sore thumb

Today we hope to find the perfect, fake Christmas tree. There's a market on the north side of town that supposedly sells lots of xmas stuff starting in December. We could really be pushing our luck by going on the first day of December. It would be quite disappointing to get all the way out there and then come home empty handed. METRO has had there xmas stuff up for a couple weeks now. We're doing a Jesse Tree (http://www.cresourcei.org/jesse.html) again this year. I hope to find a cute little tree to use and we're making ornaments out of felt this time. Last year it was all made with posterboard, markers, crayons and glue. Hopefully this year's ornaments will last awhile. I found a pattern in my Gooseberry Patch xmas books for great stockings. They're made from felt, too and so we need to go to the fabric market today to pick up all this felt. I plan on making 4 and I'll just add that fourth name next Christmas! With this cold weather and xmas shopp

It's T-giving Day already here. And I say "already" because it's still Wednesday in the ol' US of A. But I could say "already" to mean that I can't believe we're already celebrating another T-Day in this country. Which is true, I can't believe it. Last year we had our good friends John and Caitlin with us in Wuhan. Caitlin was pregnant with little Sam. It was a good celebration with them and our other friends in Wuhan. One of my favorite memories of that day was how John kept giving Maddie anything she wanted off of his plate. She ended up chewing on a turkey bone for the majority of the meal. This coming Sunday will be our traditional celebration with our friends here in Xi'an. We're even having some sort of Pilgrim and Indians reenactment with costumes and all. Maddie and I are Pilgrims. Phil's an audience member. Today we're going to school. I'm sure if I had wanted to skip today in light of the holiday Phi

This afternoon Madeleine and I made T-giving cookies together. Grandma's recipe, Mara's cookie cutters, and a kitchen covered in flour. Maddie had the greatest time. It was her first time to use cookie cutters and she got so excited every time. We made a video of the experience that will get posted on U-Tube. It was such a fun thing to do together. They don't taste as good as Grandma's and most of them look nothing like turkeys but who cares.

We're thinking more and more of going to Beijing to have baby kumquat. We've been asking for peace about staying here in Xi'an and neither of us have that yet. Yesterday, Friday, we met with a couple from our school for lunch who just had their 1st child at Beijing United Hospital. All the staff speaks English and if they're not foreigners they've been trained internationally. They had a very positive experience and highly recommend the hospital. From what they said it sounds like a VERY nice hospital. You have your own room, the husband has a pullout bed in the room, they do the candlelight steak dinner, and they have all the modern delivery equipment. We also talked a couple days ago with our Asian boss and he told us that living expenses and travel would be covered for us. So, that's a relief because being in Beijing for over a month would be very expensive. We'd need to find an apartment to stay at because a hotel for a month just wouldn't cut it.

Today feels like Friday although it's Thursday. Tomorrow we're taking the morning off for my 1st prenatal doctor's visit. We should be able to get an ultrasound done so we can see the little tike. My lesson at school today will be a lot of words like: labor, delivery, operation, and learning how to ask questions like, "Will the baby be able to stay in the room with me or be in a nursery?". I've had a couple lessons on visiting the doctor or being sick but nothing about pregnancy. So, I asked Annie, my teacher, to prepare a special lesson for me today. Our friend, Kati, will be going with us on Friday and she had all three of her children in Taiwan. She'll be helping us as needed which I imagine will be quite a bit. Unfortunately, all the stuff we hear from other foreigners about having babies in a local hospital isn't what we want to hear. So, we're hoping our talk with the doctor on Friday will be more positive. Either way, it will help us

I woke up early this morning for it being Saturday. I've always had a hard time sleeping in but now that I usually try to get up before Maddie to have "time before I'm needed" time, I always seem to wake up before 6am. So, I decided to write. It would be nice to have some coffee and a bagel with cream cheese. The coffee I have but although the thought is nice the actual making and then drinking doesn't appeal to me. I also have bagels. METRO sells bags of frozen, plain bagels. I bought a bag last week. They're shaped like bagels but I don't think they really are. I'm not sure what the requirements are for bagels but these are too airy to be real. It doesn't help that they are absolutely nothing like My Favorite Muffin's. Which of course, is what I'm craving. The cream cheese is also at METRO and it's Philadelphia Cream Cheese which we all know would be good but it's WAY to expensive to justify spreading on a fake bagel. Ye