A Holiday Within A Holiday

Even knowing that certain words are not capitalized in titles, I couldn't stop myself from capitalizing each word in the title of this post. Sometimes following conventions just looks bad. And, just now, it bothered me how unsymmetrical it looked written properly. Hopefully my grammatical double standard won't come back to bite me.

But I digress. This holiday (the mid-autumn/National Day holidays) has been pretty spectacular. The weather has been perfect - cool, sunny and relatively low pollution levels (funny that now pollution levels are very much a part of the weather for me). We've done something, generally getting together with friends, every day. And, yesterday, after going to my friend Jinbo's house, Olivia stayed to spend the night!

I have to admit I was nervous. I'm not sure why I was unnerved, since Jinbo is one of my best friends and I trust her absolutely. I can only assume it was one of those, "My baby is growing up!" moments.

We had gone to her house earlier in the day to have lunch and go to the Purple Bamboo Park, a ten minute walk away. During the day, Jinbo and Majie (her husband) offered to keep her overnight several times. By the time Dan and I left at 5:30, we were ready to take them up on their offer. It was really strange going home without her, but I'm sure Katherine enjoyed having our full attention, for once.

We put Katherine to bed and watched 4 or 5 episodes of Borgias (we never watch anything anymore!). It was really nice to have an evening entirely to ourselves in our house. Needless to say, we slept really well, and had a more relaxing morning than usual.

The nicest part of the whole thing, though, was when she came back. She was in a great mood, and after not seeing her for about 20 hours (not that I was counting), I had really started to miss her! Katherine was pretty excited too.

It's amazing how each phase of growth seems better than the last. It doesn't seem possible.