March 1, 2012 - Did you know you could buy just a single stalk of celery?

Greer has started going to the grocery store on her own for me.  She actually likes to go.  Must be the feeling of independence it gives her.  If I realize I need a few items from the store after she's home from school, she takes my backpack and heads off towards the subway station. 

I was planning on making a slow cooker meal that required celery the next day.  The meal had to go in the crockpot in the morning, but the grocery store doesn't open until 10:00 (that by itself seems odd to me).  So Greer went to the store this afternoon to buy the ingredients I still needed.  Drew had picked up some milk on his way through the train station the previous day, and I had him check if they had celery.  I wasn't sure if that was a vegetable they had here, and so I might have had to use something else.  They did indeed have celery, so I felt confident Greer could find everything on her list that afternoon.

Greer called me from the grocery store to see if she should buy one or two.  I said that I guess if they're small, she should go ahead and buy two.  I didn't realize we were talking about stalks of celery instead of bunches.  I've never seen a single stalk of celery packaged for sale.  Do we sell stalks singly in the States and I've missed it?

I should add that they also sell celery in bunches, which we found afterwards.  However, the bunches are kind of hidden behind the single stalks, so Greer didn't see them.

Japanese word of the day:  serori  (click to hear pronunciation) means "celery"
You may notice that it sounds a lot like the word "celery."  I am guessing that celery is not a Japanese vegetable (which is what I had suspected earlier).  Therefore its name is not a Japanese word, but instead it is written in katakana.  The Japanese writing system consists of kanji, which are the symbols borrowed from the Chinese, hiragana, which is used for writing Japanese words, and katakana, which is used for writing foreign words.  Cooper is learning hiragana in school, and Greer and I are learning katakana with our teachers.  If we could get Drew to work on learning kanji, we would be set!  (There are 2,000 kanji characters, so that's probably not happening.)