’t see any way that I could drive myself there but it was a done deal and I would manage somehow.
I didn’t take any more medicine so by the time I made it to the doctor’s office right at 2:00, I felt like death warmed over. After sitting in the lobby for about 15 minutes, I was finally called back and the nurse checked my temperature which registered 103.3. She also gave me a strep test which I’d never had before so the gag reflex was definitely going on.
I sat in that stinkin’ room for 45 minutes before the doctor came in. He was caught in traffic or so they said.
He administered a flu test which I’ve never had before either. The strep test came back negative and the flu test was also negative.
The doc prescribed TamiFlu “just in case the flu test was wrong” and some other medication which I can’t read.
This morning, I don’t have the chills but my temperature is 101.6 so I’m going back to bed.
Two crafty girls
A relapse
Eliana had a relapse today and was hit with a high fever again. This time around it registered just under 103.
By the end of the day, she had been filled with an adequate amount of medicine and felt good enough to pounce on me.
