a bff visit
Nov. 18th, 2019 12:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/353delA
So we went this weekend to Rochester to visit my bff and her kids. We haven’t been in far too long, it was actually three months ago we were last there, which is too long, but we were both busy and logistics were prohibitive.
They’d decided the kids could just stay up if they wanted to, why not. The girl, who is five, has been in full-on revolt and will not sleep normally; she insists on sleeping in their bedroom with them, won’t sleep in her own room, won’t admit she’s tired, won’t go to bed, won’t stay asleep in the mornings. BFF has actually decided she’s just going to go to a counselor about it, because clearly just letting the child work it out for herself is doing nothing. And sure enough, after the party was winding down, little miss M reappeared, after midnight, and wanted to sit on my lap and join in the conversation. Her mother had long ago given up and gone to bed, and in fact had let her come sleep in the bed with her, and still that wasn’t enough, this child wanted to be awake if anyone in the house was awake, and here she was. And she was up at 7, and completely unable to cope with anything, because six hours of sleep for a five year old is basically like an adult pulling an all-nighter. So that was something.
We were drinking various pomegranate cocktails, because of Persephone’s descent to the underworld I suppose. I took charge of mixing them because my friend’s husband has a horrible predilection for mixing things vastly overstrength and then underestimating their effect, every time. Also we had pigs in blankets and little meat pastries, and Turkish delight and spinach salad and potato chips and onion dip and many cheeses and some crackers, all of which was wonderful. We also had a fire in the fireplace, and I thought for a moment it might prove to be too much for me after all, but it happily wasn’t. Which is good, I’d be super bummed not to be able to enjoy fireplace fires anymore; they’re some of my favorite things.
In the evening the kids were left to pick whatever they wanted to watch on their account on the TV, it was one of those things that aggregates streaming services? Some online-connected box thing, IDK, hot and cold running cartoons you can pause and rewind and such, which is still weird to me. And they have a kids account, and it’s full of their favorites, so their mom was like, go for it, pick whatever you want. I went back into that room after a while and stood staring at the TV thinking perhaps I was having a stroke, because it was a brightly-colored computer-animated children’s cartoon of some very sweet-faced little kids, and about every tenth word was in English, and the rest of it was really definitely not in English even though it sort of sounded like it (similar vowels, similar consonants, just absolutely not in the right order), and I could not figure out what the hell was going on. The kids loved it, and just thought the characters were speaking gibberish; they were repeating it to me, and it was similar sounds but they’d made it into words they knew, though it didn’t make sense. Rather a bit of drink had been taken, by me, and so it took me longer than it should have to begin to figure out what was going on.
It took until something appeared with a text label onscreen for me to identify that it was absolutely an Indian language, about which I know very little. I guessed Hindi because I know Hindi 1) is spoken by an absolutely massive number of people and 2) uses that kind of script where it’s straight on top and curly on bottom and 3) I’ve heard it spoken a bunch and it sounds like that, though that’s not really super scientific of me.
I have since looked it up and it was definitely ChuChu TV, which is on Netflix, but it has a drop-down and is available in either English or Hindi and somehow the children had selected Hindi. They both can read a tiny bit but not very well, so I really don’t know whether they had the slightest idea what they were choosing; like most white American children, they’re unfamiliar with the concept of people speaking different languages, and so could not be made to understand what was actually happening. We turned off the TV for the night, but the next morning they wanted to watch it again. We found them something else to watch, in English, as it would be more illuminating, but the girl, who if you recall had basically not slept, pitched a holy fit because she wanted to watch the show in Hindi, which she was referring to by her understanding of one of the things they’d been saying. (Something along the lines of “johnny johnny hop up!”)
It was both cute and Entirely Too Much for a pack of hung-over adults.
I’ve recovered enough from my hangover now but like. I am out of practice drinking, which is fine, and maybe going forward I’ll dial back my participation in the drinking, because dang. I am old.
So we went this weekend to Rochester to visit my bff and her kids. We haven’t been in far too long, it was actually three months ago we were last there, which is too long, but we were both busy and logistics were prohibitive.
They’d decided the kids could just stay up if they wanted to, why not. The girl, who is five, has been in full-on revolt and will not sleep normally; she insists on sleeping in their bedroom with them, won’t sleep in her own room, won’t admit she’s tired, won’t go to bed, won’t stay asleep in the mornings. BFF has actually decided she’s just going to go to a counselor about it, because clearly just letting the child work it out for herself is doing nothing. And sure enough, after the party was winding down, little miss M reappeared, after midnight, and wanted to sit on my lap and join in the conversation. Her mother had long ago given up and gone to bed, and in fact had let her come sleep in the bed with her, and still that wasn’t enough, this child wanted to be awake if anyone in the house was awake, and here she was. And she was up at 7, and completely unable to cope with anything, because six hours of sleep for a five year old is basically like an adult pulling an all-nighter. So that was something.
We were drinking various pomegranate cocktails, because of Persephone’s descent to the underworld I suppose. I took charge of mixing them because my friend’s husband has a horrible predilection for mixing things vastly overstrength and then underestimating their effect, every time. Also we had pigs in blankets and little meat pastries, and Turkish delight and spinach salad and potato chips and onion dip and many cheeses and some crackers, all of which was wonderful. We also had a fire in the fireplace, and I thought for a moment it might prove to be too much for me after all, but it happily wasn’t. Which is good, I’d be super bummed not to be able to enjoy fireplace fires anymore; they’re some of my favorite things.
In the evening the kids were left to pick whatever they wanted to watch on their account on the TV, it was one of those things that aggregates streaming services? Some online-connected box thing, IDK, hot and cold running cartoons you can pause and rewind and such, which is still weird to me. And they have a kids account, and it’s full of their favorites, so their mom was like, go for it, pick whatever you want. I went back into that room after a while and stood staring at the TV thinking perhaps I was having a stroke, because it was a brightly-colored computer-animated children’s cartoon of some very sweet-faced little kids, and about every tenth word was in English, and the rest of it was really definitely not in English even though it sort of sounded like it (similar vowels, similar consonants, just absolutely not in the right order), and I could not figure out what the hell was going on. The kids loved it, and just thought the characters were speaking gibberish; they were repeating it to me, and it was similar sounds but they’d made it into words they knew, though it didn’t make sense. Rather a bit of drink had been taken, by me, and so it took me longer than it should have to begin to figure out what was going on.
It took until something appeared with a text label onscreen for me to identify that it was absolutely an Indian language, about which I know very little. I guessed Hindi because I know Hindi 1) is spoken by an absolutely massive number of people and 2) uses that kind of script where it’s straight on top and curly on bottom and 3) I’ve heard it spoken a bunch and it sounds like that, though that’s not really super scientific of me.
I have since looked it up and it was definitely ChuChu TV, which is on Netflix, but it has a drop-down and is available in either English or Hindi and somehow the children had selected Hindi. They both can read a tiny bit but not very well, so I really don’t know whether they had the slightest idea what they were choosing; like most white American children, they’re unfamiliar with the concept of people speaking different languages, and so could not be made to understand what was actually happening. We turned off the TV for the night, but the next morning they wanted to watch it again. We found them something else to watch, in English, as it would be more illuminating, but the girl, who if you recall had basically not slept, pitched a holy fit because she wanted to watch the show in Hindi, which she was referring to by her understanding of one of the things they’d been saying. (Something along the lines of “johnny johnny hop up!”)
It was both cute and Entirely Too Much for a pack of hung-over adults.
I’ve recovered enough from my hangover now but like. I am out of practice drinking, which is fine, and maybe going forward I’ll dial back my participation in the drinking, because dang. I am old.
