Hidden Key

I locked myself out again yesterday.  I have a history of doing this over the last 11 years, but doing it in China is just plain frustrating.  Luckily we left our apartment around 5pm so we only had to wait for an hour and 45 minutes until Kyle rescued us.  I was standing outside, sweating and losing half my blood supply to the hordes of mosquitoes and I decided that we must hide a key.  I shutter to think what would happen if I do this and Kyle is out of town.  I always think there has to be some way to get into that apartment.  But we live on the 8th floor, I have no phone, I have no car, I don't speak the language (not that it would help, but I could at least tell everyone what an idiot I am), and I never carry much money, yesterday I had the equivalent of $1 on me.  Things were grim.  Strangely the worst thing was I had no idea what time it was.  I mean it felt like we had been out there for hours, but more likely it had only been 5 minutes.  I started this weird dance of trying to walk beside any man that was wearing a watch and tilt my head just right to try to read the time.  Women here generally don't wear watches otherwise I would have tried to communicate with some grunts and finger pointing to get the time.  Pretty sure half the men in our complex now think I'm even more of a freak!  haha!  Anyway, eventually Kyle showed up and saved the day and then took us to McDonalds to replenish our energy and flagging spirits.  Kenz and Kaylie thought there were literally dying from lack of water and food.  It is good Kyle showed up with he did because Kenz was sprawled out in this broken down golf cart holding her tummy and moaning.  I think Kenz may be an actor someday, such drama should not be wasted!!!

This weekend is Dragon Boat Festival so it is a 3 day weekend.  Kenzie's school is putting on a song and dance show on Friday and she gets to introduce her class.

She has been practicing :)

It means 'Next please enjoy Lion Class 2 perform a flying insect song and dance'.

Birthday Dinner

A few weeks ago my friend Angela took me shopping.  We went to a new mall in town and then to a restaurant.  It was a Hong Kong restaurant and they served these famous buns called Pineapple Buns.  I'd never had them before but I didn't expect too much.  When I saw them I thought they would be the typical steamed bun that is served all over China.  Boy was I wrong.  They were amazing!  Served hot with a big slice of butter that you place inside them.  I couldn't stop thinking about them!  Lucky for me my birthday was coming up so I convinced Kyle take us out for my 'birthday'.  Really I just wanted some more bread and butter! :)

 This is the new mall and there is a huge cinema on top of 7 floors of shopping and restaurants.  Then there is a twin tower that is a hotel.  Rumor has it that a super rich business dude here in Huzhou has two daughters and he gifted them each one building.  Not sure if that is true or not, but that is quite the gift!

 These are AMAZING!  The top is like a crunch strudel of some sort and it is actually sweet, which is hard to find in our area of China.  SO good!  And the butter is real, also a rare find here.

 Overall the food was amazing!  The girls ate like it was their last meal :)

 We had to end the mall experience with ice cream.  We could only walk past so many ice cream places before Kyle broke down and used the kids to get himself some ice cream :) 

After eating we had to run to the grocery store because we had a toilet paper shortage.  This can easily turn into a crisis with so many small people using the bathroom.  Remind me never to complain about the grocery store at home being 'busy' again!  It was insane!  This reminds me why I never shop here at night!!!!  

 No training wheels!!

 This kid is a monkey!

 I am always finding her in trees now.

 She wants to do everything that her big sisters do.

Clear Skies

Yesterday it was windy.  Real real windy.  I got confused and thought I was in Wyoming for a couple of minutes.  It is hardly ever windy here, especially in the summer.  With wind like this comes an intense cleaning of the air.  This morning I looked out and felt like I could see color again for the first time since arriving in this country many weeks ago.  I am so used to brown skies with some foreign object that looks a little like the sun, or gloomy rainy skies where the clouds are so low you can't see any better than when the air is super polluted.  In both situations the visibility is usually less than half a mile.  This morning I took the girls out and pointed incredulously to the sky and said, 'girls, the sky is BLUE'.  I mean really really blue.  An incredible blue color that always amazes me when we travel out west.  The trees were so green.  The river water looked even dirtier than before, which is a pretty incredible feat!  I could feel the sun burning my skin.  Such a glorious morning.  This all seems crazy since a person can see this almost daily in America.  But here, it is so rare I felt like it must be similar to being color blind for part of your life and then being able to see again.  It is a wonderful feeling to be so amazed by color on a Friday morning :)

Frozen finally arrived in China.  And by that I mean my husband was able to stream it for the girls and they have been watching it as much as possible ever since.  Now every time this song comes on it is an automatic dance party.  On occasion I like to play it about 8pm at night.  The girls go wild and then their father goes wild, threatening mutiny as a parent.  He is usually way more strict about bedtime than I am, I mean they've been up this long, what is another hour?  haha!  Kyle doesn't look at it this way, so he usually is in charge of bedtime.  If he hears this song anywhere near bedtime he throws up his hands and threatens to hand them back over to me :) 

Happy Friday!!!

Kids

Sometimes weeks in China go by slowwwwwwwly.  Sometimes I don't have much besides a bunch of pictures of some crazy kids.  

 Kyle and I decided to take up badminton.  It is popular here, a lot of people play in the evenings.  We hired these people to carry our stuff and search through the bushes for the stray shuttlecock. 

 It worked great until they decided that they wanted to play too.

 This is our baller.  She doesn't know if she wants to kick it, throw it, or pretend it is her baby, but the ball is her definitely her favorite toy.

 This is the cheerleader.  With a bit of midwestern hick mixed in.  (notice the grass, she doesn't stray far from her roots!)

 Cheerleader turned motivational speaker?  Or something like that, she kept yelling at her father and I to TRY HARDER!  then would beat us with her stick, I'm not sure if it was motivational or psychological/physical torture.

 Their father teaches them how to escape all man made enclosures.

 Snail love.  Did you see that Snails and Mosquitoes are killing more people than any other animal?  I believe it.  Don't drink the water.  Sleep with mosquito netting.  These are things we are teaching our kids over here :)  Actually I haven't accepted the netting yet, but Kyle is itching (hahaha) to get some as he searches the house every night for any hiding spawn of satan that are waiting to suck all our blood.  Usually the kids wake him up around 3am with alarming screams that something is buzzing in their ears.  Most unpleasant.

 View from my kitchen window

 His way of exercising the kids :)

Noodles

My husband loves pasta.  He has loved pasta for as long as I have known him.  In northern China people eat noodles.  In Southern China, it is rice.  We are in the middle so we get lots of both.  Kyle loves the noodles here but there is one restaurant he found that he can't get enough of it is Lan Zhou La Mian.  For over a year he has been trying to figure out how he could bring the family who runs the restaurant over to America and start a restaurant wherever we end up living.  He isn't sure he can live without this stuff! :) 

After deciding that it would be way too complicated trying to get this family into the US, his next idea was to hire a babysitter and have me go to the restaurant for the weekend and figure out how to recreate all of their delicious dishes.  First of all, what the heck is HE going to be doing on this weekend, a babysitter for his kids???  And second, I'm pretty sure that it would take more than a weekend to figure out how to do this:

I guess he will just have to eat as much as possible while we are still living here...

Update

While I was writing the last entry about the snails the two oldest were playing outside.  When they came back home they brought this:

 What in the...

 Kenz explained that they just loved their snails so much they thought they would go get some more.  I tried to explain to her that these were water snails and we could not keep water snails because well, what in the world would we put them in???  So I told her to pack them up and take them back out to the water she found them in.  She packed them up, then proceeded to spilled them all over the kitchen floor.  Sigh.  Then she finally got them out of the house.  Within 30 minutes she returned with two frogs.

FOR.THE.LOVE.

While their sister has been out hunting (I heard her tell her dad the other night that he needs to teach her how to hunt.  Who is this child?) pets these two caught a miserable summer cold.