Xiaoniu 小妞

We did some traveling this past weekend and of course Emelia was a pain in the butt for at least part of the trip. She fought us in the car on Friday evening and proceeded to give us trouble Friday night. She’s fixated on nursing and Sue has been slowly weening her off. Well, it has come to a head and we have to end that. I ended up putting her to sleep in my arms, which involved about 20 minutes of screaming, pinching (her father) and hitting (her father). She was exhausted, but would not succumb to sleep easily.

Thankfully for us she was an angel (relatively so) the rest of the weekend. Saturday she went down for a nap or three and even got a ride in the stroller. Saturday night she fell asleep on the couch and slept the through the night. Too bad that Jason was home trying to sleep with Emelia screaming on Friday night and he was out working at night on Saturday while she was at her best.

Sunday we made an expected (to me at least) trip to the temple for 清明節. Sue’s dad wanted to bring an offering and burn money for great-grandma. We were not alone either. It was the busiest I’ve ever seen the place. Plenty of families were there doing the same thing, although there was a variety of things being burned.

Some people brought bags of folded up paper made to look like old money. Some brought big red bags full of things. Others brought paper slippers. There was plenty of incense burning too. Some was the incense that they provide, but some others brought some pretty big and thick incense.

All of us except for Sue, Mike and Sue’s mom went. It was only to be a short trip so we only took the van. Our little one fell asleep immediately after leaving. She stayed asleep for the trip there, the walk in daddy’s arms from the parking lot to the other end of the property where the graves were, up about 70 stairs and through some kowtowing. After all that she decided to wake up.

After paying our respects we made our way back to the parking lot, but decided to stay for lunch. The temple offers a vegetarian meal on Sunday. You pay a donation, but get to eat with the monks. I wasn’t there for the funeral so I missed out on the lunch and was looking forward to it.

After waiting around for 45 minutes with about 50 other people in the building somebody came out and basically said, “Please leave. We are not serving food today. We open to the public tomorrow.” Go figure. It would have been great if they let us know 45 minutes earlier. We were starving and then had a 40 minute drive back to the house.

We had a late lunch and a dinner around 6 before taking off. The little one was great on the ride home. She fell asleep immediately and Sue and I got a chance to talk instead of try to keep the baby from crying or keep her occupied. It felt good to be an adult and not just a parent. She did well all the way home, but gave us some trouble when we got home. We needed to change her before bed, which meant she woke up and was too tired to stay up, but too awake to go to sleep again easily. Fortunately, it did not take too long for her to crash again and she slept the whole night through until 6:30 this morning.