I have been thinking for the last few days that I wanted to write a blog post, but for the life of me, I suddenly can't remember what about.
Maybe if I just start writing, it will come to me.
I was thinking this week about my love/hate relationship with Beijing at the moment. There are days when I think "I really love living here," and there are days when I would give ANYTHING to be back home in Utah. I've recently come to terms with the fact that we will likely be here for one more year. There are still lots of things to do and see in China that I have yet to experience and someday I know I will miss being here once we've moved back. My new resolve is to make the most of Asia while we are here, it's not going to last forever and I don't want to have regrets about things that I didn't do while we were here because in all likelihood, we will never come back here after next summer. So I want to be more excited about living here and to take advantage of the unique things we can do while we live here.
China has blessed our lives in a lot of ways, we've learned so much about what we are capable of and we've met lots of really wonderful people. Living here also gave me the chance to be a stay at mom, which was not possible for us in the situation we were in while living in Utah. We were both working full time but somehow we still seemed to only make enough to live paycheck to paycheck. I loved my job, but it was a long commute from home and I hated having to spend so much time away from my little boy. The summer after he was born and I went back to work, Joel was the one who was taking care of Will everyday since he was on his summer break. But I worried about when he would start teaching again, I had no idea who would watch Will and I didn't want to put him in daycare. I prayed and prayed that we would be able to find a way that I could stay at home and although it was not was I expecting, our prayers were answered when Joel was offered his job here. Not only are we able to save almost half of what we make each month, living here has taught us a lot about budgeting and how to do without certain things. And the best part is that I get to be at home with my little boy. It's not always an easy job, but I feel blessed to be able to be home with him instead of at work.
And because we live in Asia, Will and I can do things like spend the morning at the Forbidden City, just because that's where I felt like going. We may not have Target, but there are so many cool sights to see here and I need to remember how lucky we are that we get to experience all of this.
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| The Forbidden City from above |
My sister Annie will be visiting with us in a few weeks and I am so excited to see Beijing through her eyes. She gets to stay for a little over three weeks and I am working on compiling our list of everything we are going to do and see while she is here. Her visa just came and now it's all official, everything is taken care of so that she can come for a visit. I am so excited that someone in my family will be able to see what our day to day lives are like and I'm hoping that my parents will get to come next spring (if everything works out so that we can stay another year).
And, my happiest news is that spring is finally here! Beijing is an UGLY city in the winter. No snow, just dead and brown. Now there are leaves and cherry blossoms everywhere and it's finally starting to be warm. Spring in Beijing is my favorite and now that it's here, I'm hoping that those bad air days are mostly behind us.
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| This is the view from our window on a REALLY badly polluted day. See how gray everything is? That's not fog my friends but toxic air. |
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| This is the same view today, when the air is clear. |
