Real reason I haven't posted sooner....

August 7th, 2007

So I was in the middle of catching up here and a bad case of food poisoning hit. We are now mostly recovered and it is only 3 days later. Though it took us a good week to actually get back to where we felt normal again.

Tally, I think, misses Adayla when she is at school. We play, but I know she would rather follow her big sister around. When we go to pick her up, Tally is so happy to have her back.

Last week, Tally had two more bottom teeth break through. She now has 8, 4 on the bottom and 4 on the top. Teeth just make her look like a little girl. But I guess since she doesn't have too much hair, it keeps her my baby! She is so strong willed. When we pray for the girls, we are grateful for their strong minds and we ask that they will continue to have such....I am thinking about quitting doing this. They do have strong minds and therefore like to think of themselves as independent when they feel like. When she decides she wants a toy, she lets Adayla know it. When she is grumpy, there is not much you can do to distract her. When she is mad whether you picked her up and stopped her from going somewhere she planned on or have her next to Adayla in the double stroller and she is not happy about it, she lets you know it. She knows that she can quickly give a good tug to Adayla's hair or mine. She will hit or scratch you, if she can't get to the hair. I know some of this is learned behavior, but I know she doesn't have hair that anybody pulls...she does this all on her own.

Tally learns so much from watching us interact as a family and the things that Adayla does. She knows before we have a meal, we always say a prayer. She happily keeps her arms folded throughout the entire prayer. But the funniest is that she likes to push the on/off button on the TV and she knows that she is not supposed to do it. The next time she did it, I said, Tally you go to timeout. She marched her little self right to the corner and put her nose in it. We tried to control our giggles. She stood there until I counted to ten. Then she came back out and played. I was so amazed that she knew exactly what to do, just by us having timeouts with Adayla. Next time I am going to take a pic!

Obviously she understands quite a bit. Every time she has a stinky diaper, I tell her “stinky” or “hen chou” and she grabs her little nose. We just think she is quite cute!

A few quick funnies:
When you go to a market to go shopping, the store attendants immediately shout at you in English to try to get you into their store. I don't like to just ignore them, but if you show any interest they won't let you go. I usually keep walking and will say, “bu yao, xie xie.” Which means I don't need, thanks. The other day we were with our friends and Tim was push Adayla in the stroller. I had already walked past when Tim came along. They started shouting at him, Adayla says on her own, “Bu yao, xie xie!” We cracked up!

We have mentioned that small kids her in China only have a slit in their pants. It is actually more than a slit, it is a big hole exposing everything. Quite frequently, they like to bring their little kids up to our little kids who are in the stroller. This past weekend, this lady brings her little grandson up to say hi to our girls. There he is looking at our girls, with his parts there for everybody to see. I know this is just life for them, but Adayla is going to start noticing the difference really soon. How am I going to teach these girl modesty when their are bums all over the place???

We had our 2nd set of visitors, another Olmsted family from China. They arrived Friday evening, after riding a fast train, with their 3 kids. Ayi cooked a Chinese dinner complete with homemade dumplings. I was going to help, but we got busy with other things that day. It rained hard both evenings they were here, so we mostly stayed inside and traded stories on how things are going. The older two kids are 11 and 9 and they were so good with Adayla. She loved just hanging out with them and they were very good to play games with her. They have a little guy around Tally's age. They were just happy to have toys.

Back to our weekend....
We headed out Saturday morning to see a bit of Shanghai. We took the ferry across the river and then headed down Nanjing Road over to People's Square where we went to a city planning museum. You can see the pics later. I didn't know how Shanghai really spreads out. (I don't know where else 22 million people would live, but I am in my little bubble of how to get places.) We are going to have to venture out to other places. We saw one sad part about the city...our views in 10 years will be completely gone, all we will have is big buildings to look at. So as long as it is in 5 years and not 2, we are good. But we noticed they just started a second building that will definite block our views :(
We then headed over to Taco Belle Grande to have a fabulous mexican dinner. They had chips, they had salsa, and they had cheese. Life couldn't have gotten better and it is was along 2 metro stops away! Until later that evening which led me to stop blogging and have a 3 day break...and even then we are feeling the best. So no more Taco Belle Grande.... : ( We learned all about la duzi and ou tou....

We had a great time with our Olmsted friends and look forward to a visit in Nanjing...once the days aren't quite so hot!
We were supposed to get our stuff today....we still don't have it. They called late Monday night to say it hadn't cleared customs yet. Bummer! But they called again today and set up for delivery tomorrow....we are keeping our fingers crossed.

I am hoping to improve my cooking skills while here, if not we won't starve to death, but I have the time and there isn't much else to eat other than Chinese food. I actually like it, I have to look hard to find other things to eat, but it gets us eating things outside the box!

Adayla on the other hand is a real concern for her teachers. We feed her breakfast before she goes to school (of course) and then they feed them a snack of cookies. Cookies are what they call them, I would probably call them sugarless and therefore flavorless tummy fillers. Adayla eats them and then the teachers wonder why at 11:00 am she is not hungry for lunch. First is is Chinese food, things that she is not familiar with and because she is not hungry.

I am going to bed now, more later.