What our kids are into lately

Don’t know if China has raised or lowered our standard of living, but here is a sampling of our kids’ favorite things on our vacation. First up is Xander, who is planning on building a fully functional helicopter when he’s seventeen or eighteen. Our guest house in Bangkok happened to be near the used auto parts section of town, so he was in seventh heaven for a morning wandering around stores full of engines and differentials and other miscellaneous parts as we feasted on street food. The kids are wholly convinced that everyone in Bangkok can build anything mechanical, so Xander’s planning on going there for a year of advanced engineering study in ten years or so.






Zekey has been discovering his talents in Earth Art -- more specifically, dragging a white plastic beach chair around the beach to make elaborate sets of “train tracks” that his brother and sister would run along gleefully.

Ysa, meanwhile, has adopted three or four more children into the family. To the untrained eye, they look like plastic water bottles, but they are actually her babies, named Babyang, Fabiyang, and Jang Yuen. (spellings approximate) She spent a good part of the trip with one or two bottles tucked into the front of her dress, and also got very good at putting them down for naps and making sure that they all had enough sunscreen on. Jang Yuen, the oldest, weighing in at about three liters in capacity, had a special place under the seat in front of us during our flight home, and is now resting comfortably in Ysa’s bed in Chengdu.



I’m not sure exactly what this means. Either our kids are incredibly creative young geniuses, or Jane and I are being incredibly cheap, depriving our kids, and scarring them for life. Probably somewhere between the two. Anyway, if you’re thinking of sending the kids some kind of care package in China, just throw a couple of paper bags, some machine screws, and a rusty nail or two into a cardboard box and send it on over. They’ll probably end up playing with the box, anyway...