Happy 7 months my little Will

This is going to be a mushy mommy post, just so you know. If you decide to keep reading, don't say I didn't warn you!

Tomorrow Willie-boy turns 7 months. He has been our greatest joy and our funnest adventure. I know everyone always says that kids grow up so fast but you don't really believe it until you watch it happen every day. Watching our helpless little baby start to develop into an increasingly independent human with feelings and emotions has kept us captivated. I can't help but smile when he pushes my hands away because he wants to do something himself. If I give him a bottle, he only wants it if he can hold it. He stops drinking if I hold it for him. And there are times when he just does not want to be held, he would rather sit on the floor by himself and play with his toys.

It's so fun to see him try to communicate with us in ways other than crying. He reaches for things that he wants and he reaches for us when he wants to be picked up or held. I love it when his chubby little arms stick out and he sits there with an expectant look on his face. I think my favorite time is right after he wakes up from a nap. He gets so excited when he sees me walk in the door, like a puppy when someone comes home from work. When I scoop him out of his crib, his hands immediately get buried in my hair and his face goes straight into my neck for a few minutes before he's ready to play.

Before I was a mom, I always thought it was a little silly to teach babies sign language. But I have learned the error of my ways!! I think it's a great idea to try and give a baby who can't talk a way to express themselves. (Thanks mom for the encouragement!) I have started trying to teach Will a few signs and I love it. So far, we have only successfully learned "milk." I made the sign for milk before I nursed him or gave him a bottle and now I'm pretty sure he knows what it means. When I make the sign before a feeding, he gets really excited and opens his mouth and waves his hands all over. Today I'm pretty sure he was signing back to me. It was almost dinner time and Will was laying on the floor and he whimpered and made the sign for milk. Twice. Joel and I both looked at each other and laughed. Success!

I love all of the sounds and faces he can make now. I love to watch his face when he gets his hands on something new, babies faces are so expressive. I can see excitement, curiosity, confusion and boredom in the same five minutes. And I forget how little things that I do and see everyday are new and exciting for him. Yesterday, I set Will on the counter and turned on the kitchen faucet and just let him play in the stream of water with his little baby fingers. He tried to grab the water and was confused when there was nothing to grab. So he just kept opening and closing his fingers, enjoying the feel of the cool water on his soft skin.

Will absolutely hates laying on his tummy. Hates it. He almost immediately rolls over if he's on his stomach. He hates mashed potatoes and he really hates the sound of my blow dyer. Whenever I have to use it, I set Will on the floor outside the bathroom door so I can see him and try to reassure him during the least favorite part of his day. As soon as the noise starts, this look of utter terror crosses his face. He starts to get teary eyed, but he also gets a look of determination, like he's trying so hard to be brave and not cry. It's so cute! As long as we keep eye contact, he never cries.

Being a parent has made me have so many "ah-hah" moments where I realize "my mom did all of these things for me 25 years ago." She was my first playmate and best friend, just like I am Will's. She changed all of my nasty diapers, cleaned up all of my messes, and laughed & smiled at my discoveries. Thanks for all of your hard work Mom and Dad.

Living here stresses me out, mostly because I'm worried about baby boy. Air quality, immunizations, safe food and the chaos of the big city are just a few of the things that keep me up at night. Sometimes when I'm out walking with Will strapped to my chest in his baby carrier, his little hands find my fingers and he just holds on tight. I feel a profound sense of responsibility because this little person is depending on me to protect him, care for him and keep him safe in this crazy place.

I hope you know that I'm doing my best little one.

I love you Will-a-bee, happy seven months.

Embassies, Immunizations and a double Thanksgiving

I have a lot of ideas that have been brewing in my brain for this blog post, so bear with me. This may turn out to be a long one. But they're all good ideas I promise!

First, and most importantly, we have HEAT!!! It's been heavenly. I can actually focus on doing something other than staying warm. Everyone who lives in Beijing now has heat and I think we are all a little happier than we were two weeks ago. The radiators actually work pretty well, our apartment stays very warm and they are so nice to sit next to. The only downside is that we have zero control over the temperature. They're just on all the time. But I'm not complaining! I will take it over the alternative any day. 

Our main project this past week has been trying to figure out the best way to get our money out of our Chinese accounts and deposited in USD in our American accounts. It's actually a lengthy process! We get paid in Chinese RMB which we have set up through direct deposit into our Chinese account. (Which, is hard to deal with sometimes. Chinese banking laws are funny, you can't have a joint account and you only get one bank card per account. So Joel is the account holder and we have one card for that account. It gets a little inconvenient at times. So we have ourselves set up on a cash budget. We withdraw the cash that we will need to take care of our everyday purchases for a month and we distribute that money into labeled envelopes so we always know how much we have left to spend in each category. It took a while to set up, but we are pretty pleased with the results!) Anyway, once the RMB is in our account, we have to withdraw what we want to send overseas and then we have to exchange that money into US dollars. China heavily regulates their currency which means that there are tight restrictions on exchanging money. Joel and I can only buy $500 each every day and you have take your passport with you and do a bunch of paperwork just to exchange the money. (Right after Hurricane Sandy, the price of dollars went down. So we were able to buy $500 USD for less RMB than usual. If China didn't have their regulations, we would have bought more dollars because they were cheaper that day. But that's one reason why China has those regulations, so people don't make money off exchanges.) We were hoping Will would be able to buy $500 USD, he has a passport, but you have to be 18 years old. Oh well. It was worth a try. So, our Chinese account has both RMB and USD in it and we just need to wire it to America. That will be our project this week, getting our money where it needs to go. Things that were so easy back home take so much more time here!!
On Saturday, we went on a really nice walk through the embassy district. It was a funny contrast to see the beautiful lawns and trees of the embassies that were surrounded by tall, thick fences that were topped with gnarled barbed wire. It almost reminded me of a nicely manicured POW camp because of the wire and the Chinese guards everywhere. The US embassy is not in the cluster though. I have been meaning to go check it out, that's an important place to know how to get to in case of an emergency. I also feel a need to go see the tiny spot of US soil in the middle of Beijing. Even if I just look at it through the barbed wire. 

And speaking of the US embassy, I have been asking other moms in China what to do about vaccinations. Apparently, the German and French embassies import vaccines for their citizens because the Chinese vaccines are not trustworthy and cause high rates of fevers and rashes. But the US embassy does not! A few western style hospitals here used to import vaccines through Hong Kong but they don't anymore. No one is sure if that's because the government put a stop to it or because it was too expensive and time consuming for the hospitals to do that. At any rate, there are no more imported vaccines that are readily available. I am so upset about this! Will was only 4 months when we came here and although he was caught up on his shots, he couldn't be immunized for everything since he was so little. He couldn't get the Tuberculosis vaccine or the rest of the Hepatitis series or the influenza vaccine. In the US, I wouldn't be as worried if he was behind. But TB is a real concern here, people still get it. And I don't even want to think about Hepatitis or Japanese Encephalitis. Most people just wait until they go home to visit and just get their kids caught up in the US. But our health insurance here is through a Chinese company so I'm pretty sure we won't have coverage in the US when we go home so we'll probably just have to pay out of pocket. It stinks but I would rather pay for the vaccines in America and not have to worry about Will catching some strange Asian disease or having a reaction to the Chinese shots.

There are two fences behind my head, the metal one with the strands of  barbed wire and then the cement wall with  coils of wire on top. Pretty heavy duty! 

People ask me what I do here while Joel is working. It's true, I do have some down time. But raising a baby while living in China is a full time job! Parenting in general is a full time job. But everything seems to take so much more time here. Trying to do laundry in our doll sized washing machine is a joke. I can do a handful of clothes in a load and I have to start the wash cycle first and when that's done, I start the rinse cycle. And I would give anything to have a dryer! All of our clothes are crunchy from drying them on a hockey lace strung between two kitchen chairs. I've already posted about how grocery shopping  is a difficulty all it's own and cooking in our munchkin-land kitchen with our toaster oven is another adventure. Cleaning (my nemesis) is never done here. I can sweep and mop one day and three days later, there are already dust bunnies accumulating in the corners and near the baseboards. The air here is just so dirty that nothing stays clean for very long. All of these problems are compounded by the language barrier that we deal with daily. Not to mention that if I want to go anywhere, my options are the subway (which is always crowded), buses (which there is no English on so I just have to hope I'm riding the right one), taxi's (no drivers speak English so I have to make sure I can somehow communicate where I want to go) or walking (which I love to do but it's getting colder now so that makes traveling with a baby difficult sometimes). I am not complaining, living here has been an unforgettable adventure and I learn so much every day. I just stay pretty busy figuring out how to live our day to day lives!

Do you see Joel climbing on the rock? He blends in with his greenish coat. We went on a walk to the park after the embassies. It's so nice to just be able to stroll and not have to worry about getting hit by a car!!

I am also very grateful that Will is just a baby and we don't have to worry about school here. For expat families, there aren't a lot of choices for schools for their kids here. No one wants to put their kid in local Chinese schools because for one, they have to be fluent in Chinese. So unless they were born and raised here, that counts most international kids out. Another mom was telling me that she knew a child who was born in Beijing and his mother was Chinese but his dad was American. They put him into Chinese schools and he was teased, bullied and an outcast. He was half Chinese and a native, fluent Chinese speaker but he was still ostracized. I've heard of students who live abroad for a while and are not treated the same when they come back, even if they were born and raised in China. Kids here are not kind to other kids who are different. So, due to these schooling difficulties, a number of international schools have popped up around Beijing. They are geared towards expatriate families and everything is in English. But, they charge an exorbitant amount of money!! You won't even believe how much preschool tuition is. Are you ready for this number? Remember, this is for PRESCHOOL, the number goes up from here depending on the grade. It's $25,000 for one year of preschool. Ridiculous, right? But these schools can charge this because when families get sent here for work, they are often offered a nice expat package which includes school for their children. So, these big companies pay the tuition fees. But there are a lot of families who don't work for any of the big companies and who aren't on a nice package that have to somehow figure out how to send their kids to school here. There is one mom who went and got a job at one of these schools so she could get discounted tuition. If I had the time and resources, I would start my own little preschool for kids whose families can't afford college tuition prices for their three year old. I have the qualifications, I am a licensed elementary teacher. If Will was preschool age, I would probably do it. I'm sure I could easily find enough students to make it worth my while. 


We are excited for Thanksgiving this week. Both of our parents have sent us wonderful packages with goodies like gravy mix, hot chocolate, cookie mix, microwave brownie mix and toys and clothes for Will. So we have lots of yummy things to add to our Thanksgiving feast! We will end up doing two Thanksgiving dinners, one with our church Branch on Saturday and one with Joel's coworkers on Thursday night. Since no one has an oven, we have to order catered turkeys. Hopefully they taste good! I am going to attempt yams in my toaster oven. We'll see how that goes. 

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Underground malls, art exhibits and chocolate mousse

This week has been an interesting one here in Beijing. It's been really cold and apparently, most people's heat does not come on until November 15th. I have no idea why it's not until mid November before anyone's apartment feels warm. And the heat that comes on is not central heating but radiator heating. We have a radiator underneath each window and it's encased in a wooden box with a vent on the front so the warm air can escape. I hope they work well! I guess I'll find out in two weeks if they do or not. Until then, we have been bundling in blankets and keeping the bathroom and kitchen doors shut because for some reason, those are the two most freezing rooms. (We do have a unit in the ceiling that is both a heater and an air conditioner. We just barely figured out how to switch the function from AC to heat, it's all in Chinese so it was a lot of trial and error with pushing all of the buttons. When we were running the AC in August, our utility bill was really expensive and we don't want that to happen again. So we have been rationing our heater use, mostly in the morning and when Will is awake and playing by himself. But, it only heats the living and dining area so it's really not that effective. So we are not completely without heat, just almost.)

We also celebrated my 25th birthday on Wednesday. We debated about what to do and our options were slightly limited by the fact that we had to bring Will with us wherever we decided to go and by the fact that it was cold outside. We ended up going to the China World Trade Center tower, it's one of  the tallest skyscrapers in Beijing with 81 floors. The Church Office Building in SLC is 28 stories so this building is almost three times taller! They have a restaurant on the top floor and we ate chocolate mousse while we watched the sunset and observed the enormous city from this new perspective. All the waitresses were completely mesmerized by Will and we found them frequently staring at us or just coming over to our table and standing there watching him. 

The China WTC tower sits on top of a huge underground mall, it was so cool. We rode the subway to get there and the station connects directly to the mall which connects directly to the WTC. So we didn't even have to go outside to get from the subway to the restaurant. It was so nice! On our way back through the mall, this girl just started talking to us to practice her English. She told us she was a senior art student and some of her work was on display at a student exhibit in the next tower over. We decided to go with her to look at the exhibit and ended up buying two of her pictures. This winter one is my favorite. They are mounted on silk that you can roll them up scroll-style so hopefully we can pack them home safely when the time comes.

After we made it home, we put Will to bed and ordered some Italian food from Annie's and just had it delivered to our apartment. That's one thing about city living I could definitely get used to: free delivery! So nice. Even McDonald's delivers here. They put your food in a heat box that's mounted onto an electric bike and they bike it over to you. The bikes are nice because they can deliver fast regardless of what traffic looks like. Anyway, the fettuccine alfredo was HEAVENLY!! The creamy parmesany goodness was something I had really been craving. Happy birthday to me!

This week is also midterms for Joel's students. They do it college finals week style here - no classes, just tests. So Joel has all week to grade and get ready for the last stretch until the Chinese New Year break. 

We've almost been here for three months now and I can't believe how the time has flown by. And we've made so much progress since we moved here and learned so much. I was thinking yesterday about how I'm really grateful we had the chance to move here. Joel and I have a lot more time to just focus on our little family and our lives (in some ways) are much more simple. We sold our cars, got rid of our smartphones and couldn't bring many belongings with us. I hardly miss most of our stuff. (I do really miss my skis, it will be two more seasons before I can go. I was pregnant last ski season so that will be three years total!)