The Flower Girl Report

We were supposed to be beach-side by 5:30 pm Aruba time, ready to be escorted to our seats. At 5:15, we were trying to coax a deeply snoring Bella awake, or at least, to roll over so that I could change her diaper and dress while she was sleeping. All of us still jetlagged, we had closed the curtains and settled in for a "little nap" at 3:30 that afternoon. By 5:30, we were all miraculously downstairs and dressed, but with Bella's hair (and attitude) still horribly askew. The start ran late, though, so Bella had time to snuggle in my lap for a while with giraffey, rouse herself a bit, and by the time the bridesmaids were ready and lined up, she was in her usual form, ogling their "beautiful dancing dresses." She walked down the aisle, carrying her flower girl basket in style and smiling for the cameras, then, somewhere near the front, remembered that she was supposed to be scattering petals. Eager to do her job as she was told, she upended her basket and dumped all of the petals right there. Then scooted back to Mama and watched the "beautiful dancing girls" some more. High fives all around.

ps. Friends of ours took these amazing photos with their Nikon D40 Digital SLR, which has us itching to get one as well...

A part of me (besides my liver) died last night

Sure, the bride works at the Dutch embassy. But still. Even before the baijiu (pictured above, the finest of the finest, 56% alcohol by volume, that's 112 proof, my friends) was cracked out at the wedding dinner, one bottle per table, this actually came out of my husband's mouth as honest-to-god dinner conversation:

"I've always wondered, what's the actual separation of administrative powers in Holland, between Amsterdam and the Hague?"

But she's my little dress up doll

We went to a wedding last night, and because the venue was 100m from our apartment here in Beijing, and lovely nanny Malou agreed to come fetch her once things got too nutty, Bella was able to attend for the first couple of hours. A lot of people absolutely raved about her outfit, but I wasn't prepared and would end up just stammering something along the lines of "Uh... thanks, uh... my mom got her the dress this spring and we thought, uh... that it would never fit. Uh. Where's that waiter with my champagne?"

People must've thought I was daft or just painfully, horribly, socially inept, but the truth was, I couldn't bring myself to say anything else that came to mind about Bella's clothes: that the dress is hand-embroidered with silk ribbon all over the bodice; that I bought the hand-knit angora cardigan last winter from a precious little kid's clothing store in Paris; or that the edgy fake-fur vest was from a shop in Knightsbridge around the corner from my uncle's house in London.

Because no matter how cosmopolitan Beijing gets, or how my in-laws like to say that for the kids these days (meaning me and Mik), "hopping on a plane is like riding the bus," you really can't go around saying stuff like that to people about the provenance of your two-year-old's clothes.

Thrilla in Manila

Just back earlier this week from 5 days in Manila. My cousin was getting married, and Bella was to be the littlest flower girl. The wedding was at Nuestra Señora de Gracia, a beautiful old church originally built in 1620(!). We got to the church early, and she ended up playing with the flower girls from the previous wedding, which of course was running late. She was so caught up with her new friends that she ended up joining in when they were taking the wedding photos. That poor couple is probably looking at their proofs right now, wondering who the heck that kid is, and whether they can have her airbrushed out.