We have been our busy selves this last little while. The kids jumped back into school, and are busy as ever. The big news of the week is that there is now a Dairy Queen in Nanjing! With blizzards and everything! Ok, not everything. It only has hotdogs and fries. But it has blizzards. We are happy!
We started having church in our home this last week. All went as smooth as possible(hey, at least this time we didn't run out of tp!). It was a bit hard for Eli to figure out that we have to behave as we are in a church building even in our home. He kept trying to run upstairs and grab toys.
Earlier this week, I went to Walmart. There was a man there, who said "Hello". I said hello, and he stood there while I was checking something out. I said good-bye. He said good-bye. He left his cart. He stopped mine, checked out EVERYTHING in it. The said in Chinese that it was all very good. He put his bag in my cart, and started pushing it. I tried to tell him that I didn't need his help. I was starting to get a little nervous (not that I couldn't have taken the guy out! I just didn't want to make a scene!) Anyway, I finally got the point across and he left looking a bit hurt. I just didn't want him coming with me to do my grocery shopping, having him check out everything and trying to tell me good stuff to buy! Jiang (my driver) and Mike both thought it was extremely funny. I don't think they would have thought it so funny if they would have seen his teeth!!!
I was able to go on a "ladies" outing to Suzhou this Monday. I dropped Eli to school, and asked Benjamin and Caroline Yu to watch him for me. They picked him up, and took him home for the afternoon. It was a fun trip. We went for the pearls. We drove straight to the pearl shops, spent a couple of hours there, and then were taken to lunch by the owner of the pearl shop. It was a good meal. I'm thinking she did ok, if she felt she could take 8 ladies to lunch afterward...What do you think? I tried a couple of new things...Gingko nuts, and batter-fried corn. They were both very good. It was a fun day!
We had a chance to see our good friends, the Larsens, this week. We were able to watch their children while they went to Hong Kong for a couple of days. It was so wonderful to see them. Our children loved playing with Emma, James, and Eliza. We will miss them very much. It was great to watch the children all play together so creatively.
Nicole baked an Austrian cake today. Her Austrian friend Issabella's mother, taught her how to make it. It was delicious.
Eli went to a birthday party last Saturday. At the party, it was hilarious to watch the children play the telephone game. First, they were four years old. On top of that, there were two Chinese children, two American children, and a German child. As you can imagine, the message did not make it anywhere close to it's original form.
Last Sunday, while watching the Casper movie as a family, the power went out in our neighborhood. It was pitch black, so we all went to bed at about 6:30pm. When Emma wanted to watch Casper this week, Jay said,"No, Casper makes the electricity go out!"
