We went with my dad and Linda to Pilot Oak, KY last night to eat at Southern Reds BBQ. Now normally this is the kind of place that is right down Kalkidans alley. She likes meat: steak, ribs, chicken on the bone, etc. But she said she was tired of all that because weve had rotisserie chicken, ribs, and steak within the last month. Just when we think weve found something shes really going to like, she throws us a curve like that. So she wanted soup. Potato soup, actually. Afraid Southern Reds doesnt carry potato soup, but she was quite happy with a baked potato. Kalkidan has had some leg cramps lately, so I explained to her about calcium deficiency and how bananas can help that. She came up to me last week and said she had the crunchy legs, so she ate a banana. I read Sara and Philip Mathenys blog to Kal and we looked at pictures showing the process of drying mango in a business in Burkina Faso. I explained it all to Kalkidan, narrating all the pictures, starting from the whole mangos to the cutting to the drying and packaging. At the end, she looked at the picture and said, So then they have french fries? Ok, maybe they faintly resembled french fries, but obviously there was a huge comprehension gap there. Just one example of the daily efforts at explaining the myriad things in our world. We took Kal to ToysRUs (and she wanted to know what the name meant, so I had to try to explain Toys with a backward R is Us and what that meant) to let her spend some of her money. She had seen neighborhood kids on roller skates and thought that the solution to all her problems. She would never have to walk or ride a bicycle anymore, which she considers far too strenuous now. With skates, she can simply roll everywhere she wants to go. So for two days, she has been skating all over the house and driveway. She is improving by the hour, and we are so glad, because she doesnt want to do ANYTHING that requires physical effort. She calls them skeets. We had a skunk haunting the neighborhood last week and we had to close the open windows one night because the smell was getting too strong. Kalkidan kept insisting she couldnt smell anything and I was incredulous because the smell was so strong. I got her to go outside and sniff and she said she still didnt smell any stink. Finally she said she did smell something different, but it didnt stink to her. Amazing. When we have passed dead skunks on the road and remarked about the smell, she never showed any reaction and would ask what we were talking about. Imagine that she doesnt even notice a strong skunk smell or think it stinks. I know in Addis Ababa, the smells were so strong, so prevalent, so uncontained that I had a hard time dealing with it. Maybe a lifetime of smelling so much all the time makes a skunk unnoticeable.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 02:08:04 +0000
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