Dumplings

I know I’m not really supposed to say this as a parent, but I like Lauren’s friends.  They’re good people.

Yesterday I got a text from Lauren while I was at work, which is something that happens a lot really.  Mostly it’s just the usual details about daily life and things that need to get straightened out – when are you coming home, did you get the chickens, and so on – but this one simply announced that she and her friends were going to make dumplings for dinner for us.

Sounds good to me, I said.

We’re ramping up for the semester now, here in late August, so I am getting home at my usual school year time rather than any earlier summer time.  Kim just started a new position which sees her get home even later.  So we were happy to have dinner made for us.

Ally, Hannah, Aleksia, and Lauren took over the kitchen, cranked up the Spotify playlist, and started making dumplings from scratch.  Dumplings take a long time to make, but fortunately we weren’t that hungry to start with so we could wait.  It was fun to watch them do their thing.

And the dumplings were tasty too.

We sat around the table, eating and trading stories, and eventually the subject of TikTok came up.

For those of you without teenagers in your life, TikTok is essentially the new Vine – a place for people to post short videos (well under a minute – I don’t know if there’s a hard time limit the way Vine had, but they’re usually things that would have fit in that time slot).  They’re really fun, or at least the ones that Lauren and her friends had already curated were.  It helps to have a guide when exploring new territory.

This naturally led us to make our own video.

There’s a song by Mariah Carey called “Obsessed” and apparently it comes with dance steps.  Somewhere on TikTok there’s a video of all us doing the moves for the chorus and it is exactly as awesome as it sounds, even if I got lost about halfway through the take that got posted.  I did better on the first take, what can I say.

Isabella joined us after she got off work and there was dessert and more stories.

Sometimes on a quiet Monday evening there are dumplings and stories and good people sharing time together, and if you’re smart you’ll treasure those times when they’re happening and remember them when they’re gone.