sore thumb

It's in the 70s this morning and drizzling. I hear it could be close to 100 tomorrow in Chengdu, the day we'll arrive. I haven't packed one single thing yet. Last night I was wiped out and went to bed earlier than normal but Lilian had a hard time falling asleep so it took awhile before we were all content enough to close our eyes. This morning and into the afternoon Phil and I have interviews to conduct for potential volunteers for work in Chengdu. I think I'll have to skip out on the afternoon stuff to pack. Thankfully, Chengdu is a big, modern city and we can buy anything there that we don't want to pack or forget to pack. Well, almost anything. It's been a really busy, full week with us learning the ropes of how CCA goes about selecting suitable volunteers for the work they are doing. The interviewing process started yesterday and was really interesting. Phil conducted them all with an interpreter and I sat in on a few of them. Everyone also had to

Lilian Pearl will be 3 weeks old this Thursday. It's already going by so fast, so much faster than it did with Madeleine. It seemed like everyday was an eternity when Maddie was this old. We've been home for a week. Our train trip from Beijing to Xi'an couldn't have gone any better. We all slept well and got home without any problems. My parents, sister and nieces came up from Wuhan last Wednesday. They are all back at their homes now. We had a great time hanging out here in Xi'an and they got to do a lot of fun stuff and we did it almost all together! Again, it's amazing how differently we function with our second child. I could barely get it together with Maddie at this point and with Lilian we went out to dinner several times as a family and pretty much just did whatever we wanted. She's a pretty easy baby as far as babies go. Now, we're trying to figure out how life works with 2 kids. Madeleine is figuring it out very well. She has her mo