This was taken through our screen window this week at some obscene hour of the morning. I can’t believe I sleep through such a magnificent light show most every morning.

It made me think of a few positives of jetlag, including:

• the chance to enjoy for a week, an unusually slow pace of morning life – with music filling the home, cooked breakfast treats our bellies and some uninterrupted time together.
• going to bed stupidly early and then getting up to run stupidly early as a little family. We’ve secretly always wanted to be those ‘morning people’.
• resetting Ayo’s clock, namely getting rid of those sneaky nighttime wakeful periods. (Mama is on the war path this week. Bleh!)
• skyping Europe before noon France time. I did say we were up early!
• finishing a load of laundry by 3:30 am..oh wait, I could do without this last one.

Apart from the lovely morning pace of jetlag life, we’ve been thrown back into the swing of things in our city, frantically trying to spend time with friends leaving town for Christmas. It’s been a wonderful, breakfast or coffee date, late night PJ & chick-flick, Christmas parties… sort of week. Another highlight was an email in my inbox. I still don’t know how I got added to the recipient list. It was a call for Mandarin-speaking volunteers at a nearby hospital. I’m trying to remember if I wrote in some blog post about this peculiar but deep sense of needing to get back to studying Chinese more seriously. I have really put study on the back burner for a while, wondering how this skill and especially the time investment could ever be useful in such a ‘white’ American city. Well, for a few weeks now, the books have been out, the podcasts back on (pity Ayo, not me!) and here comes this email. Knowing how life works, this is probably not the main reason I should keep up language study, but it put a spring in my step for the whole week to think that I might not going crazy with this prompting. I immediately emailed about the position to find out more.