Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

Right? Because it’s been almost a week. (Although to be fair, April is turning out to be a busy month.) Tuesday afternoon was all about the dentist and dance; Wednesday morning I took the car in to get the dent from my oldest’s run-in with a Lexus looked at and then spent the middle of the day at Britt’s, helping with party prep; Thursday I worked on cleaning up my desk area and then had lunch with my hubby (and two of his work friends, because it was the junior high’s Cafe Rio fundraiser); Friday I knitted, made egg salad (there’s been a lot of that going around), took kids to piano, and took my oldest shopping for prom shoes; and Saturday I took my oldest to the school for a mock AP test at 7:20, took my 13-year-old to Britt’s daughter’s birthday party and stayed to help, and then went home to do Saturday things. Yesterday was a lovely Sunday, really; my hubby was sore and tired and struggled to get going, but he made it to be sustained, stayed to be my audio/visual man during my Sunday school lesson, and then got set apart after church. AND participated in the setting apart of our second girlie! (If you’re wondering, being sustained and set apart is simply part of getting a temporary volunteer assignment in our church.) Our afternoon was kind of the perfect family time–an Easter egg hunt in which the kids hid for the parents and then the parents hid for the kids, a break in which I headed over to get knitting help, a family game of Bottle Bash, and then collaboration over dinner and a couple of episodes of “Ghostwriter.”

I’m still really grateful for how nice of a Sunday afternoon that was.

In other news, I finally finished listening to Remy Lai’s Pie in the Sky this week. I honestly can’t remember why I ended up pausing it to listen to other things, but I did and just finally got back to it. (I also just got back to this post, which I started yesterday and then got distracted from. Sigh.) You know the kind of book that you find solidly good–and moving–but that you know you’d get more out of if you shared more experiences with the narrator? Totally Pie in the Sky for me. Jingwen’s difficulties with making friends in a new school when he’s barely able to communicate in a new language tugged at my heartstrings, and his grief over his father’s death was palpable. I’m not a fancy baker myself, but it was still easy to get pulled into Jingwen’s determination to bake the fancy cakes his Papa intended to sell someday, once they all moved to Australia and he opened a new bakery; I could also feel his desolation and bewilderment at having to make the move without his father. What I lack experience with is being the oldest–and being a brother. The brother thing might not matter so much–I’m a sister with a sister, after all–but I’m the youngest, not the oldest, and Pie in the Sky is so clearly Jingwen’s story. It was just, well, slightly disconnecting to recognize my likeness to Yanghao (the younger brother) while still experiencing the book through Jingwen’s eyes.

On the other hand, it was still good, and a slightly different expression of the immigrant experience than I’m used to. The illustrations (which include occasional comic panels) integrate nicely as part of the story, and yet the audiobook deals with those illustrations surprisingly well (I listened but flipped through the physical copy afterward to experience the art). This is a good book in general, but if you have a son with younger siblings who is struggling with a move or the loss of a father figure, I’d say it’s a must read.