Summer Days

Chapter 47

My schedule was changed at the Diner. Uncle was gracious enough to remove me from the schedule so that I could spend more time at the hospital. I found it to be a personal mission to spend time with Angel and then also with her mama.

The boys understood that and I kept my cooking class sessions with Luke, the golf games with Owen and Sean and a different one of my boys, usually Victor or Kota because North, Nathan and Silas, while athletic, did not particularly enjoy golf. I went to the symphony with Victor, shopping again with Gabriel and Luke tagged along. We had a good time shopping. Gabriel was very enthused about the idea of us dressing for a few days on our trip in Disney character inspired clothing. We managed to loop Erica and Jessica into the idea as well and I was happy that Jessica was more than enthusiastic about getting to dress up as Merida from Brave. I suspect it had a lot to do with the fact she was going to be able to accessorize with any number of her arrow and archery inspired accessories that she owned. I was going to be in pink as I planned on being Aurora from Sleeping Beauty. The boys were slightly less enthused with some of our ideas.

Although, strangely, North warmed to the idea first. I'm not quite sure why but I mean, he was going to be Grumpy on our Snow White day and we were making him wear all black... no real surprise there... and dressing him as Mordu, the antagonist bear from Brave.

I had my mornings with North and surprised him when I was fascinated with the inner workings of car engines. Apparently no one in the family liked to learn about them. "well." I shrugged, glancing up at him. "If my ghost status means I don't get to drive legally then I should at least help you with maintaining them. If you're out and there's a problem with one of the cars, I could maybe fix it until you could really fix it." I said. He flashed a smile at me and kissed me on the tip of the nose before hugging me and nodding his head.

I could see the wheels turning about what he could teach me next.

It shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone that I was suddenly in charge of oil changes.

I'd beaten him at a challenge to see who could change the oil the fastest. Victor was dismayed at the thought that I was changing oil but pleased enough when I finished his oil change before North finished the oil change on Owen's car.

I also enjoyed my morning out on the boat with Silas and North. I was happy to discover that I loved boating. Silas was pretty pumped too. We had a Greek style picnic out in the middle of the lake we were at and North graciously excused himself to drive the boat for a while so that Silas and I could have some time alone.

Sean and I went out for our Sushi date. It was a lot of fun and I tried a lot of things before deciding that I was going to limit myself to smoked salmon, tofu, cucumber rolls or basically anything that didn't involve actual raw fish. I was delighted to find sesame noodles, pork dumplings and egg rolls on the travelling belt as well. Sean laughed at my efforts to try more types of sushi. Apparently I had a tendency to wrinkle my nose and scrunch my face up like a rabbit before I even managed to get the sushi into my mouth with the chopsticks.

I pointed out that it was probably my tendency to overload it with wasabi, pickled ginger and soy sauce that made me actually wrinkle my nose.

Sean poked me in the side and kissed my temple before finishing off the types of sushi that I didn't like. Then we got to the good part. He introduced me to green tea ice cream and banana tempura. OH Yum. I seriously could eat those two things all day long.

Sadly, we didn't make it to dinner with his parents for their anniversary. They were called to an urgent event in Japan. I think Sean said one of the aunts or uncles had passed away. He wasn't required to go so we ended up facetiming with his parents on their anniversary.

He was very proud of how well I carried on a rapid fire conversation with his mother in Japanese. We'd been working very hard on my conversation skills and I'd struggled a bit in talking to Victor the week before. But once we were talking to his parents and he'd introduced me to them, it all just fell into place and I felt like I'd been speaking Japanese my entire life.

I politely excused myself from the conversation, letting them have some family time together and overheard his mother praise him for his choice of young ladies.

Apparently, I'd won her over with just one conversation because I'd been more than happy and willing to speak to her in her native tongue. I couldn't help but be pleased myself and we went out for green tea ice cream and banana tempura after he was done with the facetime conversation before he took me to Nathan's house for the week. I wasn't working or doing anything that week but we'd decided that Nathan's house made the best location for vacation packing and Gabriel was staying over for the week as well and between the two of us, there were lists to be made and checked twice and suitcases to be packed and repacked and packed again before we could actually leave the next weekend.