Other People’s Kids Are SOOOO Cute

Walking home from school a couple of days ago across the Jubilee Footbridge (which overlooks the Waterloo Bridge, the London Eye, Big Ben and Parliament) I heard, then saw, a little girl walking across the other direction with her mom in tow. She was clearly not a happy camper, but was very much in control of the situation. She was throwing a tantrum as she stormed across the bridge. Her mom must have told her to stop crying, for just as I came within earshot, I heard her whine: “But I don’t wanna stop crying!” She continued on, wailing as she went across the bridge. I could only smile and think to myself, ‘hey, at least she knows what she wants!’

Continuing south, I stopped by my local Tesco to pick up a few chocolate-making supplies (more on that later). While I was standing in the aisle trying to figure out the difference between caster sugar and granulated sugar, a plump Chinese boy came trundling down the aisle, pulling his mother by her basket behind him. He pushed his way in front of me and started calling, “zhege, zhege, zhege, zhege, zhege,” or “this, this, this, this, this, this, this,” (good thing I studied 5+ years of Chinese…) and pointing to some Silver Spoon sugar (which I think has some artificial sweeteners in it, I cannot tell you how many different sugars exist in this country in small, 1 kilo packages. What ever happened to regular granulated sugar?!). One of the packages had ripped open, and sugar had spilled on the stack of pouches. He started sweeping it off into his hands and eating it. His mother tried to bat his hand away and told him not to eat the sugar (in English), but it didn’t seem to stop the kid, as he continued to greedily chomp away on the white crystals.

How cute these kids were. I'm just glad I didn't have to deal with them!