Tormato Warning!

Finley made a very interesting craft at preschool yesterday. I knew that he had used clear plastic bottles for the project because I had been caught frantically digging through our work kitchen's garbage in search of clear plastic bottles to send to school with him. But I had no idea what was going to be done with the bottles. So over dinner last night I quizzed him about the bottles. He kept insisting that they had put tomatoes in the bottles with soap and then shaken them all about. He demonstrated the shaking all about part by doing full body bends with his hands above his head. I was pretty sure I was missing some crucial element of this craft because shaking tomatoes and soap around in a plastic bottle seems just weird, not educational, not pretty - just plain weird.

So after dinner he showed me his tomato in a bottle. The bottle was full of water, soap to make the water thicker and create "clouds" at the top, and a generous handful of gold sequins. He shook the bottle all about and sure enough the sequins made a beautiful miniature TORNADO in the bottle. Ah! Mystery solved!

"Finley, that's a torNAdo, not a tormato"

"TorMAto"

"No - NNNnnn, torNAdo, NNnn, NNnnn. Can you say NNnnn?"

"NNnnnna-torMAto"

"Never mind."

I suppose it's not really that big of a deal really. How often will he need tornado as part of his weather vocabulary in Hong Kong or in Vancouver for that matter? It's not like we live in Kansas or something! Weather words that would be much more useful to him here are words like: impenetrable smog, pollution index, and ungodly humidity. In fact, maybe I'll draw up some flashcards for him...

In other news - Steve just got back from Bangladesh where his new temporary job took him. Steve is on secondment to Citigroup for a few months. I think it has so far been at least somewhat interesting to him and it has meant somewhat more time with him on the weekends which we are all enjoying.

And in further career news - I have a new job with my same firm. I'm now in charge of corporate social responsibility for China which is pretty much my dream job so I'm very happy. I'm also the practice development lawyer for the dispute resolution group here. So I get to kind of keep a finger in the actual law while still doing a lot of other things.