She Took the Shirt Off My Back
Papa, give me your shirt. What? Give me your shirt, Cici said again. I want to wash it for you. So here I sit with no shirt, wearing the blanket Cici draped around me when I gave her my shirt. This child has been doing my laundry since the first time we met. She would take my dirty clothes from the hotel to the house in Guangzhou and wash them, hang them out to dry, fold them, and bring them back to me at the hotel. It is a little easier for her now. Ping and I put our dirty clothes in a hamper in a closet in our bedroom. Cici takes the hamper to the washer and dryer maybe 15 feet away and starts the laundry. Ping, on the other hand, just gathered up my dress shirts to take to the cleaners. Spoiled? Sure my girls are. 
So Cici caught a fish for the first time in her life today. Unfortunately we will have to rely on our memories for the moment. The camera with Cici's photo with the fish ended up at the bottom of the lake. And I learned where the expression "sick as a dog" originated. One of our friends brought her little dog with her on the boat. The water was quite choppy today, so when we tied up under the bridge to fish, it wasn't long before the little dog got very sick. The owner was soon holding the little dog like a baby, wiping its mouth and teary eyes with a blanket wrapped around it. This wasn't a little boat. We had 10 people on the boat and still had plenty of room for everyone to fish, but the swells had it moving around quite a bit.
The girls felt bad about losing a $300 camera until I told them the story about the last time something got lost in the water when I was out on a boat. It cost me $17,000 to replace those earrings that landed on the bottom of the ocean. I wondered what Ping said to Cici in Chinese after I told this story so I asked. She said you bought too many diamonds for someone else, Cici said with a laugh.
Hmm. She might have a point there.
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