1.

It’s a double-holiday weekend around here…  Tet and Valentine’s Day.  Which means we’re busy busy busy!  Sort of.  In a home-bound kind of way.  To kick off the Tet weekend, I printed out directions for a Chinese dragon from Lego and Family Fun magazine.

Zeeb has been working on his dragon while R~ builds a Valentine’s-themed picture frame, also from the Lego website. To help them get in the proper mood, I put on Zeeb’s Vietnamese Sing ‘n Learn CD. Somehow this CD was pulled out of our kids’ CD playlist for a while so Zeeb was pretty excited to hear it again. (Though sadly now he totally doesn’t reconize any of the Vietnamese language, whereas in the months after he came home I think he liked this CD because he actually knew what they were singing.)

2.

On Sunday we’ll be going to a local Vietnamese community Tet celebration at a big Vietnamese shopping center not far from here.  I LOVE that this place is so close and we can always take the kids anytime we want them to get a taste of Vietnamese culture!  And doubly love that they have big events on all the major Vietnamese holidays with activities especially for the kids!  Makes my job much much easier.  :)

3.

Our road was just plowed last night for the first time since the blizzard hit last Saturday.  That?  Is a very long time to be snowed in.  My neighbor told me they actually sent a “smaller” plow to our road yesterday morning, but it couldn’t deal with all the snow.  They had to bring in the big guns.  It seems like someone ought to have come up with a better more efficient way to remove snow by now, don’t you think?

4.

I talked to the neighbor because I brought them some brownies, as a thank you.  Her husband has a snow blower and he cleared the road right in front of our driveway twice this week.  I thought brownies was the least I could do in return.  That said, it still took a lot for me to muster the courage to go over there.  I know in my family I’m the “outgoing” one, but knocking on a virtual stranger’s door is still very intimidating to me.  We have talked once or twice, like at Halloween, but I don’t know her name (or I, um, forgot it, because I’m awesome like that.).  Also it seems like it takes a while to get past the “distant” attitude that most people have here.  The other day our school district sent out this email asking people to help get kids back to school by clearing walkways and bus stops, and said that may mean helping out neighbors who can’t clear the areas themselves.  The way they said it made it sound like simple neighborliness was a foreign concept.  That made me sad.

5.

As much as I’m ready for my kids to go back to school (and I AM ready!), I’m going to miss the relaxed routine we’ve gotten into the last 8 days.  Sleeping in until 8:30 every morning, the kids doing whatever craft or game or activity strikes their fancy while I get stuff done around the house or peruse the web, watching TV with my kids at night past their usual bedtimes…. it’s been nice.  And I feel somewhat vindicated after feeling so gypped that we weren’t getting a “mid-winter” break in February like we always have before.  I’ll try to remember that in late June when my kids are still in school while everyone else is off on vacation. 

6.

 So apparently the Olympics start tonight?  Yeah I haven’t been really tuned into any of the pre-Olympic stuff.  Well, we did watch some sort of exhibition skating thing with the US Olympic skaters but I didn’t recognize any of the skaters and the announcers were talking about all this amazing stuff they did during the qualifying trials and I felt like I was already out of the loop.  But, I am a sucker for ladies and mens skating, and the pairs are pretty fun to watch too.  Ice dancing?  Starts to get a little weird.  I’ll probably have the TV on in the background for the other stuff but I confess I really can’t tell what a good ski jump/luge/curling thingy is supposed to look like, so those events are kind of lost on me.

7.

Could you please say a prayer for my friend Rhonda?  Or actually, on behalf of her son, Seth.  He was adopted from the same orphanage as R~; Rhonda and I “met” online through our adopting connection.  Recently Seth has been very ill, with severe cold type symptoms, headaches, dizziness, and all kinds of stuff.  They put him on a number of antibiotics but nothing worked so they finally evacuated him out to Thailand (with his dad) where there’s a good hospital that can diagnose and treat him.  He’s been diagnosed with TB. But that’s not all.  Rhonda’s latest update said,

” Seth’s MRI shows he has some inflamation in the brain probably due to post infection. Now they will do a spinal tap to test the fluid to look for menningitis. The inflamation may be what is responsible for his double vision, vomiting, and headaches.”

  Please, pray for Seth, for healing and wisdom for the doctors as they treat him.  And pray also for his family – this is especially hard for Rhonda because she had to stay back in Cambodia with the rest of their family.  Thanks so much, I know that every prayer makes a difference.

Have a good weekend everyone!  More quick takes here.