Mei Mei and Xiao de Bebe

We are ridiculously excited!

In one short week...

this is coming!

 Accompanied by her lovely mother... 

We can hardly contain our glee. We thought that we wouldn't get to see them before this Christmas until they surprised us with the most amazing gift of this visit. 

This is how big she was the last time I saw her...

She is now, according to my calculations, approximately fifty times this size.

Unfortunately our brother-in-law won't be able to join them, but we're extremely grateful that he's willing to let them come while he stays in Tanzania without them. 

Honestly, how amazing is that? 

And my sister in law gets a medal for being brave enough to travel all this way with a fourteen month old without anyone to help. *Previously, Sarah has also medaled in baking....Remember these?

Yep, she made them. (*Thank you to all the bridesmaids, aunts and helpers who iced and decorated them too, Sarah was wearing a lot of hats that day as baker, bridesmaid, and oh yeah, she was pregnant too!)

We'll be waiting at security with open arms and a bag full of all manner of things that I hope will endear me to the precious baby we call Roo (and of course some chocolate milk for Sarah). 

Because, let's face it. 

She's too young for me to reason with, so I'll just have to bribe! spoil? help her to see that I'm her favorite.

House Swap

With our departure date drawing ever nearer I realized it was time to start thinking seriously about the practical side of moving home. We came to Shanghai with only the contents of four suitcases to start our home here, and in theory we will be leaving with just the four suitcases again. Dust to dust and such.

Unlike most overseas teaching gigs, Joel's didn't come with a furnished apartment- which means we furnished it ourselves on arrival. That's fine and all, but it also means that when we leave we have to figure out what to do with everything that doesn't fit into those suitcases. Not just the couches and the bed but our lamps, our conversation piece of a refrigerator, our dishes, everything.

I'd begun ameliorating myself with the idea of parting with all these things we'd designed and accumulated. I started putting together an Exit Strategy complete with a time line of what things to sell when and at what cost when an unexpected email arrived.

The email was from another foreigner living in our complex who asked us, quite frankly, if we would be comfortable playing musical chairs with our furniture-only without the music and the getting out if you run out of chairs-so nothing like that really. The proposal was that we start selling our furniture and as each piece sold- a couch for example, they would replace with a couch from their home until eventually all their furniture was moved into our apartment for the next tenants.

It was a great proposal. I felt suddenly much more secure about our situation. With the freedom to sell things at our leisure we could get ahead of the end of the year move-out rush. This happy non-stressed feeling stayed with me for about a week, until we found out that there had been a change in plans and instead of moving their things in eventually they needed to move them by the end of the week.

Which week? Next week. Oh my. Thankfully almost everything of ours has sold lickety-split (I had to define that term to some rather incredulous first graders this week, so I feel the need to justify its existence by using it in a sentence) so it's out with the old in with the new-which in this case is actually true in reverse. Selling the new to make way for the old. Bygones.

Wish us luck!

I like it, add more bows and I'll love it.

As promised I'm continuing the list I started to share the quirkier aspects of life here.  And, I have to tell you, I had no idea how controversial that pea-popsicle was going to be. Here that's like a one on the scale of strangeness. There are corn popsicles and red-bean paste popsicles, milk popsicle with raisins, popsicles that have only a thin layer of actual popsicle carefully wrapped around a "tongue" of gelatin. I got that one once by accident. I thought it was lime then got really freaked out when the inside wasn't popsicle but some goo. I ran up to two youths that looked like they would speak English (I have a good sense for these things) and demanded that they translate the wrapper so I would know what I had just bitten into. It's called "Green Tongue" because when you lick it, the gelatin starts to look like a tongue. Personally, I wouldn't consider that a marketable feature, but there you go.

Fashion (#6) "I like it, but I'm going to need about ten more bows added before I'll wear it."
This is pretty self explanatory. China style is something of an enigma to me. I know it exists, but it's hard to see any true trends. What I have discovered I'll share here. Rule #1: More bows, more bows, more bows. We want bows in the hair, bows on the shoulders, bows on our backs, big bows on dresses, small bows flanking the sides of cardigans. The more bows the better. You'd think there was some sort of monetary compensation for the number of bows you wear in public.

The main window display of the "Gap" of China- it's called Uniglow

All the shirts are Carebears or Barbie

Rule #2  Clothes with animals-yes!  This fashion mentality mirrors my feelings about cheese. Mainly, everything is better when you add it. Why wear regular earmuffs when you could have bunny rabbit earmuffs? Why have a regular jacket when the hood could have cat ears and the back could have a tail? Why have a regular umbrella when you could get on in the shape of a frog with eyeballs sticking out of the top? Why? Why? Why?

Bunny rabbit earmuffs

Ok, that's all. Just two rules. Well, there is the heels rule- mainly you're an low-life idiot if you're a girl who doesn't wear six-inch tall heels everywhere you go. Riding your bike. Climbing the Great Wall. Whatever. But that one just makes me feel bad about myself for not wearing heels, so we'll move on.

I'm Allergic to My Air Conditioner (#15)
This was a really fun one to find out. I include it to make you all appreciate your clean air conditioners, clean drinking water and smog-free skies. To put it in perspective, I can stare directly into the sun here in the middle of the day without sunglasses and not even squint. Regarding the air conditioner, basically what happens is when we turn it on, I lose the ability to keep food in my stomach for any length of time. You were probably thinking that I sneeze a lot or something, nope. Nothing that fun. It happened last summer but we didn't make the association because we'd just moved here and we thought China itself was the enemy of my stomach. Now that hot weather is back and our air is on it's become painfully clear that it's our AC. I'll spare you the details, but you can trust me. Joel is unfazed. And it's never bothered anyone else, last fall or now, so I think you're safe if you're not me. (Just in case I'm terrifying future guests...Welcome to our amazing apartment!)

Who Farted? (#43)
I knew when I moved here that the manners wouldn't be the same. I knew there would be shoving and the hawking and spitting of gross things on the street, but what I didn't know was that people burp and fart without apology or shame. Let me tell you- the first time you see a lady tooting her heart out in an office and nobody bats and eye it is both shocking and hilarious, and unfortunately you pick up quickly on the "laughing now would be like laughing during a prayer" vibe. You really don't want to do it, but the fact that you aren't supposed to makes it harder to contain and ultimately you end up giggling despite yourself while everyone else looks at you like you're the immature one. Whatever, she farted. I just laughed about it. It's still a struggle not to make a face whenever my bus driver or my bus monitor burp and toot out their own little symphonies on the way to school and back each day.

Sorry, Mom. You raised me better than to converse about people's bodily functions, but I felt it was my journalistic duty to share it.

"The husband. Twenty Six. Years. Ok?"

That's how I tried to explain the banner to my ayi when she came to do our dishes this morning.

Banners make everything more festive. Don't you think?

I'm not sure if I've talked about this or not before, but we have an ayi which is a word that I've discovered can mean virtually anything but in our case means house-helper.  She comes twice a week and does our dishes and mops the floor on Saturdays.  Usually we aren't home when she's here so on Wednesday I come home and it's like magical kitchen elves snuck in and made my kitchen all sparkley and nice.

But today I was home, and after two months of Mandarin lessons I was finally able to communicate with her a little bit. It was a fun surprise when we discovered the fact. It went something like this:

She saw the desktop picture on my computer which is of my absolutely adorable neice, Reed and she said the words "beautiful baby" as she was walking back into the kitchen. And I said "Oh! I understand that!" In English, yes.

Now normally, we both just smile and shrug our shoulders and laugh when one of us tries to talk to each other, but this time I understood and I got excited. I quickly tried more words, "baby husband sister. niece? come here! China!" Which she, of course, understood to mean that Reed and Sarah are coming to visit us. She asked "when" and I said "three-of (weeks...weeks...) um...one month!" For some reason my word for weeks was failing me. Then she asked how old Reed was and I told her "Yi-ge Yue!" and she looked shocked which was my cue to realize I'd said "month" instead of "year" so we fixed that, but not before agreeing that regardless, Reed was a big baby.

Anyway, yeah, I made a banner for Joel's birthday. I know he's not a kid and I didn't need to decorate, especially in this fashion, but I just thought it would be fun. Plus, the two desserts I baked took FOUR HOURS to cook in my toaster oven so I was tied to the apartment anyway so why not?

In the end we fit eleven people into our living room after a fun dinner at a local Mexican place. We came back here for triple chocolate cake and brownies, of the four hour toaster oven variety, and peanut butter banana bread that our friend Tim got up and baked before school as a special gift for Joel. I got to introduce one of my very favorite games, tele-pictionary to a few people in the group who'd never played, and a grand time was had by all.

The group at our apartment.

Joel successfully added another year to his resume. He's currently enjoying the six week stretch that he's older than I am.  The only thing that could have made the celebration better is if we could have had you all here with us. Birthdays are bittersweet. It's fun to celebrate with new friends, but you miss your friends from home and family more than ever. Here's to another year of Joel :) Now I'm going to have a brownie for breakfast.