Festival of the Autumn Moon

JieJie and MeiMei had a great day, playing with visitors and family, riding the plasma car and scooter around the new, empty house, and eating mac and cheese well past bedtime after spurning the wonderful Chinese dishes Ping cooked for the holiday.

Last year, when the September moon was full, and MeiMei had been with us about a week and was just a year old, we celebrated moon festival in Guangzhou, carrying lanterns from 7-11 illuminated by birthday candles down to the Pear River, to watch the boats full of lanterns pass by.

This year, we did not go outside to gaze at the moon. We scrunched down by the bedroom window to see it. JieJie said we should each make a wish. An adoption wish, she said. Hmmm. OK.

Her wish was a secret. Mine was not. I told the girls that on Moon festival day, when families come together, that their father and I were thankful for the tummy ladies who had given birth to our daughters, and that I hoped as they looked at the moon they would know that we were taking good care of their babies. JieJie didn't say anything, but I'm sure what went in will percolate up to the surface in a few days. MeiMei just wanted to have her toes tickled. "Booove!" she said, to get me to move over. "Booove!"

Later, when the girls were asleep in the bright moonlight, I said to their father, "On nights like this, I really wish we had another.''

He said, "You read my mind."

To be continued.

MeiMei Turns 2

And what a vision she is in her taffy-green party dress, celebrating.

Headlines

JieJie Publishes Newspaper: The Horrible Cat News in which a burglar steals Mama Cat's book while she is putting the kittens to sleep.

MeiMei Hones Gymnastics Skills. Well, OK, One Trick

JieJie Gives Ping a Grammar Test; Ping Scores 100

JieJie and MeiMei Pee in Potties Across the Midwest;
Undie-Clad JieJie's First Public Toilet Visit, at Cleveland Airport, Ends Tense Flight for Mom

Mom Longs for Day She Can Write a Paragraph Without the Word "Potty"

MeiMei Gets First Haircut

The Girls, Visiting Friends

Is JieJie really aiming the ray gun at her little sister's head? Has sibling rivalry taken on a cosmic dimension? Stay tuned for the latest developments.

The Naked House

Toilet training in our house has become something like a dissertation. We work on it for hours every day, and every day we make a teensy bit of progress. It's also as expensive as an advanced degree. To help JieJie over the rough patches we have invested in a staggering array of potty accessories, including the travel "potette," the Kandoo deluxe toilet training kit complete with frog toilet flusher) and the tissue paper cutouts called Toilet Targets.

Then there is sibling rivalry, the great unharnessed natural resource that keeps JieJie on track for kindergarten. Every time JieJie wants to pee in a pull-up, I cruelly trot out MeiMei and lead her to the potty, which is a sure-fire way to send her older sister racing to beat her to it.

MeiMei has been toilet trained somewhat miraculously by Ping, our au pair from China who deserves her own headline. At 22 months, she is a potty chair pro, although she is frightened of the grownup potty, even when it has the kandoo frog throne on it.

JieJie does not think undies are comfortable, no matter how they appeal to her fashion sense. I know some day she will fall victim to elegant lingerie, but at this point panties don't feel right, so she pads them with a panty liner. She found these in the cabinet and when she asked about them, I told her ladies wear them sometimes in their panties. She immediately latched on tot his idea. After all, they make her undies feel more like diapers. ) Which brings us to Pods, another brilliant marketing scheme and major expenditure. A pod is essentially a very thick (think futon) sanitary napkin created for the purpose of -- you guessed it -- making undies feel like diapers.

Mostly, though, JieJie prefers to wear a diaper or nothing at all, and so the default uniform has been a top with no bottoms. The girls spend a lot of time with no pants on, and all of us have gotten used to bare bottoms.

All of us except the repairman who came to fix the icemaker. He managed to politely inquire as to the girls' ages without comment on their state of undress.

A Brush With Fear

A drunken driver clipped our car on Saturday night.
We were each taking a sleeping child out of a car seat when the head light beams swept around the corner of our quiet street.
When the lights kept coming with no sign of the car slowing down, I squished myself between the car door and the car just before the loud crack of metal on metal. My head bumped the frame, the door dug into my back, but I was fine. MeiMei was still sleeping peacefully in her seat, although already unbuckled. JieJie began to whimper, less from the impact than from the string of forbidden
words I hurled at the receding taillights.
Since then she has been afraid to let Mommy and Daddy get in the car without her, and when Dad wanted to clean his car, she begged to be allowed to help him. Her help was as a self-appointed sentry, calling out to him to be careful each time a car turned down the street.
The driver came back. He turned out to be an attorney, a neighbor we had not met before. He was quite affable, apologizing and offering to exchange information in the morning if we preferred. But the Mama Lion adrenalin was pumping. It was Daddy who had the presence of mind to notice the driver was drunk, and so I retreated to the house to call the police. The driver retreated to his house to park his car and returned with a big plastic goblet that appeared to contain wine. I found the glass later at my feet. The driver told the police he had gone home for a (very short) half hour before they arrived and had a couple of glasses of wine. When they shined a flashlight on him, they noted that his white shirt was spattered with red wine.
They conducted a road sobriety test quite loudly in the middle of the street, which brought the neighbors out. He failed in what surely must have been humiliation, unless perhaps he was so anesthetized he did not feel it.

Mommy in the Middle

MeiMei does not seem to be acquiring spoken language terribly quickly, but she gets her point across. The other night she sat up in bed, pointed at me cuddling JieJie and shook her head angrily while miming rocking a baby. She is not getting enough cuddles from mommy in the "family bed," itself a concept that I considered completely misguided when I first encountered it on "Six Feet Under." Once there was a scared and lonely first child in our lives, the family bed seemed imperative and the quote marks fell away.

JieJie craved physical closeness and still does. We called her the heat-seeking missile when she was a baby. When MeiMei came home, we tried briefly to keep her in the crib, inches from the bed, but it did not seem fair to put her behind the bars with JieJie snuggled between us.

JieJie won't budge from her spot. MeiMei bonded with Daddy first, and she remains a Daddy's girl, but she will dive away from his embrace in a heartbeat to engage in a kicking and poking fight over the prime space next to mommy. MeiMei's message is loud and clear. Time for mommy to sleep in the middle.

Mommy Moment: I found the Netflix that have been missing for what must be a few weeks. They are on my desk. I checked the Netflix site. They seem to have been mailed here in December. Time to quit Netflix?

Briefs

MeiMei said "Bob-Bob" while pointing at SpongeBob
(Well, I said TV was good for learning English. Is that English?)

***

JieJie was elated at a trip to the nail salon because her private mommy time has been limited to potty visits since Mommy went back to work. She said, "When I grow up, I don't want my own house. I want to stay with you and Daddy."

My eyes welled up. "That would be wonderful, baby."

"I want to stay for a hundred years. Can I stay for a hundred years?"

"Of course. You can stay forever."

***

Mommy is up late thinking about a colleague who has recently left this world and another trapped inside himself by traumatic brain injury. Time to go upstairs and hug those babies while they sleep.