Whining Animals

Ok, he thinks he's driving. Every meal lately, he takes his plate and treats it like a steering wheel and says he's driving. He doesn't want any food put on his plate when he does this.

Today at the restaurant, he drove a bit wild and dropped the plate on the floor. Ceramic plate meets tile floor - the plate was reduced to many small pieces. He got no more plates.

Driving to the store, Jared fell asleep in the car seat. We gently unbuckled him and I picked him up so that he'd be laying down on my arms (damn, he's heavy). As we walked in the store, he mumbled, "Mommy, I'm awake."

His eyes, however, never opened. We continued to wander through the store for a half hour, managed to buckle him back into the car seat and get him back home with him sleeping the whole time.

Finding food for lunch is always interesting in Shanghai because there's five of us with different tastes. Of course, we can usually agree on Pizza Hut. The last time we tried to eat there, there was a long line to get in - it's apparently very popular, or so we thought.

We managed to get in today with no wait and this time we wanted to get a pizza more like we're used to. Chinese pizza is lacking in pizza sauce so we asked to have a pepperoni pizza with extra sauce. Little did we know what we were asking for.

The pizza came out and smelled a little funny. Ricky took a bite and said that it had ketchup on it. We all took a taste and agreed that it was ketchup. The manager came over to investigate and we found out the waitress was new and put down on her order to have more sauce, however, most Chinese do not distinguish between ketchup and pizza sauce so she must have asked for extra ketchup on the pizza.

The whole time we were waiting for our replacement pizza, Ricky goes from indignation about ketchup on the pizza to eating another bite of the ketchup pizza and complimenting the flavor. He thought the ketchup pizza was better than the replacement pizza. This from someone who ate ketchup popsicles. (Ew, ew, ew.)

So, if you want a US style pizza in Shanghai, ask for the extra sauce, but make sure they understand that you don't want ketchup.

The kids have been in China for a few months and have adapted a bit to Chinese food, much to Mom's pleasure. We went out to do some shopping and decided to stop for lunch. We were going to go to a Chinese restaurant that serves these "sha-loom-bow" that Jared likes so much. but the line was too long and the kids were hungry. We started walking to the McDonalds for the kids with Jared telling me over and over again, "I love sha-loom-bow."

As we approach the McDonalds, he asks me where we are going and I tell him that we're going to McDonalds. At that point he tells me, "I love McDonalds!"

Mom was crushed.