We visited an artist shop in the alley last week and the artist painted this flower on Cooper's hand in watercolor.
She joked that it would be worth a lot - sure enough, the next day I saw posters around our tower for a big art show where she will be featured.
Cooper's hand could be famous!
The first question Koreans almost always ask is if he is a boy or a girl. At first it threw me off - I thought "well, of course he's a boy!" but then I learned that they ask for two reasons. One is that in the Korean culture baby boys and girls look an awful lot a like and even the clothes are very similar (they are all very feminine). Also, again males are more revered for carrying on the family name - so I always get a nod of approval.
Koreans usually ask how old he is and then they reciprocate - always in months. I had someone tell me their baby was 72 months at the grocery store once - it honestly took me a few seconds to figure that one out in years! Even the toys that we've bought have age markers like 32 months. Koreans also start life at age one rather than 0 but I think, in general, they understand how we do it with our children.
Besides the artist interaction we've had a lot of other great experiences; here's a couple that were especially interesting:
The maintenance man that came to my house this week stopped what he was doing, said some things to Cooper that I didn't understand, softly touched his head and then gave him a piece of ginseng candy.
We went to a Korean hospital this week with one of our friends. As me and Cooper walked down the hallway we saw a really young boy in a wheelchair hooked up to various bags of liquids. He was in the cancer center area so we could only assume... He looked tired and ragged - when he saw Cooper he beamed and looked up at his mom smiling. This made her beam too. If only for a second, Cooper made someone hurting, smile. This happened with a few more patients during our walk. Heartwarming!
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