A Busy Day

Children have very busy schedules. This is something I am quickly learning. Add in the transition times to get a child changed, in and out of a car, and other miscellaneous events, you can’t plan more than two activities with a child per day. This includes any running around you want to do on your own.

Yesterday, we had a very full day. It started at Brookfield Zoo where Sophie was meeting Kenna, Michal and their parents and Kate, Julia and their parents. The girls loved the animals. Sophie was particularly excited with the rhinoceros and even repeated the animal’s name upon my first saying. The highlight of the zoo trip for Sophie was definitely the geese. Another lesson I am learning as a parent is not to buy or plan anything complicated to entertain your children, as they always seem to be most fascinated with the most mundane items.

It was a spectacular day and everything started out easy enough. Sophie’s other engagement was a birthday party for Sophie Mei, who turned 1 the other day. This is where it gets complicated. Brookfield Zoo is right near our new house in Oak Park and since we needed to test the AC (it was finally warm enough), we scheduled an appointment with our realtor to stop by. On cue, Sophie fell asleep in-route to the house. I’ll elaborate more on the house in ourtinybungalow but everything went well and Sophie woke up just before we left for a late lunch. I don’t know if it was the trip to the house, the late lunch, the short nap or Mars aligning with Venus but this is when it all went awry.

We stopped at a local Diner to visit our friend Claire and to get something to eat. Sophie was having none of that. She gave her worse public display of displeasure that we have ever seen, throwing food, pouring a small glass of chocolate shake on herself and using the restaurant booth as her personal jungle gym. Sorry – we have no photos to show the above.

From the OP we drove up to Stacy’s house for Sophie Mei’s party. It was a nice party and the mountain of toys there seemed to placate Miss Sophie Wan Xin - though I am not sure our little hoarder will ever learn that one child cannot play with more than six toys at once. We got to spend a little time with Ella, who just got back from China with Kim last week. The day ended with the ubiquitous “couch photo”. I am not sure what it is but it seems that when more than 3 Chinese girls are in the room at the same time, adults feel the need to place them on the couch for a photo. Needless to say, Sophie had had enough by this time and was not cooperating. The other girls in the picture (from RtoL are Sophie Mei, Grace, and Ella. The girls cooperated enough to take part in a once in a lifetime opportunity for a photo with Stacy’s Uncle Steve. Uncle Steve is becoming somewhat of a celebrity in adoption circles for his “comments” left on travel blogs. For those of you that have not visited Stacy or Kim’s sites, you should do so to see what I mean.

We got Sophie home at about 7:30, just in time for bed. After throwing her evening snack and screaming at the top of her lungs, we put her to bed without her story. After just five more minutes of screaming, she eventually fell asleep. Hopefully she had sweet dreams about geese, flying chocolate shakes and Uncle Steve.

-CP