A toast to Friday

Friday!  Yes, even stay-at-home-parents experience the "TGIF feeling," because for most of us, this provides the hope that we'll convince our partners to enjoy some child-bonding time while we do laundry  shave our legs  read a book  sleep!  In anticipation of a relaxing two-parent weekend, we begin a Friday of celebration.

This past Friday, Tyler and I attended a massive playgroup.  The weather in Shanghai has recently taken a turn towards the bearable, so the usual small indoors playgroup moved outside to a local park and became a massive swarm of babies, blankets, toys, and over-eager moms with cameras.
  

Want to create chaos in China?  Gather 20 babies in a public park.

I wish this photo captured the uniquely “Chinese” element of old men standing right at the edge of our group, pointing and gawking as they chain-smoke cigarettes.  Because obviously, the best place to puff clouds of carcinogens is right over the innocent crowd of babies with developing lungs.  Several of the mommies either were Chinese or fluent in Mandarin, and yet nothing they said could convince these men that they were not welcome to join us.  But I digress…

After the babies' playgroup, we attended mamas’ playgroup in a friend’s apartment courtyard.  It was similar to our previous engagement, with one distinct addition: wine!

Cheers to a bottle that's meant for adults!

Above you see yours truly; Jade, the New Yorker who owns a spa back in San Fran; Victoria, the English woman married to a Portuguese man who has spent the past eight years in Egypt; and Nishtha, who had been a professional in Shanghai for six years until she gave birth to her one-year-old son.  It’s intriguing to me how we’ve all arrived at this place – parenting in Shanghai – with such different reasons, backgrounds, experiences, and emotions.  So we toast to a world that somehow becomes both bigger and smaller with each new friend we meet.  And, of course, we toast to Friday.