A Social TG

It's always easy to send the kids on their way to school on Fridays.  They know that the only thing standing between them and a weekend is a few hours of school, and they're eager to get it over with.  And Ella's favorite class, handicrafts, is on Friday: they're learning to sew, and Ella's making a little pouch, apparently, and brings home little piles of stray threads with her each week to play with.

But this Friday it was especially easy to get them out the door because Ella, when she was opening the blinds for me this morning, noticed the big piles of crushed boxes on the corner across from the house.  Cardboard recycling day! How could she have forgotten?!

I, myself, forgot the monthly cardboard pickup in April, and our storage room bore the evidence, the floor lost in old packing material and egg cartons and toilet paper tubes, not to mention the scattered remains of a half-hundred kid art projects.  I wrote a reminder to myself on my calendar earlier this week, and Ella noticed it a few hours later.  "Dad! Can you believe it? There's only 4 days left until Cardboard Recycling Day!!"

In the end, it took me over an hour last night to cut down and tie up all of our cardboard and then to lug it out to the curb.  Recycling takes a lot of time when you're re-bundling half the neighborhood's trash, rescued from the curb by your kids.

So, after the kids ran out to check out this months' offerings on their way to school, Joey and I regarded each other.  I had a little shopping this morning, and then we could go to our new playgroup.  "Ready to go, Joey?"

"No stroller? Scoot?" he asked, hopefully.  Sure. We had plenty of time, and I only needed a few small things from the store that could fit in my purse. He could ride his scooter.  "Yay! Get books!" he cried, running off.  Oh, wait. No!

Joey's taken to carrying around a pile of Ella's books with him whenever he goes out.  And then, when he boards a bus or tram, he'll pull one out and page through it carefully, importantly. But I didn't have room for them in my bag, so when hopeful Joey came back with a heavy little library and held it out to me, I told him "No no, Joey. I'm not carrying your books. You have to choose.  Books or scooter?"

Joey was quiet for a moment, looking from his books to his scooter and then back again.  And then his face broke into a grin. He ran and got a little bag, stuffed the books in, and hung it on his scooter handles.  And then he beamed up at me, nodding: "Okay?"

When your two-year-old looks for a solution instead of throwing a tantrum, how do you say no?  Even if it means your two-year-old needs to get off and walk his scooter uphill because he's so front-heavy, and drops and scatters his books every time he picks up his scooter to board a bus?

It worked out, though: we got home from playgroup a full three minutes before Ella and Alex did. And after Ella came home from school the second time, in the afternoon, we packed those books up again to go and visit Dennis at work.

Pool lessons with Dad before the concert.

The TGIF party is a Google tradition, but in America the events are strictly for employees. (At least as far as Dennis has told me.) Here, in Zürich, at least once a month the families are invited in for a social TG, probably because there are so many trailing, displaced spouses in this particular office. It's always nice to go in and have a beer and meet Dennis's coworkers and their wives, but this week was particularly nice.

The coordinators decided to try something different: they wrote an e-mail to the employees saying that they'd be classing things up a little this week, bringing in chamber music, serving extra-nice food, pouring wine instead of beer.

Wait! No beer??  According to Dennis, there was something of an uprising.  You do NOT come between Googlers and their beer.  So they classed it back down a smidge, and put the beer on tap.

But the music was so great!  They brought in a brass quintet and a string quartet. I only heard the brass: three instructors at the University of Zürich and two of their students, playing their own arrangements.  They were clearly having a ton of fun, too. They played some fun crowd-pleasers (or, at least, Cheryl-pleasers): Moonlight Seranade, Preludes by Gershwin, some songs from West Side Story, When I'm Sixty-Four...half-way through, I ran out to drag Ella and Alex inside with me so that they could hear it, too.

After half a minute, Alex told me he had to go back outside.  He'd been collecting pretty pebbles from the ground, and he didn't trust the grown-ups not to steal them.  Googlers: they're a scurvy lot. But Ella was more engaged, to the point where I had to sush her giggles whenever the trumpeters used their mutes.

So we ended the day on a high note.

In other news,  with Mother's Day trappings disassembled,
we've broken ground on Schloß Geels.