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Moon Festival = Success!. Made some hongshao fish (used tilapia, and fiddled with two recipes), and everyone raved. Because it tasted so darn good.
The only thing that could make fried food taste better, after all, is frying it AGAIN.
Daughter also appreciated the coloring and the stories, and has now added inquiries about Chang Er’s current status to her inventory of standard questions. Is she here now? Did she drink the potion to go to the moon? Is she visiting the sun? Can I see her now?
The moon itself was blindingly brilliant. I’m unsure now whether it’s more poetic to look up and see the rabbit pounding out medicines, or to think of the rabbit’s hands as Mare Nubium, the Sea of Clouds (which is where the Chang-Ngo crater is located).
Odd coincidence about the weekend, too. We left China with son (son!) on May Day, which is a big holiday. And then on the weekend of the Mid-Autumn Festival, another big holiday, we finish our post-placement paperwork.
I’m sure there’s an esoteric significance to that, but really it just means that last night I was trying to get labels on photos for our agency to send back to China to, you know, prove this whole “family” thing is working.
* One photo of parents plus child. (Taken at a funeral, so the young man is eating and I’m wearing a tie, but the CCAA doesn’t really need to know that.)
* One photo of child alone. (I think this is just to get up close and prove the creature has all fingers, toes and isn’t blistering his fingers while soldering electronics in our home DVD player factory or the like.)
* A couple other pictures that happen to have the child in them. (During which I realized that there are lots of pictures of The Boy ((now age 12)) with Daughter, and a few of Daughter with son ((son!)), but none really of The Boy ((now age 12)) with son ((son!)). And I just realized now that I’ve code-named the males in my house with parentheses and the females with Capital Letters. Which must have a graphological significance, but….)
Strangely, we were also supposed to label these photos. I’m not sure exactly how we were supposed to label them, so I hope I did a good enough job with just names and dates. Vague dates. On most of them.
I don’t remember labeling Daughter’s post-placement photos, but that was a couple years ago.
And I didn’t include the note (although I wanted to) telling the CCAA that yes, things really are really really working out.
Even though he keeps dunking his hands in the dog’s water bowl….
