One year later....

Today is Will's first birthday! Just before I started writing this post, Joel and I were browsing through some photos from our very first days in China and I can't believe how much little Will has grown since we've been here!

This is the very first picture we took in China! We were SO tired after our long trip. But Will still looked happy and chipper. He's changed so much since then!

This is a more current picture.:)

 So happy birthday my little boy! He is learning so much everyday. He loves to wave good-bye and to hand me anything he finds. He can take steps on his own but still prefers scooting to walking or crawling. He is an awesome napper and sleeper. I just lay him in his crib and leave the room and he falls asleep. He's been saying "Dada" for a while but I'm pretty sure he's just barely figured out what it means. Will and I walked past our spare bedroom where Joel was grading some papers and Will stopped and looked at Joel and clearly said "Dada." He seemed pretty pleased with himself!

Will has recently figured out that he doesn't have to open his mouth every time I try to feed him with a spoon. This boy used to eat anything I would put in front of him! Not anymore. He gets this mischievous look on his face and drops food onto the floor and waits for my reaction. 

Will also loves to drum on things. Joel bought a set of drum sticks for himself but they have since been taken over as toys by Will. He just scoots around with those drum sticks all day and hits anything he can reach. Sorry Joel, but I don't think you're getting those back anytime soon!

I can hardly believe the love and joy this little guy has brought to our lives. One year ago today, we met him for the first time. When the nurse laid him in my arms, I was smitten. He's been charming me (and everyone around him!) ever since! 

We have a friend of a friend who used to work at the front desk of our building who now works booking models for photographers and we ran into her a couple of weeks ago and she told us that she had a photographer who was looking for a couple of baby models for a photo shoot. She asked if she could take a few pictures of Will and send them to the photographer. I told her that would be fine and she got back with me a few days later and told me that photographer loved him. So we met with the photographer and he wants Will to model a split bottomed pants outfit! Pretty funny. I think we're going to do it just to say we tried it. I think it could be fun or it could be a disaster. I guess we'll find out which.

Today for Will's birthday we went to Beihai park. It was so nice to see green leaves & grass! Such a refreshing change from the gray concrete. Will loves to be outside, as soon as he sees that we're going inside, he'll just sit down and refuse to stand back up.

This is the first time Will has walked on grass. Ever.

This is Will's "I just tried to eat a blossom and it didn't taste very good" face.

 Let's see..... other things that have happened since my last post.... Joel turned 30 and we had a lot of fun with that! I asked a few people to send me video clips wishing him a happy 30th and I put them together to make a video. It was fun to see friends and family even though we were so far away. I also did a little surprise party for him with a few of his colleagues. I'd say it was a success! We got him some tailored shirts made as a gift and only in China would a tailored, custom shirt be half the price of a pre-made department store dress shirt. I told him he looked like James Bond. I don't know how we'll go back to the pre-made ones!

Never can get a serious photo! But he looks good in that shirt, even with the robot pose.

I have already started my summer vacation countdown.... Eight weeks until we're back in the USA! I feel like a kid waiting for Christmas. I already have a list of all the things I want to do while we're there and all the things I want to bring back to China from the States. :) I'm already picturing the moment when I see our families again and it makes me teary just to think about it. Joel and I can't wait to watch our parents play with Will and interact with him! I can't wait to hug my Mom and Dad. And go grocery shopping at Costco!

We had a "small world" moment about a month ago: Joel's Chinese teaching assistant told us that she was moving to Utah of all places! We loved her and were really sad to see her go but so excited for her.  It was really fun to email back and forth and to see our home state through her eyes. We couldn't believe the coincidence; what are the odds? 

I'm having a little mom guilt over the fact that Will has not been to the doctor once since we've been here.... yes, that is 8 months without a checkup. We have insurance through Joel's job but it's only good in mainland China and I don't really understand how our plan works. Whenever I call to try and talk to someone, they can't ever explain anything very well so I'm a little nervous to use it because I have no idea what to expect. I've also been thinking about vaccinations; if we wait until we come home to get all of his vaccinations done, we'll have to pay out of pocket. If we get them done here, China does not allow the importing of some vaccines anymore, so you get the made in China shots that have higher risks of fevers and rashes. Ugh. 

That's about it, I'll leave you with a photo record of a few other things we've been up to. Thanks for reading!

Wanna know how I got these scars?

Prince? Or Che Guevara? Who knows.

Hold on!

Aw, come on Mom. Five more minutes?

Happy birthday little guy!

Farewell to our heating

This is has a week that has made me ask "why are we here again?" more than once. Not to complain, we still really like it here, but sometimes it's hard not to think that "we wouldn't have such and such problem if we were back in the States," problems like having no heat in March and privacy issues.... Will was down for a nap yesterday and I had just gotten out of the shower. There was a knock on our door and I didn't go answer it because I was getting dressed. When I didn't get there fast enough, the guy opened my front door wide open (of course, he came on the one day I forgot to lock the door when Joel left for work), and yelled a loud "Ni hao!" The yell woke up Will from his nap (which will incite immediate rage in any mother) and caught me right in the middle of putting my clothes on (just my luck, our bedroom is straight across from the front door so it's the first thing you see). I have been told by several other expats here that this is not an uncommon occurrence. Apparently, it's not at all rude to just open someone's door if they don't answer. What if I had still been in the shower? Would he have come all the way inside and dropped off my package? The more I thought about this yesterday the angrier I got. Who does that? Who just opens someone's front door? That's when I have to realize that he wasn't meaning to be rude, it's just different where I'm from and there's no sense in getting upset about it. It was a good lesson for me on just letting things go.

And, we have no heat again. Heating in Beijing is only on from mid-November until mid-March. So now it's off. And it snowed this morning- a good two inches of snow. So, after Will falls asleep, I sneak into his room and add three extra blankets to his bedding so he won't freeze at night. Poor kid.

On the plus side, David Beckham is apparently going to make an appearance at Joel's school today. I guess he's acting as a "soccer ambassador" to China so some of Joel's students get to play an after school game of soccer with Beckham. Will and I are heading over when school's out to see if we can "happen" to run into him....

These are some random pictures of our produce market, we try to make a trip here once a week to pick up our fresh fruit and veggies.

Eeeww. There's something about buying meat in an open air market that I still can't get over.

I never knew there were so many kinds of eggs.

Will is getting so big these days! In one month, he'll be a year old. The kid makes me laugh every day. He doesn't crawl, he just scoots. He pulls himself forward while sitting on his bum and because we have wood floors in our whole apartment, it's pretty efficient. But, if we ever go somewhere with carpet (like the church), he just gets frustrated because his mode of transportation suddenly doesn't work. Too much friction! He can clap, give baby kisses, feed himself finger foods, feed me & Joel finger foods, and walk with a little help.

Prep for our summer trip is coming along as well. We decided that I would go three weeks before Joel. At first, the motivation was mostly financial. School doesn't get out until mid July when flights are at their peak price. It saves me $600 to go at the end of June! The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wanted to go home sooner than mid July. Even if that meant flying with a baby by myself for an 18 hour trip. And then, my sweet sister Annie decided she is going to come meet me at the Seattle airport for our 4.5 hour layover and then fly with me the rest of the way to SLC. I was really dreading that layover because it will be in the middle of the night according to our body clocks but I'll have Annie to help me, which is such a relief. And I won't have to do the last leg by myself. So I'll have almost 10 weeks at home and I can't wait!

Goodbye, February!

It's official, we are at the end of Joel's 4 week Chinese New Year break. (And the end of the nightly firework displays! Hallelujah! Now we can finally get some decent sleep around here.)

I think we made the most of our time together. Even though it was cold outside and the air was icky a lot of the time, we still stayed busy and had a lot of fun.

My handsome boys!

They have a game that they play here that's a lot like hackey sack (sp?) only it's a feathery thingy that they kick around. Joel saw this game going and happily joined in!

We also took 6 days and went to Xi'an, an ancient capital of China where the Terracotta warriors were found.

We stayed in this great little hostel just inside the city wall. It was small, but clean and nice (and cheap!). When we first got to our room, it was FREEZING! It was snowing outside and the only heat was a little space heater (I wish they would have turned that on before we got in so that our room would have been warm when we arrived but oh well. We survived) and the door had an inch gap underneath that had a frigid draft blowing in (because our room opened to an outdoor courtyard). But, we turned the heater on and stuffed Joel's coat under the door to staunch the flow of air and our room eventually got warm. That first night I wondered what in the world we had done by bringing our 10 month old on this little adventure but every day got better and better. We went with our friend Jen who used to live there and so she was a great tour guide and she was so patient and understanding of the special needs that come when traveling with a baby!

Right in front of our hostel was the city wall, woohoo!

This awesome little market was right behind our hostel. They had so many cool things for sale and everything was so much cheaper than in Beijing.

Muslim street- we tried some delicious treats here! They had these peanut butter finger-like things  that were so yummy and a sticky, sweet rice treat dunked in a chocolate sauce.

There were SO many of these cute little birds in cages down Muslim street and of course, we had to stop so Will could see them.

Shop on Muslim street

Probably my favorite part of the whole trip was biking the city wall. Xi'an's city wall is the best preserved of most any city wall in China because of a water drainage system that was installed after it was built. Jen stayed with Will in the hostel while we rented bikes and rode the entire 8.5 miles of uneven, old bricks. We had some sore bums afterwards, but it was well worth the trip!

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned split bottom pants before, but I'm going to revisit the topic. Once kids here can walk, they no longer wear diapers. They just squat whenever they get the urge to go (regardless of where they are at the time!) and the easiest way to facilitate that is to just have crotchless pants for the kids to wear. What makes me laugh about these pictures is the fact that Chinese ladies are always yelling at me because I never bundle Will enough (which is totally not the case, he is usually sweaty whenever I take him out of all his layers) but somehow having a hole in the seat of a kids pants for the cold breeze to blow through is ok. I will never understand. 
Will is currently in the biggest size of diapers that my Chinese grocery store carries. Once he grows out of those, I'll probably have to buy diapers at the import store to get a bigger size.
 Or we could just buy some split bottom pants and fit right in! (Not really)

Joel is laughing at me while I'm uploading those pictures. He says that all the Chinese people take pictures of Will's face and we're taking pictures of their kids' bums!

And speaking of taking pictures of Will, this trip was no exception! We put Will down on this cool tile for a photo op and before we could even snap a single picture, other babies were photo-bombing our picture with their parents taking pictures.

This is right after that little girl hugged him (which was so cute!). He was ok until then. He must have felt accosted by a strange baby and all the people staring and taking pictures.

This is our cute friend Jen who came with us.

Yes, this is in fact, a tower made out of plates.

And the food.The food! Ah. It was so good in Xi'an.

Beijing Duck- ironically much better in Xi'an than any I've tried in Beijing!

 They roast the duck whole in a wood fire oven all day and they bring it to your table and carve it up for you right there. You then take a crepe-like pancake and put julienned spring onion and sauce inside and top it with pieces of duck. It was delicious!

Carving our bird

Brunch at the Shangri La hotel.

 We woke up early and headed to Shangri La for brunch and it was one of the most fabulous meals I've ever had. I couldn't believe the choices! It was buffet style and we had homemade yogurt, salads, sandwiches, cheeses, french toast, eggs, fresh squeezed juices, chocolate fountains with fruit, sushi, and Japanese soups. It was well worth the trip (and the money!).

 This is Korean BBQ. There is this dish in your table for hot coals and an oiled skillet goes on top. They bring you marinated meats and seasoned vegetables that you cook to your liking right at your table. The eggplant and mushrooms were probably my favorite.

This soup was one of Joel's favorite meals. It had lots of lamb, noodles and these yummy bread dumplings.

Cute, huh?

When we were walking around the park, we saw another foreign couple. It's funny how foreigners are drawn to each other here, probably because we stick out so badly!We made eye contact across the park and chatted for a while and came to find out that they were LDS, too. It was really cool. The only other foreigners we saw on our whole trip were Mormons. Small world!

By the end of our trip, the weather was gorgeous! It was 60 degrees and the air was clear and beautiful. We made the trek out  to the Terracotta warriors with little Willie in tow. It was an hour bus ride out of the city and we'd had a few people tell us that the soldiers were a let down and to not expect too much but we loved it!! I thought they were so cool. They've had to glue most of them together because they were found in pieces. They're like life-size puzzles.

These are the works in progress.

I wouldn't even know where to start putting these together! They all look so similar but every soldier is unique, they each have different uniforms and even different hairstyles.

Yep, that is Bill Clinton's face on a Terracotta warrior!

The gorgeous city wall at night

Things in Beijing are really great, the first tendrils of warmth have finally started to creep into the city and it's a good reminder that winter doesn't last forever.

 Will and I are getting antsy to be able to go play outside, hopefully spring makes an appearance soon!