Chinese Folk Tales

This two week part of Glenn's Internal Medicine rotation he is in outpatient (which has SO much better hours than inpatient that he worked 76 hours in last week!). The office that he is working in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays is 6 miles or so from home so he has been taking the van which has been fine because we really don't go anywhere.

Today after he left I looked at the calendar and saw "Chinese Folk Tales DCL." This summer New York's library summer reading program theme is "One World, Many Stories" and there was going to be a storyteller or something at Dewitt Library that I was going to take the kids to. If it was at Petit we could have walked but since it was Dewitt we would have had to drive but we had no car so we couldn't go and I was kind of sad but then I realized something....

Last night we went to a Christian Medical Fellowship picnic at the home of the new president of CMF (Karl). It was a lot of fun. There were several people from overseas there, some from Africa and some from China. The three from China work in the lab that Karl has been working in this summer. We ate lots of yummy food and played some ping pong and a table game that you flick disks onto a target thing. While we were there the girls attached themselves to Lynn, the lady from China. They went off into an empty bedroom and she told them some "fairy tales." I got to listen in on part of them. I realized this morning that my kids really didn't miss out on Chinese Folk Tales. They heard actual folk tales from a lady from China who has only been in the US for about a year. (At the library it may have just been a librarian reading from a storybook, I don't know.) She told a story about about a wolf and a rabbit and one about a clever girl. One of the men from China told them a story about a snake and a farmer.

As I was typing this and asking about the stories Abigail said, "They weren't really true because a real farmer would be smart enough not to put a snake in his shirt." My kids had an opportunity to interact with people from China and they had the opportunity to try to navigate "what is the word for that" circumstances like when they were trying to figure out the word for something and that has a head like a snake and 4 legs  and a shell. It was a turtle. They also got to play make believe together.

I was sad that the kids missed out on the library thing but I think that the opportunity that they had last night was so much better than the library one would have been and I am so thankful that they could have a chance to make friends with some people from China, not just hear a couple of stories out of a book.