Throw that tooth up on the roof!!‏

Hellooooooooooooo!!! La-la-laaaaaaaaaaa... (That's from Seinfeld.)

I hope all is going well for you guys back in May-gwah, as they call America around here. School is probably starting up, the weather is probably cooling down...I love autumn time.

Things here are good. Life is good when Kar has a kitchen. That's all there is to it. :) We continue to eat Americanized Chinese food, and I'm okay with that. We've found a few little parts of the local cuisine that are nice - they make these wonderful pita bread things down on the street - better than any pita bread I've had in the states. But we don't really like the fillings they like to put inside of the pitas. So we just buy the pitas plain, and then fill them with our own meatey-vegetabley mixtures. And it's good.

Losing Teeth

Sadie-Sue lost her second tooth last week. Here is what a bad mom I am - she lost her first tooth, like, the day before we left for China. And I was so stressed and busy and just..FREAKING OUT that I forgot to have the tooth fairy come to visit her and give her some money for her tooth. And then we left. Sadie kept saying, "But I thought the tooth fairy was supposed to take my tooth and leave money..." I blushed and said, "Well, maybe she forgot that night. And then, when she remembered, she didn't know where you had gone..." I'm such a dork. So we were eating one night, and Sadie picked this thing out of her mouth that I thought was a piece of rice, with this look of horror on her face. I was like, "Sadie, dang it, eat your dinner!" And then I realized that wasn't a piece of rice; it was a tooth. :) So we put it in a little paper cup next to her bed and I told Sadie that I thought the tooth fairy would remember this time. She did. And she left a little note, saying, sure enough, "I was sick that night you lost your tooth, and the next day, when I went to give you some money, you were gone!!" So she left $2 for July's tooth, and $2 for this tooth, but in yuan, so - 24 yuan.

When Summer and Maria came over two days later for Sadie's birthday party (more on that in a moment), she proudly showed them her gap. Summer later asked me what we do when children lose teeth. So I told her the whole tooth fairy bit. She asked what we do with the teeth. I told her that I don't know what other people do, but I just throw them in the garbage. :) I asked her what they do here in China. She said that, if the tooth was a bottom tooth, you throw it on the roof of your house, if you can. Because those teeth grow up, toward the sky. So you throw your tooth up on the roof and make a wish. If the tooth is a top tooth, you throw it into a water well and make a wish, because upper teeth grow DOWN. I asked her if there are that many water wells around - what do you do if there aren't any wells? She laughed and said, "Well, you dig a hole and bury the tooth." Interesting, huh?

Yelling in the Marketplace

The streets here are just...really LOUD. Not only do people speak pretty loudly, but in the afternoon or so, the street vendors get these loudspeakers out. And they have the loudspeakers where you can record yourself saying something, and then play it over and over again, nonstop. So they'll be like, "Come buy my scrunchies for your hair! They're really beautiful! Get them now, while they last!" or whatever, in Mandarin, of course, and they put those loudspeakers on top of their cart and push the "play overandoverandover again" button, and that's what we hear all night, until 10 or so. Sometimes Dylan thinks that there is music on in the other room, but it's usually somebody's loudspeaker, on repeat, yelling about their wares.

Joyless Line Dancing

There's this park thingey we've passed when we've gone to the far-away supermarket, Da Fu Yuen. In the evening, all of these ladies line up in four or five lines. And it's just ladies, and only older ones. And someone has always brought a boom box which plays some traditional Chinese song. And these ladies do this...line dance thing. Like we do to country music in the states. The dance doesn't seem really...Asian...to me. The moves are pretty bland - I could see anyone from anywhere doing them. But they line dance for hours out there. Once, we went to the store at like six, and we left at like eight, and there were these ladies, doing the same dance, over and over and over. And it cracked me up - it was just like how people watch/listen to fireworks here - with a totally straight face. They don't smile. This line dancing is serious business. It cracks me up.

An Answer to the Fireworks Question

The other morning, someone lit firecrackers at 6:30 a.m. I am not even joking. I was like, "You have got to be kidding me..." And then one night, there was this enormous firecrackers show, at like 9 at night. It was right on Party Street (what we call it), only maybe a block away, so our view was phenomenal. It was a really good show, too, lasting quite a long time. And they were the big old firecrackers like you see on the 4th of July in Idaho Falls. So I asked Summer the next day, "Is there some celebration going on? Why all the fireworks? Why the fireworks so early in the morning? And what was that fireworks show about last night?" She told me that, if someone is opening a new business, they light firecrackers to attract business. Interesting, huh? Or, often, people light firecrackers right after a marriage ceremony. So the thinks that, most likely, the culprits of all these early morning firecracker wake-ups are a new business opening about a block away. Funny.

This Time, a Real Playdate

So we have the coolest neighbors across the hall. I can't remember the names of the parents, but their daughter, who is seventeen, goes by the name of Candy. I asked her how she chose that English name for herself. She said her English teacher gave them a list of possible names to choose from, and that was her favorite one. The parents, interestingly, are both architecture professors at the university! Anyways, one day, they invited us over for Asian pears and the watching of a Garfield cartoon. Sadie was in hog heaven. I excused myself early, because they weren't running any air-conditioning, and I thought I was going to pass out.

So the neighbors have a neice/cousin who is Sadie's age named Tian Tian, which is the word for "sky." She was visiting her extended family and wanted to meet the little May-goren girl. :) She was too nervous to play by herself over here, and she doesn't speak a lick of English, of course, so Candy offered to be Sadie and Tian Tian's translator. The girls played with paper dolls for awhile, and then ran around screaming and laughing and tickling each other - Sadie's favorite pasttime. :) Tian Tian is ADORABLE. And she helped me figure out a couple of more words. She kept saying, "Jigga," which makes me laugh, because Lex is always saying, "Jigga what?" when someone says something she just cannot believe or whatever. Example: "I got into a car accident today!" "Jigga what??" So she kept saying, "Jigga," and finally I said, "Candy, what does 'jigga' mean??" She smiled and said, "This. It means 'this.'" So Tian Tian had been referring to this paper doll, or that paper doll, and she was saying, "this blah blah blah. This blah blah blah." So now I know. She was also saying something that sounds unfortunate to my English-speaking ears - "nigga." I asked Candy what "nigga" means - it means "that." Who knew??

Yogis

So, as you know, we've started homeschooling, and one of the requirements for the Idaho Virtual Academy is to do P.E. They mainly give you carte blanche on what you can do. So we try to shake it up - jumproping, playing on the big toy, etc. We just bought a basketball that needs to be pumped up, and then we can dribble the ball around and stuff - they have basketball courts at the university that we are allowed to use, but the hoops are too tall for the kids, you know... I need to take our new ball to the dude on the corner. His job is to pump up bike tires and balls. That's what he does for his living. Poor guy. So I need to pay him a visit. There are ping-pong tables at the university, near the track (which I plan on using daily, if it would ever cool down), and I saw ping-pong paddles and balls at the school supplies store the other day, so I think we might do that, too - play some ping-pong with the kids.

The other night, it was pretty late in the evening - too late to go outside for P.E. But we had to do our P.E. requirement for the day. So I decided to hop online and see if we could find some yoga videos. None of them would download or buffer correctly or whatever, but we did find a couple of websites that showed pictures of the poses, and how to get into and out of the poses correctly, etc. So we did that one night for P.E., and it was a big hit. We did it again a couple of nights later. We use our bedspreads as our yoga mats. We were doing that one pose - is it called the lotus pose? I think so. Where you are sitting, like, kind of cross-legged, and your hands are on your knees, facing up, index finger and thumb touching. You know the one. So we were supposed to hold that pose for a minute, so I was closing my eyes and breathing deeply and holding the pose, and Sadie whispered to me, "Mommy, are you listening to Jesus?" It was so funny. She is so cute.

Sadie's Birthday

Our little Sadie girl turned six on Aug. 31st. We had Summer, Maria, and the Hans over. I'm not as mad at Professor Han as I used to be, now that we have our kitchen in. I got another cake at our little bakery on Stinky Street - hand-picked by Sadie herself. Summer got Sadie a hand-held compact, which was sweet. And Maria got her a music-playing snow globe. The Hans gave Sades a barbie. My mom sent a package over with more paper dolls, and Littlest Pet Shop toys, which she plays with incessantly ever since, by the way. Gloria had given me a card with money in it to give to Sadie - it was in my suitcase and I got it out. Ben and I got her two things - a set of Baoding Balls - she has been begging for some for ages - and a real Chinese tea set. Every time we see those in the flea market, she just stares and stares at them and tells me how much she wants one. They weren't too expensive, so I just got her one. She adores it. The cups for tea are soooo teeny-tiny. And they come with this tea tray thing. It's wood, with designs on the top, and slats in it. And underneath is this drip-catching drawer. So when you are serving tea, if you drip, it goes through the slats and into the drip-catching drawer. She adores it. I'm sure she'll break at least one of the cups or pitchers or whatever before our time in China is over, but she is so thrilled about it.

Professor Han, in addition to Sadie's Barbie, brought some candy for the kids, and for Ben and I - a special treat. A can of peaches. They acted like this can of peaches was this huge delicacy. They made a big show of opening the can for us and dishing out several cups full of them for people to eat. You would have thought they had brought caviar and old wine over or something. It was so funny. I was like, "Wow. Canned peaches. Ooooh." We smiled graciously, and stored them in a tupperware for everyone to see how grateful we are, and we have eaten them.

After we had cake, Maria and Dylan made up a game with fans and balloons. You can't let the balloon touch the ground, and to prevent it from doing so, you blow it from underneath with your handheld fan. But you can't touch the balloon with the fan, either. They played that for, like, an hour. Maria is so cute. I told her she would make a great mother. She seems to really like doing active things - she's always jumping and dancing around. I love it.

Professor Han had brought his nephew, Mike, over. Mike is a doll. I was confused and thought at first that Mike is Lillian's brother. No, no, no, Prof. Han laughed. He's a nephew from a different sister. My eyes widened. "You have more than one sibling???" I asked. He chuckled and told me that he has THREE sisters. I asked how that was possible, with the laws here about number of children you can have. He said that law is only 30 years old, that he and his sisters were born before that law came into effect. I had no idea!

Professor Han's wife is awesome. Very down-to-earth and sweet. She brought us pictures that she had taken of Ben's birthday. Such a babe. She was wearing these ankle-length panty-hose with her dress. I've noticed that about women here, maybe age 30 and older - they wear ankle-high panty hose with their sandals and shoes. I think it looks so, so funny. I can see wearing those if you're wearing long pants that cover the tops of the anklets, you know? But they wear them with their miniskirts or knee-length skirts or whatever, and they look really dorky. But it's cute. Just a cultural thing, I guess.

Our Very Shady School Supplies

Well, we've had...one and a half weeks of school so far, and guess who still doesn't have their books? Us. Ben's company actually ended up sending them via DHL. There is a DHL office in Beijing. It took two weeks for them to get to Beijing. But then, because there were SIX of them, and they were heavy, they were under heavy suspicion. What are in these boxes? Are they full of contraband? Why so many? So first, we had to send a list of every specific piece in those boxes. I had to look up and copy and paste the list in an e-mail. Several books, some workbooks, science instruments, rulers, an inflatable globe, on and on. So we did that. So then they were like, "Ooooh, are any of the books banned???" We were like, "Um, not in the U.S...." So then they had this customs agent go and inspect our suspicious books. I'm not even kidding. Word on the street is that they were inspected and found worthy to enter China for reals. So we should get them hopefully by the end of this week. One of Ben's work associates is going to pick them up when he goes to Beijing next.

In the meantime, I've been trying to teach lessons without these books. Which has been really fun. Some things are available online, which has been helpful, but others haven't. I was lucky and found a grammar workbook that Dylan is supposed to be getting, online. And it showed the first 10 pages, if you click the "look inside" button of this web page where you can buy this workbook. So I was able to "look inside" and copy and paste the worksheets from Dylan's grammar lesson last week, onto a word document. Other things I haven't had such good luck with. So I do what I can. We don't have our literature books, but if the lesson plan is available online and tells us the names of the short stories or poems the kids are doing, I'm able to look those up online and find copies of them. So I"m making due.

It's interesting to see, close-up, what Dylan's and Sadie's strengths and weaknesses are, as far as schooling. I always knew Dylan enjoyed Math and was good at it, and that he wasn't a huge fan of reading, but I'm seeing more than ever how much he detests English-ey stuff. If he has to write three sentences in response to his history lesson, saying what he thought was interesting about it, he acts like I've just asked him to wash our entire apartment building using a pulley system of ropes. I'm like, dude. It's three sentences. It will be okay. We are reading Tuck Everlasting for his literature class, though, and he's enjoying it. So that's good. He just...takes more after his dad in his preferences in school - he's a sciencey/math kind of guy.

Sadie is definitely not a sciencey/math kind of girl. Dylan and Sadie take three classes together - the specialists at the Idaho Virtual Academy said that would be okay and still fulfill both kids' requirements with Idaho for the next year, and it would cut my time down considerably. So they both take 2nd grade history, 2nd grade science, and 2nd grade art together. It has helped, time-wise, but obviously, Dylan catches things immediately, and Sadie is taking more time to understand things. Because it's second-grade curriculum. So we do the lesson, and then Dylan takes the assessment online and usually passes with flying colors the first time. Sadie has to take each assessment two or three times before she gets it. Which is fine. I don't make it a big deal. I say, "Well, let's review this again tomorrow and see if we can ask you the same questions tomorrow and see how you do."

Sadie takes 1st grade math, however, and she really struggles with it. It's just not her forte. So I find us reviewing lessons two or three times in math, too, poor girl. And she just hates it. I know how she feels. She also really hates phonics. And boy, does that girl give me attitude when we're working on a subject she doesn't like. But when it comes to things like, "Is this a sentence?" Oh, she loves that stuff. She totally gets it. "Which of these words best fills in the blank?" That kind of stuff is easy for her. She has a natural talent for it. Like her mama. She and I are reading Ramona the Pest together, and she loves it so much.

I've been reading Vanity Fair by William Thackeray, and the other night, I hopped onto the iPad to read a few pages of it. I had forgotten to close out of Ramona the Pest earlier that day when Sadie and I had read. I was so tired that I didn't realize my mistake and just started reading Ramona the Pest. I read, like, three pages of it before I realized, "Hey, I'm reading Ramona the Pest, not Vanity Fair!" It was funny. I was sitting there, going, "Oh, that Ramona is just like my Micah..." and then I was like, "Why am I reading this?" Hahaha! I guess once a Beverly Cleary lover, always a Beverly Cleary lover.

Sadie's Bedtime

Sades has to share a room with Gage, and what we have to do is usually get Gage to bed first, and then wait an hour or so, and then sneak Sadie in there. If we put them in together, Gage won't fall asleep. So we try to put Gage down at 8 and Sadie down at nine, but sometimes that doesn't always happen. Sometimes we get Gage down at 9, and we have to wait until 10 to put Sadie down. I don't mind having her up the extra time. She's easy and self-entertaining. She and I will play a quiet game of "chest" or memory or whatever and it's usually really pleasant.

The other night, we didn't get Gage down until nine, so we were kind of hanging out, waiting for 10, and Sadie goes, "Hey, Dad, are you ready to put me to bed? I mean, it's your choice...but I was just wondering." I giggled. She was trying to say that she was tired, but she was being all passive/aggressive about it - "I mean, it's your choice..." That is so what I do when I'm talking to my kids. "If you don't eat your dinner, you can't have anything until breakfast. So are you going to eat your dinner, or are you going to go hungry until breakfast? It's your choice."

Taiwan - oh REALLY?

The other day, Summer was like, "So, do Americans think that Taiwan is a separate country?" I was like, "Um, yeah. It is, isn't it?" "Oh no! It's just a province of China. Just like Hebei." I was like, huh??? I later looked it up. From everything I have read, Taiwan is NOT a province of China, when you talk to Taiwan (or anyone else in the world) about it. When you talk to China about it, it is. I guess it depends on your point of view. It makes me laugh. It's like those funny propaganda-style news shows in the English language on Chinese television - "Oh, Tibet loves being under our rule. The Dalai Llama is wrong. We've made Tibet so successful and happy..." Yeahhhhh.

Gage's Walker

Gage is Mr. Walk-Along-Couches-and-Walls man, right? He's really close to walking. He has discovered that he can use his high chair as his own little walker device. It's wood, so it slides easily on our laminate flooring. So he pulls up against it and is off to the races. He walks that thing all over the apartment. He's such a mover and a shaker. And the kid is the best eater EVER. I had forgotten, after Mr. Weak Cheeks (Micah), that a baby could eat easily and happily. The kid PACKS IT AWAY. He eats as much as Dylan, at every meal. And he's chewing so well.

He Gets Free Stuff

People on the streets ADORE Micah. He's so shy, and when they try to talk to him or touch him, he looks down and picks his nose. We've talked about this. This doesn't make people less affectionate toward him - if anything, it makes them MORE affectionate toward him. The kid gets soooooooooo many free things from people. When I was buying school supplies, the lady gave him two free packages of stickers. When I was getting Sadie some wrapping paper for her birthday presents, the lady in the store gave Micah a free gerber daisy. When we were staying at the hotel for a month, one of the gate keeper guys drew these really neat pictures of planes and fighter jets and gave them to Micah as a present. He is a favorite. I love it. Nothing makes peoples' day more than when he says, when we are leaving, the Mandarin words for "goodbye" - "Tsi Chien!" They laugh and ruffle his blonde little hair and give him free apples, bananas, sodas, candy, etc. etc. etc. It's adorable.

Hazy

It's still pretty hot outside, but I can tell a difference - it's not, like, melt instantly into your shoes hot. It's more like, "Well, it's ninety degrees out here, but we can cope for a few minutes while we run down to the market." It's very, very hazy most days. You can tell if you are having a non-humid day, even before stepping outside, by seeing how hazy it is outside. The other day, it was surprisingly clear. I mean, I could see buildings clearly for miles and miles. I couldn't believe it. And there, on the horizon, were some MOUNTAINS! I was like, "There are mountains right there?" They were really relatively close, but it's so hazy that you never see them. I haven't seen them before, or since.

The other day, it was 4 o'clock or so - when the sun should have hit our eyes really bright as we were walking westward on Stinky Street. And the sun was right there in front of us, but it was just bright red. I couldn't believe that I was looking at the sun, and that it looked red. That is how hazy and polluted it is here.

Sparkly

We went to this alleyway by a different McDonald's to do some more cold-weather shopping on Saturday. There were tons of kids' clothing booths. I was hoping to find some, I don't know...normal clothes. Those hopes were dashed. Kids' clothes are so crazy here! Things still do not match each other at ALL. I was wondering if it was just that flea market, but no. It's everywhere. And everything has bedazzled this and sparkly that and sequins, sequins, sequins. Even on little boys' clothes. Micah picked out a shirt for himself that he is so in love with. It was cheap, so even though it's butt-ugly, I got it for him. It's clearly meant for a boy, because it has a picture of a little cartoon boy on the front, right? And it says, "Hip Boy" on it. So whatever. The long sleeves are covered in British flag pattern. The front and back are neon blue. And the cartoon boy is wearing these, like, gangsta clothes, with all of these sequins and bedazzled things and bright, shiny studs all over him. Micah calls it his Sparkly Shirt. In fact, he wore it for a day and a night and a day, and it's in the wash right now, much to his consternation. He went to the market with Ben the other night, and he insisted on wearing his Sparkly Shirt, even though it's actually a sweatshirt, and it was crazy hot outside. He's so funny.

All of Sadie's clothes that she picked are totally sequined and sparkly and just crazy. I've decided that I'm never going to find some plain jeans or any plain shirts for my kiddos, and to just go with it. Haha!

Ben bought me some cute, cute, cute little pageboy hats on Stinky Street the other night. They were only $3 each! Now that's what I"m talkin' about. I love them so much, and they're perfect, because I throw one of those on in lieu of doing my hair, and voila. Cuteness.

Well, so that wraps up this week's events. I uploaded pics of all of the things I just talked about (and other stuff) onto smugmug:

Pictures we took for our virtual ward directory - http://utahben.smugmug.com/Travel/Pictures-for-our-Branch/18865081_P2rP7W#1462266661_xwzqF3G

My cute new hats - http://utahben.smugmug.com/Travel/Shopping-Finds/18864864_jbZbP7#1462247594_Bm87z8Q

Sadie's Birthday - http://utahben.smugmug.com/Travel/Sadies-Birthday/18864581_bv3jWF#1462221290_Jr5CcfR

Laundry, Yoga, Tian Tian, and Firecrackers - http://utahben.smugmug.com/Travel/Our-Apartment/18427321_wQ6pj3#1420807863_thcSnBF

Alright, I have to go - Ben's on the phone with his work associate, Charles. I guess, because our school books are so scary, there has to be special documentation by someone in China to verify that the books are okay to enter China officially. There are only a few companies in China that offer that service. Are you KIDDING me????? Kill me now!!!

Love,
Kar