2023 Highlights: Early January

This has been a beautifully normal week. No one has been (newly) sick. We were able to resume/continue our regularly scheduled activities. I feel like I’m doing decently well at spending my time the way I want to spend my time. Here are a few highlights:

• Pearl got to have a friend over to play after school. Something we don’t take for granted for a kid who spent the first two years of school with a variety of Covid rules.
• Friends who hear you’re having a hard day and drop by with coffee: (technically from last week when I had an ear infection, but I’m counting it)

• School staff who are eager to help and figure out solutions that work for our family.
• In an effort to be more deliberate about spending time with the girls, I’ve encouraged them this week to choose a game for us to play as a family after dinner. On the days when I work, my time with them feels really limited and this has been a (mostly) nice way to be together. (Games come with competition and sometimes that has a lot of emotions.)
• Peter and I have been watching Andor, the Star Wars show and quite enjoying it. I’ve seen all the movies and all the new shows on DisneyPlus but I still can’t keep track of this universe, yet I feel like I can understand enough to follow along.
• Re-starting our community group for 2023 and getting to spend time with other families that we love.
• Daily Bible reading time. I plan to read through the Bible again in 2023 but this time I am following a daily reading plan that will take me through the Bible chronologically. I’m really excited about this.
• Stumbling across a Reddit thread (I was trying to figure out the words to a childhood rhyming game) that told me Ching Chang Push is a uniquely East Van phenomenon. Ching Chang Push is what I grew up calling Rock Paper Scissors. That’s what we called it at home, at school, everywhere that I remember. When I moved away for university, I learned that most people call it Rock Paper Scissors. At some point in the last few years I checked in with my brother to see if he remembered Ching Chang Push and where the name came from. I wondered if it was a sort of anglicization of some name we learned for it in Hong Kong. He thought maybe but was sure it was always called that at our public elementary school. Turns out kids across the eastside of Vancouver grew up calling it Ching Chang Push and it probably does have its roots in some Cantonese name as so many of East Van’s residents in the 1990s were from Hong Kong and China. What do you call Rock Paper Scissors?