our little lake getaway, the stories (and more photos too)

We packed a lot of fun into three great days at the lake. Here are a few of our favorite memories....

Our favorite outfit? Swimsuits! (Lydia calls hers a "swim soup".) We basically lived at the shore line, returning to our room only to sleep :) We had a great suite set-up in the hotel so there was plenty of room for everyone, and a terrific balcony too!



Our favorite meal? We packed a picnic lunch and took a short boat ride over to the island. With two adults, three non-swimmers and a small rowboat, the trip did not lend itself to good photo ops! We took this photo of the island from the balcony off our room.



Our favorite quote?

On the drive there Lydia said, "I'm helping mommy learn to be patient." [I've asked her to remind me of this at least once a day, preferably sometime between 5 and 7 pm.]


Our favorite activity? Playing on the 'beach'! We loved to sit in the sand - digging and shoveling and pouring water everywhere.

We took a scenic route home which was really neat - a lot of rural countryside that I rarely get to see. The fields were full of crops, mostly corn and tobacco (kind of like home). There is still very little large machinery, and the fields were tucked into corners and valleys and lowlands. Matt and I enjoyed a nice drive while the kiddos snoozed in the back seat. (Have I mentioned that I just LOVE carseats!)

All in all, it was a great weekend trip. We decided that we will definitely do it again - hey, maybe you'll come visit and join us!

our little lake getaway, the photo version

Lots and lots of fun!

Stories to come later, but here are a few photos while you wait :)

a little vacation

Sunday morning we leave for a three-day, two night vacation at a lake about two hours from here. We've been before, but our most recent trip was two years (and two children!) ago, so it will be a bit of a different experience :)

The lake is clear, deep and cold. On our last trip Julianna had great fun playing on the sandy beach area next to the hotel, and we're hoping for a repeat experience!

[I look at this picture and think, "that was just two years ago?!?!?"]

I'll certainly post photos when we return!

slave day

One of my birthday presents was a gift certificate for "slave day" and I redeemed it yesterday! Basically, "slave day" is Matt's version of saying, "I am taking a day off work and I will do whatever you want me to do, for one entire day." He's done this gift once before and it is such a sweet way for him to serve me and our family.

He kept saying things like "whatever you wish" or "at your service" or "your wish is my command" which just made me laugh.

So, what did my slave do for me/us? Here's a partial list: Wiped down the dining room walls. Dusted the baseboards throughout the entire house (I hate getting down on my hands and knees to dust baseboards!) Replaced the light in the stovehood (this is not nearly as simple as it sounds, or as simple as it should be). Arranged for the carpenter to come and repair the drawers in the girls' room so they shut all the way. Used one entire bottle of the local version of Drano and finally managed to unclog the tub drain (note to entrepeneurs: there is a market here for an effective drain unclogger!) Shifted the carpet in the girls' room so the carpet liner isn't peeking out on two sides. De-cobwebbed ceiling corners and light fixtures.

And, the biggie: spent a few hours re-arranging our living room furniture! I was itching for a change, and I think my slave agreed to this rearrange-the-living-room plan in hopes that he would stave off my growing urge to repaint the walls! Erin Ashley came over to help - she is really good at this kind of stuff - and we moved and shifted furniture until we came up with an arrangement that I really really like!

Isn't that a GREAT birthday present?!?!?

the reading sandwich

This is what it looks like when both girls want to read to Isaac at the same time :)

He is thoroughly entertained by most of their antics, including this reading-sandwich. It does not bother him in the least that he is simultaneously hearing two different books :)


Notice how Julianna is carefully using her finger to point to the words as she "reads" - this technique is a surprisingly effective means of "reading" almost any book that she has memorized!

solar eclipse

Matt called a little before 9 this morning to tell me that I was missing "the longest solar eclipse of the century". The sun was already about 60% obscured and the moon was moving fast when he called so I grabbed the girls shoes and said, "hurry hurry, we need to get outside and see the eclipse".

They love to get excited, even when they don't really understand why, so they were jumping up and down (which made putting on the shoes a little tricky) and shouting, "we're going to miss it, hurry, it's an eclipse, hurry mommy, hurry." Of course, they had no idea what an eclipse was, but they sure weren't going to miss it!

By the time we got downstairs at 9:01 am the sun looked like this:


Cool, huh? It was cloudy and overcast, which made for perfect eclipse viewing. We could look up at the sun with bare eyes and not squint. It was so, so neat.

We were not in an area of Asia that saw a total eclipse (the sun was never totally obscured). At the "most-eclipsed" point it was just a small sliver of sun.

Here is another photo, almost an hour later, at 9:48, as the moon continued it's journey and the sun was re-emerging.


Now it's bright and sunny outside, big puffy white clouds and perfect blue skies with lots of sunshine. Kind of hard to believe that this morning the sky looked like the photo above. So neat!

You can read a CNN article about the eclipse here.

cows and elephants

I'm sitting here at the kitchen table looking at my dad's blog - he and mom are spending the weekend at my (maternal) grandmother's house and he posted lots of photos of the farm.

My mom grew up on a dairy (then beef) cattle farm and the backyard looks like this:



It reminded me of a conversation Julianna and I had a few months ago.

Me: Julianna, have you ever seen a cow?

Julianna: No. [Not an entirely accurate answer, but she's three, so not all answers are accurate :) Besides, it was definitely her best guess ... I only remember one time I am sure she saw a cow, she visited my grandmother's farm when she was about 5 months old. Perhaps she saw one of the cows in the above photo!]

Anyways, back to the conversation. We'll take it from the top.

Me: Have you ever seen a cow?

Julianna: No. [long, thoughtful pause] But one day my daddy and I rode an elephant.


Well, she had me beat with that one. Sure, at age three I had seen plenty of cows, often from the cozy front seat of my granddaddy's beat up red farm truck as we cruised through the pastures. But the closest I got to an elephant was probably a Babar the Elephant book.

In a seemingly unrelated event, she is now sitting beside me at the table, coloring a picture of a Christmas tree (apparently coloring is not seasonally-bound) and I can hear her muttering under her breath, "sheng dan shu sheng dan shu".

Sometimes I can feel like my life is so 'normal' as defined from a western-standpoint. My kids love spaghetti, read The Little Engine that Could, play with blue-eyed baby dolls and sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

Other times I feel like we are anything but normal. I wonder how our children will deal with the tricky crossing of cultures - the crazy differences between the blog my dad writes and the riding of elephants. The coloring of a Christmas tree while saying its name in a language where few native speakers celebrate Christmas.

One thing is for sure, it will probably be an interesting journey - and part of it might just include another elephant ride!

PS - Sheng dan shu means Christmas tree :)

J - U - L - I - A - N - N - A

Julianna wrote her own name for the first time on Saturday. She worked hard on each letter, and when she finished the last "A" she sat back to look at her accomplishment.

"Oh MY" was all she could say.

Then she hopped down from her chair and scampered off to find her daddy so he could admire her handiwork.


Since then writing her name has become a bit of a hobby! She still needs plenty of prompts as to which letter comes next and asks things like, "ok, what comes after L?"

It's so fun to see her starting to understand a little of the what's happening on the pages of the books that she loves to read!

our (borrowed) ride

It's been fun to have a vehicle to use this summer!

Friends loaned us their mian bao che to use while they were back in the States for a few months. Mian bao che literally translates "bread loaf car". Check out the photo below, and you'll know exactly why it's called a bread loaf, it looks just like one!



The Bread-loaf is an incredibly popular vehicle, the workhorse of the driving fleet here. They are everywhere, and carry everything! We once saw one with a small donkey in the back. Farmers take out the back seats, fill them up with produce and drive into town - park on the side of the road, open up the door and it's an instant fruit/produce stand. Right now lots of them are full of watermelons - and when I say "full" I mean "really really full", you'd be surprised how many watermelons these farmers can get in their bread-loaf.

The one we are driving carries children :) Even though it is much smaller than an American minivan, we manage to squeeze three carseats across the middle row (the back row does not have seatbelts).


Isaac sits in the center - a bit of a "sister love sandwich". Sometimes it sounds like they are torturing him back there - with the seats squished together, he's well within arms reach of each big sister. They poke and prod and tickle and get right up in his face singing, "hey little buddy buddy".

One evening it sounded particularly rowdy and I felt sorry for the little guy in the middle. Until we arrived at our destination and opened up the back doors - and I discovered he was sound asleep :) Apparently when the sister-love-sandwich gets too intense the best option is to just settle down for a little nap.

It's an interesting ride. Matt says it drives like his 1990 Honda Civic. Except the Civic had a much larger engine. Imagine driving a 7 passenger vehicle equipped with a 1 liter engine - needless to say, acceleration is an issue! No power steering either - I only tried parallel parking once :)

But it's a lot faster than a double stroller! And we like the freedom to just pick up and go, without worrying about arranging for a driver. It's been so fun to go on quick little trips as a family.

And the girls love carseats. I think they like the freedom to sit on their own and that they sit up high enough they can look out the windows. [Carseats are really uncommon here - we have some that we got from the States.] I love the carseats because I can just sit by myself and not worry about restraining one or more children while riding down the road!

PS - I realized that our little set-up with the carseats satisfies approximately 3% of US child safety regs. Hey, the car probably satisfies only about 3% of US safety regulations!

Remember, we live in a different country! Americans are incredibly blessed to live in a country that is wealthy enough to create myriads of regulations for the express purpose of safe transportation. It's a whole different world here - although seat belt use is required for drivers, the law is not consistently obeyed. Children ride in laps. Pregnant women or those carrying children are actually encouraged to ride in the roomier front seat, because it is more comfortable. Seatbelts in rear seats are pretty uncommon - this mian bao is a pretty special ride because it does have the seatbelts.

We are thousands of miles away from anyone who would ever consider adding a special feature like side impact air bags or an alarm that sounded if you were about to back over something and didn't realize it.

wedding bells are ringing

Today my brother Stephen marries his fiance Jen at a beautiful resort in Panama.

Bummer is, Panama is conveniently located on the other side of the world - it's a 40 hour trip, one way! So we aren't there, and we hate to miss all the celebrations.

We made a little video to send our greetings to the bride and groom. It took about four tries, but we finally got one with most of us looking at the camera and most of us following our 'script' most of the time. You can watch it here.

The last time we saw Stephen and Jen was two years ago! Right before Lydia was born we took a little family beach vacation and Stephen joined us for a few days.

He was a big help with Julianna :)


and kept her smiling!

I'm sure there will be more smiles and laughs during our next visit too - Jen is really great with children!

Congratulations Stephen and Jen! We look forward to the next time we see you!

on the up and up

So, Friday morning started out rough (another pipe burst - outside our building - which meant lots of workers digging a huge hole in the ground right outside Erin Ashley's kitchen window and no running water for all the apartments while they fixed the pipe).

I was really frustrated. How much more of this could I take? I was past the point of laughing and wondering what could possibly go wrong next. I was ready to walk out my front door and just keep on walking..... to where? Not sure. I was just going to walk til I got tired and decided to stop. At the very least, the place I chose to stop would probably have running water and a store that would sell me a new cell phone! [We rarely use our land line, so a cell phone is really my link to the whole world, or so it seems.]

But I stayed put. After all, someone has to stick around and finish the 24 pack of diet coke I just bought, right?

And I am glad I stayed. The water did come back. My washer hose has not flooded the bathroom since Thursday. I bought a new cell phone last night. The first worker showed up at 8:15 this morning to start wall repairs. A friend is pretty sure he has killed the computer virus (but there is still a slim chance that it has mutated and is 'hiding' from all the virus-detecting and virus-killing software).

The girls are spending the morning at Xiao Li's house where they are making pancakes and - I'm sure - having a grand time. It's just me and Isaac (and the wall-repair man, of course!). And I am grateful that things around here are on the up and up.

Oh, that the "slow-paced, laid-back, restful July" that I have been dreaming of would finally show up!

[I will post again soon with some recent photos - the camera needs to be virus checked and cleaned before I can upload to my (hopefully) virus free computer - and I have no idea how to do that myself, so I've got to wait til Matt can help me.]

it's been one of those....

Well, I know the saying goes, "it's been one of those days", but unfortunately, for me, a better option is "it's been one of those weeks".

For starters, today is the one week mark from the beginning of the whole "a pipe inside your kitchen wall is leaking" mishap. I am realizing that I had my expectations a bit too high with the whole wall/floor repair thing. This is Asia. Things take forever. I KNOW that. But I forgot it.

Sure, the leak is fixed. But it will be a while til the kitchen is back to normal. This reality is slowly sinking in. I am hopeful that the kitchen cabinet will be re-installed on Saturday afternoon, which is great news - right now the kitchen cabinet is sitting by the windows in our dining area, which means the stuff that used to be by the windows (including our dish cabinet) is spread throughout the rest of our apartment. I can't wait to get the cabinet replaced, and the furniture back to it's previous resting place. As to when the walls and floors will be repaired, well..... it might be a tad bit longer (like maybe a few more weeks).

Yesterday morning my cell phone officially "broke". It's been acting up for the past few months, but I think the voice receiver died it's final death - I can send and receive messages, but can't have a phone conversation.

Yesterday afternoon I tried to start the dryer only to realize that the drum would not turn. The trusty dryer repair man arrived this morning (I'm starting to think I should send this guy a birthday card, he's a big fixture in my life!). He quickly fixed the belt and the drum was turning again in no time. I started a load of laundry - 45 minutes later I returned to find the bathroom floor flooded with water. ARGH. This is, unfortunately, not too uncommon, but I really thought we had the problem fixed. I (hopefully) fixed the washer hose, mopped up the floor, and put in another load - we'll see what happens this time around.

Oh, and my computer has a nasty virus (don't worry - you can't get it from reading my blog!) that is befuddling computer experts. Matt and a tech guy have been emailing trying to get rid of it (his computer is infected too), and it's proven to be quite resilient - the two of them have been working on it for over a week, and it's still alive and thriving. It temporarily killed my email yesterday. ARGH.

I know that this is exactly God's good plan for me and my family right now. He knew this week would happen. It was part of his exact plan. And it is for my good and His glory. The challenge is clinging to that truth in the midst of "one of those weeks"!

Lydia in the middle

First things first, for all of you who are wondering when our apartment will return to "normal" and we will no longer have holes in our walls or floors: There is NO update.

Yep, you got it. We are still waiting for the workers to come and give the leak repair their official approval. I can look at it and tell you that it's not leaking. But who cares what I think? They've gotta see it for themselves. We can't start the process of repairing and restoring til the apartment management folks see it with their own eyeballs :)

So, anyways. Enough of that.

A few weeks after Isaac was born I went through this stage of feeling really sad for Lydia. The child in the middle. No longer my baby, but not nearly old enough to do all the things her big sister could do. I watched her vacillate between wanting to crawl into my lap (which was often occupied by her new little brother) or wanting to run and jump and play just like her big sister (which usually meant she ended up crying in frustration because she couldn't keep up).

Almost 4 months have passed since Isaac's arrival, and I no longer feel sad for Lydia :) She's got a great spot in the family!

She's loved and adored and delighted in by her big sister Julianna......


and she's finally managed to gain enough of Isaac's confidence that she can hold and cuddle him without him bursting into tears.


[Sure, that's probably a bit of fear in Isaac's big eyes, but at least he isn't crying!]

Yeah, Lydia is doing A-ok with her spot in the middle :)

hole in the wall dining

Many of the best restaurants here aren't too fancy. Actually, they are the opposite of anything resembling fancy dining.

Picture this.... an old, rundown concrete building, the ground level lined with garage doors. Open up one of those doors, grab a gas canister and hook it up to a stove, and bring in a big 'ole wok. Set out a few tables and cheap plastic stools..... and voila, your restaurant is open for business.

We call them "hole in the wall" restaurants. And some of them cook up the most delicious fare!

Well, last night Erin Ashley was kind to provide a little comic relief to our current kitchen situation, telling me our dining area now qualified as a "hole in the wall"! She's right. Actually, there are now two holes (in two different walls). And two holes in two different floors too, but "hole in the floor dining" doesn't have the same kind of ring.

The low point today? A little before noon when I realized water was seeping up through the seams in our wood floor. The high point? About an hour ago when the workers declared the pipe "fixed".

So now we wait. In a few days the workers return to ensure that the pipe is definitely fixed (it will take a while for everything to dry out). Then, a bunch of different folks are lined up to come - to fix the wood floor, to replace the destroyed pieces of tile floor, to re-plaster and paint the wall, and to reinstall the removed portion of kitchen cabinetry, etc.

It's far from over. But I am so grateful that our kitchen is (mostly) back in commission for the time being. And that the landlord and various other businesses are covering the cost of all this mess.

from bad to worse

[You might want to read the previous post to fill in some details.]

Things are not looking good for the pipes. The leak source was finally found about 5:45 this afternoon. The only way to repair it? To enter from the kitchen-side of the wall (as opposed to the dining-area side, which is where they workers have been hacking away).

We are currently waiting to hear back from the company that installed our kitchen counter tops. They need to come uninstall them, so the workers can move the cabinetry, and get to the leak.


Yeah. Exactly.

water woes

It would probably not be difficult to fill an entire blog simply chronicling the many woes of living in poorly constructed housing. Poor quality construction is just the way things work around here.... recently Matt and I were driving on an almost brand-new road and it already had potholes!

Our home has also been a source of much frustration. It's not just this apartment, it's basically every apartment. Erin Ashley recently called a plumber to her house for three (or maybe four - I forget) different problems in less than 24 hours! 3 different plumbing problems in 24 hours!

So, I can't blame our home. In fact, I love our home. I could spend years in this apartment - the floor plan, the kitchen, the everything.... I tell Matt all the time, "I just love this apartment" (even though I do wish it wasn't on the 4th floor!).

Anyways, yesterday morning the apartment management company fix-it man showed up at our door. Residents in the third floor apartment were complaining that water was dripping from their ceiling. Maybe it was coming from our apartment? Well, turns out it is.

See the bottom six inches of this wall.... look closely..... that's water stains. Water coming from INSIDE the wall.



So by the end of the day yesterday the conclusion was: We've gotta get to the water leak source. It's probably somewhere inside your wall - a pipe that is busted or something. We'll be back in the morning.

Oh joy. Joy upon joy.

At 10 am this morning the source of the leak is still MIA. More water has been found. My kitchen/dining room is a wreck, covered in bits and pieces of busted up tile. The workers have been hacking at the floor with a hammer and chisel. You'd be surprised how far the little pieces of tile fly!




The hole they are digging is filling with water. Nice.

Little Isaac managed to take a pretty decent morning nap, sleeping to the sweet lullaby of "hammer upon tile floor". I can't believe he slept at all.

More later -

Isaac vs. the brown-eyed-genes

I spent part of the afternoon taking photos of my bigger-every-day little boy. We had a great time just the two of us, while the little ladies slept the afternoon away. Then he got tired too and now the house is quiet - for a while :)


I am not a great photographer, but the blurry feet in this photo are pretty much Isaac's fault :) He was busy kicking and pumping his little legs.

I think he is built just like his daddy. I hope he manages to win the battle in the face of terrible genetic odds and hang on to Matt's blue eyes.