No, No

Sharing

My daughter was nice enough to share her fruit snacks and raisins with Elmo.  Mommy and Daddy are glad that we discovered her charitable act before Elmo got too sticky. 

No batteries needed

There's a toy store next door to our neighborhood supermarket and considering how many parents take their kids to the supermarket, it's a great location.  Today, during a toy store detour, my daughter tried to figure out the intricacies of an Etch-a-Sketch.  She turned the dials, looked at the screen and asked my wife, "Momma turn on?"

My Olympic Moment

My first memory of a global event was of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games held in Los Angeles.  A cycling event actually took place in my home town some 60 miles south of Los Angeles and I watched riders of unknown name and nationality whiz down the main street.  I don’t have any recollection of the Soviet boycott but I do have a few “communist”-related memories. 

My elementary school caught the Olympic hoopla and my second grade class was chosen to represent China.  I distinctly remember my second grade teacher asking if I knew what the Chinese flag looked like.  As the grandson of a devout Nationalist, I began to describe the flag as, “Red, white and blue like the American flag, except that there is one big white star.”  A classmate of mine just happened to be wearing a t-shirt bearing the flags of the world and I began scanning his shirt for the flag I described.  I had no luck, but my teaching identified a red flag with gold stars as the Chinese flag.  My second grade eyes couldn’t believe that, “CHINA” was printed below the flag she identified. 

I thought that my classmate’s shirt must have had a typo but I didn’t protest.  I couldn’t reconcile the flag on my classmate’s shirt with the flag hanging in my grandfather’s room, so that night I asked my mom about it.  That’s when I found out why the international letters my grandfather addressed ended with, “R.O.C.”  Now, in 1984, communist was a bad word I was assured that we were part of the “good” China. 

Flash forward a few days to the “opening ceremonies” held on the playground.  As the only Chinese kid in the class, I was naturally selected to carry a construction paper version of the “bad” China’s flag.  I dutifully did my duty and, since nobody else wanted the flag after the ceremonies, brought the flag home.  I suppose it was a fortunate thing that it was my mom rather than my grandfather, that first saw me take the flag out of my backpack.  She instructed me to quickly hide the flag before my grandfather saw it so I tossed it behind the family room sofa.  I have a faint memory of throwing the flag away in the outside trash can a few days later. 

Things have changed quite a bit since 1984.  On my first trip to China in 1994, the sight of a red flag with gold stars still spooked me but I suppose I was paying more attention to the number of Mercedes Benz S-classes and BMW 7-series I saw parked outside the restaurant I was dining at. 

Potty

  vs.

We’ve had a Baby Bjorn potty seat for six months now.  My daughter treats it as more a novelty item than something she uses consistently.  Actually, for a few of those months she was scared of the potty.  One of the first time she successfully used the potty, I congratulated her a bit too loudly.  Since we keep the downstairs potty in the shower, I think my voice echoed a bit too much for her.

My daughter will still be in diapers for a while, but this past week she started requesting to use the potty before she had to go.  Hopefully this is another step towards diaper-independence.  Today I asked her to use the potty every two hours or so.  Most of the time, she was able to squeeze something out since she was looking for praise from daddy. 

This week, we also started to use the a potty ring.  My vote is definitely for the potty ring.  The Baby Bjorn advertises itself as easy the clean, but it can’t compete with simply flushing the toilet and wiping down the ring.   We decided to purchase a potty ring since cleaning the Baby Bjorn after a #2 is not the most pleasant of tasks.  The main drawback is that the potty ring doesn’t protect wandering hands from touching the sides of the toilet.  I’m not too sure what will happen when she has to use a potty outside the house.  I guess we’ll stock up on Lysol and Purell.