It’s been a busy last couple days. Tina’s 90 year old father, Len, and his friend Joyce are here staying with us for a few days and they’ve been doing a pretty good job keeping up with us. We had swim lessons again this morning and then had just enough time to turn around and head out to the Northwest Chinese Cultural Association’s annual picnic. There was an amazing amount of food there, both Chinese and western dishes. There were some really great steamed buns, and a desert dish made with red bean paste that was really good! There were also these really fancy looking thinly sliced things with lots of different looking textures and colors running through them. They looked something like this without the fancy presentation:

Tina and I both took some and were trying it. Parts of it were soft like tofu, and other parts had a crunchy chewy texture. I continued to wonder what it was as I ate some more, then the Chinese woman sitting across from us at the picnic table said she was surprised to see us eating the pig’s ear. “Evan many younger Chinese people won’t eat it these days”, she said. Suddenly I understood what all those different textures were!
The boys really enjoyed watching the dancers...


And listening to the music. These kids were playing the húlúsī - Chinese gourd flute. The first song they played is one that we knew from our trip to adopt Kai.


We had brought a bunch of bubble stuff for the kids to play with. When we brought it home, Kai and Shen were playing with it in the backyard. Shen wanted to hold the bottle in his left hand and was trying to hold the wand with his right elbow. So I got some elastic and made him a little wrist band that would hold the wand at the end of his arm. We’ve been reading about prosthetics lately and have really mixed feelings about them. I do want to find ways to make more adaptive things like this for him.