An Unexpected Playdate

When we left the US we were very tight on luggage weight and space. Each child was allowed to bring one special toy. Zoe chose an American Girl doll, and JT his stuffed polar bear “Polie”   This past week we invited Zoe’s friend Clara to lunch at our apartment. Since lunch is the main meal of the day, we had to vary from our typical PB&J to serve what we would normally eat for dinner. We decided on fajitas as it would be something that we might typically eat at home and would give Clara an opportunity to experience something new. She wasn’t a fan, but she was gracious about it. The moral of that story is stick with pasta.

After lunch the kids were playing out on our little patio and somehow Zoe ended up tossing Polie over the wall into our neighbor’s patio. Three sides of our patio are walls 5 floors tall and the 4^th is a set of cabinets about 8ft tall and 2.5 feet deep. We weren’t really sure that the patio on the other side even belonged to our apartment building, but the kids knocked on some doors and determined that it was mostly likely apartment 1C.  Since no one was answering 1C's buzzer Zoe wrote a note signed 1B and stuck it in 1C's mailbox. There was a lot of gnashing of teeth and “what if” scenarios being played out by the guilty party (Zoe), but JT was being a very good sport. That night, when I returned from dropping z at swimming Polie had come home. Our neighbor in 1C wrote us a note saying that our little Bear had a lot of fun playing with her cat on the patio, but alas, it was time for him to go home.