The Kid woke up pretty excited since she would be getting her cello today. Finally! We had to mosey over to La Jolla Music to get it, as they are the only store to rent that particular instrument. She ended up with a brand new 3/4-sized behemoth of a thing to strap on her back each morning. She was all smiles as we left the store.

Prior to that, she had invited a couple of the neighbor kids to join us on the excursion. This happens a lot. She’s either spending the weekend with them, or they’re spending the weekend with us, or I’ll lose my kid to their household while they end up in mine. Kid swapping. We call it “hana’i” in Hawaii. Okay, it’s not exactly the same thing since hana’i is permanent. Some weekends it certainly feels permanent!

Instead of lunch in La Jolla I made the decision to eat at our favorite phở place, Phở Ca Dao. We arrived just in time to find a bunch of Võ-Thuật (Vietnamese martial arts) students milling about the parking lot while several older men were stringing up firecrackers. I guess some part of my brain remembered the little flyer that Cat and I saw when we lunched there last week, because I was otherwise on autopilot trying to economically feed five humans. And one can never go wrong with a $5.00 bowl of phở.

After a very short but very confusing wait, we were seated at a table close enough to the front window to watch the festivities unfold. Three strands of firecrackers went “snap, boom, snap, blam!” and five…FIVE…lions began dancing around the entrance to the restaurant. I’d forgotten that they actually enter the establishment. I had to take care of one extremely distressed five year-old who had never seen such a debacle in her life. My kid and the distressed child’s elder sibling were happily walking around looking at the various lions but refused to put the $1.00 bills into their mouths. I had to take the sibling’s hand and thrust it into the lion’s mouth as she winced and closed her eyes. By the time it was over (half an hour later…felt like we’d been there for days) I was a wreck. The kids were very happy and chatting with great animation about the goings-on. I wanted to haul off and smack them all.

That’s ok. I got my good luck for the year for the incredible sum of $2.00. Apparently so did the kids — I didn’t ditch them at the restaurant.

Photos of the dancing lions appear waaaay below the text of this post for God only knows what reason. The plug-in gallery hates me, probably. I shoulda given that lion a five-spot.

How was your Tết this year? =)