>Tuesday Tidbits: 2 February

>Tuesday Tidbits are the posts where I sum up all the little things that happen in our lives from one week to the next; the little things that aren’t interesting enough for me to write an entire post about (though you all know I can spin a boring tale out of pretty much near anything), but which may or may not be of interest to you.

First of all, let me start by saying I can’t believe it’s already February.  Where in the world did January go?!

• I got my hair cut yesterday, in my longstanding tradition of only having it done on a semi-annual basis.  Normally I have it cut somewhere up around my chin, letting it grow out to about my shoulders before Tony and I both start saying I’ve got to do something with it, and then head in for a four-month overdue cut. I was so desperate to get it done and over with that when I walked into the salon to make my appointment this past weekend, I took the first one they offered me, on Monday at 11am.  I figured I could get someone to watch Bug for me for an hour, and accepted it. 

  Well, Monday dawned with Bear coughing up a lung, so I told her she could stay home from school that day.  Wouldn’t you know five minutes after I let the school know, her cough magically disappeared?  At any rate, I ended up bringing both of The Critters with me to the hair salon, where I bribed them with normally verboten lollipops to keep them quiet during the 45 minute process.  When it was all said and done, Bug looked at me and said, “Your hair is beautiful, Mommy.”  And Bear?  Said, “It looks kind of scary.”  She’s sweet, huh?  I’d show you a picture, but to be honest I kind of agree with her.  The way Miyagi styled it did make my hair look a bit scary, so I’m reserving judgment (and holding off on taking any pictures) until I’m able to style it myself.  Although I do look eerily like my driver’s license picture, which was taken eight and a half years ago right after I got my hair cut in a very similar style on our honeymoon, and Tony says he loves it.  (Of course I’ve trained him well.  He knows better than to say anything else.)

• This past weekend, the USOs here on Okinawa brought a Sesame Street Live performance to the military installations to present a short (30 minute) program for kids, about parents’ deployments and family separations.  These were free performances and the staff even handed out mechanical Elmo twirly light toys that at Disney On Ice performances cost somewhere in the overpriced vicinity of $10 or more.  I’m pretty sure the message that Elmo and the rest of the Sesame Street gang were trying to get across to the kids went over both my Critters’ heads, but they sure enjoyed the singing and dancing.
  

  And I got to play around with my camera, and figured out how to get it to do this:

  

• Also on Saturday Bear and I dropped Tony and Bug off in front of the movie theater where the Sesame Street performance was being held, to stand in line while Bear and I checked out the Base Exchange.  We walked around the store for awhile, picking up a larger set of boxer briefs and undershirts because Bug has very much outgrown his 2T/3T items in those smaller sizes, and then wandering into the toy section.  I let Bear drool over the pink aisles while I wandered into the board game section and discovered that they’d finally gotten in sets of dominoes.  Our next-door neighbors introduced us to the “Mexican Train” version of that game on New Year’s Eve and I’ve been mildly obsessed with playing it ever since.  I bought ourselves a set with double twelve dots (up to twelve on each side) and a Mexican Train set inside. 

  After the Sesame Street performance we put Bug down for a nap and pulled out our new game.  Bear asked to play with us, and I didn’t expect her to understand or enjoy it, but she shocked us both by catching on faster than I had and even beginning to understand the concepts of strategy and planning ahead.  She’s been begging us to play ever since, which is fine with me because out of the 20 hands that I’ve played in this house since Saturday, I’ve won all but three hands. 

  
  This is actually the round that I lost to Bear last night

  I’m also really excited about this development because as much as hard as I’ve been trying not to wish The Critters to be older and more advanced than where they are at any given moment, I’ve been waiting very impatiently for the time when they’d be old enough for us to play games together as a family.  More importantly, games that hold any amount of interest for me and Tony, and are equally challenging for us as for our children.  I’m really excited that we’ve gotten to this point with Bear, at least.  And Bug enjoys playing dominoes his way, too, which means that our entire family can be involved at once.

• Later Saturday afternoon (it seems all my Tidbits this time around occurred on that day), one of Bear’s neighborhood friends rang the doorbell and walked in, asking to speak with me.  “My mom and dad wanted to know if I could spend the night here,” she said.  Surprised – given that Tony and I haven’t met her parents and at the boldness of the request – I said, “Well, I guess you can, but don’t they want to meet us first?“  “Nah,” she said.  “I don’t think so.”  I told her that she needed to have them come meet us (and figure out where our house was) before she could come stay over, and half an hour later she and her parents rang our doorbell.

  We chatted for awhile before they asked, “Did she invite herself to sleep over?”  I told them that she had, the reason she’d given being that they wanted to go get tattoos.  I think her parents about died when they learned that their eight-year-old daughter was going around the neighborhood looking for somewhere to crash for the night so they could go out gallivanting, which was not at all the case.  It was very much a Lost in Translation moment, which I’d assumed from the get-go.  But I did end up agreeing to let her spend the night, which went from being just a sleepover to a full-out four-ring circus of a slumber party.  (The difference being, Bear informed me, that a sleepover is two friends sleeping at one of their houses, whereas a slumber party involves several wild beasts ruining a once-clean house friends spending the night at one house.)

  We sent everyone home to eat dinner (for clarification on that point, see bullet #1 above regarding the lack of food in our house), then turned on the Hannah Montana movie before turning off the lights at 10pm and hoping they’d fall asleep.  Two hours later two of them were passed out, but the other two were still wide awake when I finally laid the smack down, and I didn’t hear a peep from them again until 7am the next morning when they woke up and I had them get dressed and go home, with my apologies to their parents for not feeding them breakfast.  In the past I’ve made skillet French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon, and orange juice for Bear’s overnight guests, but with no time to prepare this weekend I decided to let their own parents take care of them.  After all, they do only live 30 seconds away.

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