Excuse me, have you seen our kids?

Ah, what a difference a year makes! It's hard to remember exactly, but a year ago at this time, as the weather was getting colder, the kids were either complaining to us that they were bored or cycling through the same five or six bootlleg Pixar movies on DVD in a state of zombielike rapture. We prioritized and sorted multiple Christmas requests to the grandparents. More construction sets! Good workbooks! Chapter books in English! And multiple trips (organized by Jane) into Chengdu to get our kids playing and socializing with other expat kids so they wouldn't drive each other crazy here at home.

Fast forward to the present.
"Umm, Jane, do you know where Zekey is?"
"Isn't he over at Yang DongQi's?"
"No, I called, and they said they haven't seen him since this afternoon."
"Maybe with - who's the kid at the end of the block...?"

You get the idea. Our boys are now bona fide social butterflies, with Ysa trailing only because she's three, and we don't let her go out on her own yet. Most every day after school, they're over at friends' houses, out building forts out of spare paving blocks and rubble (see photo), playing in traffic, and so on. All of the things that Jane and I did when we were allowed to run wild in the suburban fringes of the seventies, in other words, except safer, because everyone (and I mean everyone) knows Who They Are and Where They Live.

Which leaves me feeling happy, spoiled, and just a teeny bit bewildered, especially when back in the States, you can apparently get threatened by police if you let your eight year old play in the park by himself. Happy because, duh, my kids are happy. Spoiled, and a bit guilty, because up to this point, other parents are doing the lion's share of the hosting, even if we try to offer otherwise. (Being nervous about letting your kid play with someone who doesn't speak much Chinese, I suspect, along with a big dose of wanting to have your kid play with the Americans - the privilege of the foreigner, I suppose. Sigh.)

Bewildered, because, yes, because we seem to be typical immigrants. Our children are becoming much more immersed in the culture than we are, simply because they: a) are better than us at soaking up the language, b) are a heck of a lot cuter than I am, c) are, I suspect, watching lots of Chinese kids' TV, and d) don't have to teach English all day for a living. Do I sound jealous about now?

So they come home from school singing songs that we can't understand, with photocopied notes to the parents that we can barely decipher. (Did they want us to send a grocery bag with Ysa to school tomorrow, or should we take her grocery shopping over the weekend...?) Best, though, are the hysterical giggling fits that I can only catch the general gist of - if I understand anything at all, that is.

So yes, we're in a foreign country, and our children are interacting with this country in ways that are new, exciting, wonderful, and to us, unimaginable.

Guess that about sums up parenting in a nutshell, doesn't it?