It all began with a 6:45 awakening by James who was UP! I was hoping that he would crawl into bed with me and drift off to sleep but, alas. That was just not in the cards. A few minutes before 7:00, I gave up and said, "Isn't Scooby Doo on about right now?" (This would be the Tom solution to children who wake you up early.) We went upstairs and I was right. James happily lay on the couch and vegged out to SD.
By 9:05, Jame and I were at the club for his tennis lesson. Dave, an Australian coach, is very enthusiastic and works well with James (who had a great time). I was able to go have a coffee and read the paper for a bit before catching the second half of the lesson. (I'm not sure if Dave is James' permanent coach or not. I introduced myself to him after the lesson and said that I'd see him next week. He didn't seem certain that he'd be there. I hope that is not the case.)
By 10:10 I had dropped James off in the marina, collected Claire and was heading to Karrie's house for piano lessons. Poor Claire had barely practice at all this week (due to illness and the fact I wasn't home to help her). It showed. We will do much better this week---the countdown is on for Claire's Grade 1 exam on October 28th.
By 11:20, we were back in the marina. Mariz and James jumped into the StepWgn and off we went to Hang Hau. Mariz had errands to run. The kids and I took the MTR to Diamond Hill. We were on a mission to buy Pilly's (it's a Muldowney children obsession, I'm afraid) at the Uji store in Plaza Hollywood. But first we headed to Food Republic (great food court!) for lunch. Claire chose congee with minced beef, James wanted Pizza Hut (located just outside of the food court---I ordered take away and had them ring once it was ready) and I had Korean (stone pot mixed rice and a side of kimchi). We all had fresh watermelon juice. Yum!
We then went to Uji, purchased the snowbean pillows and walked the entire mall. We did not find sneakers with velcro for James. No dressy shoes for Claire's piano exam, either. Claire asked on our return trip if we could go to a Japanese department store to look for robot pets. Thus we headed to Cityplaza in TaiKooShing. No robot pets but James but a G-Force Training Centre toy (what a pain to put together) at Toys R Us. Claire later bought two Sylvanian Families animals. We all had gelato at XTC (Hong Kong Milk Tea flavour was quite good) and we found a Geox store. Success! James has new trainers with dragons (or dinos?) which light up as he walks. Claire has a beautiful black pair of flats. (Very expensive---she now fits into adult sizes here.) The sales people at Geox were outstanding. I hope they work on commission as they then were on a mission to find a pair of shoes for me. It was quite amusing. I tried on a purple (much prettier than that sounds) pair of flats and the corresponding black pair. They then brought out the matching pair of shoes to Claire's. I caved in the end and purchased a black pair (but not the same as my daughter's). My bank account took a serious dip after that venture! It was very fun, though, to watch Claire become a mini Imelda. The salespeople brought out three boxes of shoes at a time and Claire had a blast.
After heading home, we hung out. I put together James' toy. We played a Wii together, had a simple dinner and were all in bed by 9pm.
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