My bags are packed, I'm ready to go...

Ben went with Summer and Maria and got tons more suitcases for our trip home. We hadn't accumulated that much stuff while we were in China, but we had to bring these infernal school books home (and I still have to mail them back in - it's on my to-do list), which necessitated more luggage. The kids had a good time fitting into the suitcases and then popping out:

I was so preoccupied with schooling the kids for a million hours per day, so Ben did allll the packing that last week, which was sweet. We had to make sure that each bag wasn't over fifty pounds - tough to do when you have a zillion books to take home. He had me pick up a scale at Hui Mart - it was in kilograms, so he had to use his phone converter app to figure out how many pounds each bag was - he would move books around from bag to bag to make sure none of them went over the weight limit. He's cute.

It was a huge pain in the butt carting those things around the various airports on our travels home. It took forever to check them in at the Peking airport. When we landed in Seattle, we made the mistake of keeping a club sandwich from the plane, which a special sniffing dog found. So we had to get our luggage from the plane (we had to do it ourselves - the airport personnel weren't supposed to touch it until it went through a conveyor) and then, after the conveyor, it had to be thoroughly searched by various airport personnel. Then we had to re-check it in. It was fun to do that after a ten-hour flight with four small children. :) A tip from me for any future international travelers out there, especially if you're returning from Asia - don't bring the airplane food off with you. It spells big trouble. They said it was the whole bird flu thing they have to worry about. And because we had turkey in that sandwich, ka-bam. It's a good thing we had a two-hour layover there in Seattle in which to do all that.