July 15 - The Supermarket‏

Hey, guys,

Well, I had another little meltdown this morning - I'm just having the hardest time here. I've been praying and reading scriptures and trying to figure out what I should do. I finally asked Ben to give me a blessing of comfort. I trusted him to use his priesthood and say the words that Heavenly Father would have him say, rather than say what he himself wanted to say. It helped so much. I could feel Ben hesitate, but then say that it was Heavenly Father's will for our family to stay together, and that He will protect us, guide us, and comfort us. It was a powerful blessing, and though I'm not happy about it, it was the answer I've been looking for. Heavenly Father wants me here. So I'll stay here until we're done. He was crying pretty hard by the end of the blessing. He said he knew that I wanted to hear that it was right for me and the kids to go home, but he truly felt like we needed to stay here with him. So here we are. Sigh.

I guess Ben won't be able to get in and see how the apartment is doing until this wall foundation issue is fixed, in one week. So it will definitely be more on the two-week original schedule they originally set for us to get in there.

We needed baby wipes, so we took a little family trip to this supermarket Ben keeps talking about. And guess what is above the supermarket?? (The supermarket is underground.) A park!!!! A normal, grassy, non-garbage-filled park. Um, there still aren't kid toys, but dang. A park. A clean park. So I was really excited about that.

So we decended into the deep to see what was down there. The first level you get to is like a shopping mall. Cute Clothes Central. Oh my. I told Ben he needed to give me lots of Retail Therapy while I'm here. He chuckled and said he would. I'm also holding him to my Trip to Hawaii requirement, dude. So then we went down to the second level. This level is mainly fresh fruits and vegetables, meat, milk, etc. All of the milk is in boxes, and unrefrigerated. Ben says that Summer says that it is indeed pasteurized, but I'm worried that it will taste really weird. I didn't see any milk like unto what we see in the states. I saw oodles and gobs of different options for vegetables and fruits, which is awesome, but I can't really see anything of the Mexican food persuasion - cilantro, jalapenos, or anything like that. I checked out the meat section very thoroughly - it was cleaner than the pics I had seen online. The workers get everything for you, and they all wear masks, hair nets, gloves, etc., and the meat is refrigerated. There was every kind of pork you could ever want, and any kind of chicken you could want, but not a sign of beef anywhere. And, obviously, seafood mania. The bakery was on this level, and it didn't have anything that looked familiar at all. The bottom level had baking stuff, boxed stuff, etc. I wanted to explore that area more thoroughly, but Gage was getting hungry and it was sooo crowded in there. And we kept getting stopped so that people could take pictures of us and with us and touch Gage and hold him and pinch his cheeks. :) So we left.

We were on our way up when we passed a bra store, and I was like, dude, I need a bra. I thought I packed one for washing, one for wearing, but apparently, I only packed one. It's an issue. So we stopped there for a minute. The chest measurements are the same as ours, I think, but not cup sizes. Their cup sizes are in numbers. So I picked one that might be my size, then I pointed into my mandarin dictionary for, "May I try this on?" She indicated that they didn't have a trying-on area. She kind of signed to me that I would have to try the bra on outside of my clothes. Oh, and she did succeed in signing whether or not I wanted padded or not. I indicated not. :) So she sat and helped me try on bras outside of my shirt. I got one as close as I could to a good fit - who really knows until I try it for reals under clothes. It was funny.

Oh, another funny thing that happened - on the first floor, Micah had been whining about needing to go pee, so we found a public restroom and Ben took him in. But then, in the second level, he said he had to pee again. Sigh. So we were looking all around and couldn't find any. We were checking out, paying for our baby wipes and some Skittles that I was really excited to find, and he was whining, and the checkout lady took her garbage out from under her little area and set it in front of him. And the actually indicated that he should pee in there. We were like, "Whaaaa?" Yep. That's what she wanted to offer us. So we had him pee, right in the checkout line, in the checkout lady's garbage. And no one even blinked an eyelash. If I was her, I wouldn't want to work next to a garbage can full of urine all day, but it was no prob. So weird!!!!

Dylan did a great job hailing a taxi for our way out of there. That makes him so proud.

Everywhere we go, the number one thing people ask - or sign - to us is, "Are all four of these kids YOURS?" When we nod our heads, the older people laugh so hard, like it's the funniest thing ever that we have four children. The younger people always smile and give us a thumbs-up sign. I don't know if rules are still applicable about how many kids you can have here or not - Ben heard they relaxed the rules so that, if your firstborn is a girl, you can try for a second. Who knows.

I did check into this imperialism thing from 1900. Apparently, there were foreigners here and there in Beijing and here in Baoding at that time, living, working, whatever. And these rebels, called the Boxers, wanted to rid China of all foreign influence. So they started this thing called the Boxer Rebellion, where they would kill and drive out any westerners, along with any Chinese people who had converted to Christianity. So this is why those troops from France, Germany, England, and Italy applied such brute force and destroyed so many things. I'm not saying it was okay of them to do this, but now I kind of understand the history around it.

We saw our first white person today!!! In May Down Low [McDonald's]. (By the way, I ordered an egg mcmuffin, which I had a couple of days ago and just loved, and they didn't put ham on it today! To compensate for lack of ham, they put on like a half-inch layer of mayonnaise and ketchup. Onto the egg. Gross.) He is actually from Russia!! He spoke good English. He said that most Americans and other English speakers are gone for the summer because they are professors, and school is out at the university, but that they all come back in the fall, and there are lots of them. This made me soooo happy. I'd like to make some friends who understand me.

Gage needed a nap, so I'm here holding down the fort. Dylan is playing Angry Birds. And Ben just took Micah and Sadie with him to Popland to grab another gross lunch. Sick. I don't expect them back for a couple of hours. "Fast food" is a foreign concept here. It has every appearance of being a fast-food joint, but it is slower than molasses.

So that's that.

Love you guys.
- Kar