Towels

Sometimes I wonder about all the boxes we have in storage somewhere in a warehouse in the Chicago area. We have many, many boxes in storage, packed up years ago now. What is all that stuff? I've thought about the day that I begin to open those boxes and what I'll find. I have a feeling that I'll feel a little silly that I even saved some of those items.

Tonight as I hung our bath towels, still warm from the dryer, on the the towel bar in the bathroom, I thought again about the stuff in storage. I know there are bath towels in storage. I know because I didn't bring a single one here. I purchased a towel a piece for us once we got here. Scott and I have used the same two IKEA bath towels since our first week in Shanghai. Part of the reason I only bought us each one towel was for the simple fact that we have really limited storage here. Actually, no storage. No linen closet, no pantry, no coat closet, etc. But really, how many towels can you use at a time? One has turned out to be plenty, and it's kind of nice to be streamlined in this way.

However, having only one towel causes the towel to wear out more quickly. As I hung the towels tonight, I noticed little signs of wear. A few random bleach spots, a bit of fraying. It relieved me in a way. I will have good reason to dispense with these towels when we leave. I have decided that when we move from Shanghai, we will not be taking our towels with us. Why should we? They will have been used literally daily, aside from vacations, for five years. I think they will have served their purpose.

Besides, I have all those lovely old towels in my storage boxes. Maybe those will go on their way as well... I think I might plan a bath towel shopping trip now, for the Summer 2012. :-)

6th Grade Trip

Seth is away this week, in Xi'an. He's the first in our family to get to see the amazing terra cotta warriors that Xi'an is famous for. Sixth grade is studying ancient Chinese history this year, so it's a perfect trip to go along with the topic. In addition to the warriors, the students are climbing a pagoda, eating lots of Chinese food, going to a Chinese music show, visiting a panda saving center, touring a Taoist temple, doing a "treasure hunt" in the Shaanxi History museum, learning some martial arts, going shopping on "Muslim Street", near the Great Mosque, and doing Taiji on the ancient city wall.

There's also time for some swimming and bowling in there somewhere. :-)

Scott still remembers songs and events from the sixth grade camp he attended. Praying for Seth this week to make some wonderful memories!

Just the Facts

Gwen: Where is our old house?

Mom: In Chicago.

Gwen: I want to see it.

Mom: We can't see it right now, it's too far away.

Gwen: Then I be sad.

When Life Gives You Boxes...

...it's a good time to create a fort!
Of course I'm about ready to ship the forts out the door. We've had our fun for a few days, and I think I've seen enough boxes now for a while!

News

Did I tell you our house has rented?! The family moved in this weekend. I'm so glad there are people in the house... now it is alive again. :-) Hopefully my flowers are giving them a warm welcome.

Also, our white elephant Yukon finally sold. It's not easy to sell a big boat like that when gas prices are as high as they have been the last six months, but a friend of a friend finally did it for us. Many thanks!

So glad to be out from under these two things!

Digging Out and Looking Up

Our long awaited sea shipment arrived yesterday!


We are so happy to have our cozy couches here to flop onto... the ones that were in our apartment looked chic and all, but they were sort of like sitting on bricks. Not quite the cozy factor.


In addition to our couches, several other important pieces of furniture were in the shipment. Dressers! We have been making do with two very shallow (maybe four inches deep!) drawers in the closet of each room... not quite adequate for two people to share. So the dressers' arrival was a good thing.


We had a lot of books arrive in the shipment, which I have been busily arranging on various shelves, in the kids' rooms and in the living room and office. We have More Books Than I Realized. They feel like friends, though, and I am happy to have their company again.


Our bikes are here, and for the time being they are in our round front hall. This is not their permanent home, thankfully. The only trouble is that we're not sure where their permanent home will be. We have a small room, a little larger than a twin bed, behind the laundry room. Hoping that magically all five bikes will fit in there. It's more likely that we will end up locking some of them in the hallway outside the main elevator... we shall see. I am quite anxious to have them out of the main thoroughfare of our home!


Also in the shipment came coats and winter clothes for six... hmmmm. With no coat closet, and no extra storage, I wonder where I will put these? Perhaps the small room behind the laundry room? No, bikes are going there. It is definitely time to get creative!


Various items from our playroom and the kids' rooms also arrived. I was kind of liking the streamlined life we had here, less is more and all that. Well, that is no longer. I truly did get rid of lots of things before we moved, you remember my posts about the fully loaded Yukon going to Goodwill. How did I end up with some of this junk to sort through today? I let you in on a secret I'm not telling the kids... I made a few trips to the large garbage can in the back hallway outside our unit this afternoon. But there are still dress-up shoes, doll clothes, etc. to find homes for... I made great strides in the girls' room today. More to do tomorrow.


All of Madelyn's school things arrived in the shipment, the books I had ordered and received before we moved. I got excited as I organized them this afternoon... there are some wonderful art books in the lot that I am anxious to dig into with her, as well as fun literature.


I forgot what it's like to find new homes for things after a move. This one is easier than our last, because many of our things did not make this move but are safely stored away. But it's not a task that can be completed in an afternoon, like I was thinking yesterday. This morning, faced with the chaos, I was pretty overwhelmed and even discouraged by the job ahead of me. I am learning slowly that my ability to relax and have a good attitude cannot be based on whether or not everything in the house is in order. I think I have made progress out of this faulty self entrapment. But when there's a job looming like the one I saw in every room of my house this morning, it's easy to jump back into that line of thinking. I literally had to drag myself to a place of joy and thankfulness today.


Now the house is dark and the kids are sleeping. It seems peaceful. We left for a while this evening, had a yummy Chinese dinner at a place called "Queen", and did a little grocery shopping. It was good to get away from the stuff, the stuff that doesn't matter anyway.


Gwen used to ask me to sing the "Many Matches" song. It refers to the verse in the Bible that talks about how Jesus is preparing a home for us in heaven (thus, "Many Mansions").


I'm looking forward to that final move... and there won't be any unpacking!

A Few New Home Pics

The girls playing with playdoh at the island in the kitchen (dining room in background).
Not a great picture of everyone, but this was our first dinner in our new place.
Madelyn and Gwen arranging their hair stuff in the nifty little divided drawer in their closet.
Caleb is pretty happy with the picture collage he put up over his bed.

Thump In the Night

Last night, in the wee hours, there was a thump (that we didn't hear) and then a scream and some more screams (and more and more and more...) that we most definitely did hear. Gwen had fallen out of her bed, which is quite low, but she fell onto the hardwood floor and apparently hit in the wrong way. She cried for a long time and I sang about every song in my repertoire to settle her, to no avail. Her cries were definitely cries of pain, and so Scott began scrambling to make his way through the paperwork we'd been given about the medical system here and our expat insurance. He made several calls while she cried, but she eventually fell asleep and so we decided to wait until morning to do anything.

This morning we noticed that she wasn't holding her arm quite right, but we still weren't sure what part of her body she had injured. We made our way to the expat health clinic by late morning, where we found very helpful English speaking doctors. Gwen was not the least bit cooperative, probably because it was very painful for her to move. She did not want to let go of me, and she told me later that she was really sad when the doctor cut her pajama top off to try to look at her back. We ended up having to go to another facility, a children's hospital, for an x-ray. We had pretty bad memories of a children's hospital in China that we went to days after we adopted Gwen.... parts of this facility today were reminiscent of that visit. Loads of people filling every hallway, a somewhat dilapidated building. That aside, the doctor we saw first merely touched Gwen's clavicle with one finger and declared it fractured... Scott and I looked at each other in amazement and with kind of a "yeah, right" look between us, but when the x-ray came back, he was exactly right. Her right clavicle is broken clean through. Not only did the x-ray clearly show her broken clavicle, it also showed her wide open mouth... she was not too happy about the x-ray!

So yes, 8 days into our China adventure, we have a broken bone in our family. On the bright side, we have successfully navigated the health care system and been well cared for. Gwen is wearing a little cloth and velcro brace around her shoulders to hold the bone together, and by this evening was gingerly trying to keep up with the other kids.

Oh, and about the other kids... they did pretty well on their own today while we had Gwen at the doctor. Seth even made them all a special treat... mandarin oranges with Sprite poured over them. Can't beat that!

What Jet Lag Looks Like

In Flight Activities

Gwen was really into the headphones... of course they were way too big, so she had to hold them on.

If only there had been more of the sleeping and less of the wiggling! :-)

Before and After

These pictures were taken on opposite sides of the globe!

The first one is at O'Hare Airport last Friday morning. Both the girls look like they are still waking up... and they are justified, because we had a very short sleep the night before. It was after midnight when we finally reached our hotel at the airport the night before our flight to Shanghai. When I took this picture, we had just finished getting all ten or so of our large pieces of checked luggage up to the counter, and are ready to head through security.
This picture was taken once we made it outside at the Pudong airport in Shanghai, and were waiting for Mr. Wu to bring the car. All the kids look a little travel weary, don't you think? Fourteen hours on the plane will do that to you. Besides that, it's 2 a.m. for their body clocks. Look at all our luggage!

Got It!

Hurray! We finally have internet access at home. We don't have our computer yet, just Scott's work laptop which has all kinds of firewalls and so is preventing me from viewing any blogs... ugh. I am so anxious to catch up with all of my blogging friends... I miss you and miss reading about what is happening in your corner of the world. But I am so thankful to be able to send and receive email now (hint, hint, I'll write you if you write me!) and to be able to post again.

It is Saturday morning. It's a foggy (smoggy?) day, as it often seems to be early in the day. Hopefully it will burn off later. I'm anxious to see how much longer this rainy season lasts, and what the weather will be like once it's over. It has been very humid every day since we've been here... which I guess is a week now.

Our air shipment, which we had hoped would be arriving at the end of this week, will probably not be to us until the end of next week. Strange, as it's been in the country for several days now. We had to pay duty on several items in the shipment, including the food (which was only 6 boxes of mac and cheese and five bottles of spices). Some of the other things that duty was charged on were strange.... a small wicker chair, a plastic storage shelf. Also all the cds that we brought.

We are so anxious for the air shipment to arrive, as it has all the kids' stuff... toys, books, our music and dvds. Yesterday I remembered that the library at Concordia, the school the boys will be attending, is open in the summer. We headed over there and hung out for an hour, reading and picking out storybooks for the girls. I was so happy to be able to get books for them. The boys had brought chapter books with them on the plane, but the girls had only a couple of small books with them, and we were quite tired of those. So nice to have fresh reading material! We were actually only supposed to be able to get a total of 10 books out, 5 for each of the boys, but the librarian took pity on our situation and told me we could use her password and take out as many as we wanted.

All of our kitchen stuff is also in the air shipment, so I've had to be quite creative in my cooking methods. I really wanted to make chicken soup last night because of the cough/cold crud we seem to be passing around, but I have only one small saucepan, which I picked up at the grocery store the other day. I ended up cooking things in stages and transferring the parts of the soup that I had already cooked to the one mixing bowl I have. It actually turned out to be pretty good, even though all the ingredients never got to simmer together! Seth, who is our egg making aficionado, had a similar problem this morning... how to fix eggs for six in one small saucepan? He ended up making soft boiled eggs, four at a time.

Last night I was feeling pretty melancholy, even tearful. Not having our phone (Vonage) hooked up to be able to call friends and family yet has been hard, in addition to the lack of internet. I was feeling pretty far from all of you. Part of my feeling so low was the fact that I felt physically weak, with a sore throat from all my coughing, and minor ear pain. It's amazing how quickly I dug a deep hole for myself. The view from our apartment is so beautiful, esp at night... I took some Tylenol for my physical discomfort and attempted to take some pictures of the view to take my mind off myself. Scott reassured me that we would be able to get things at least partially hooked up this weekend, and that helped too.

That's all for now... I have lots more to tell, but it will have to come a bit at a time. Hoping to have pictures posted later today!

Now We Are In China

I can't quite believe it, I guess, but we are in China. The smell as we walked off the plane through the jetway to the airport should have cemented the fact in my mind. I'm not sure what it is, but the smell is distinctive. Tonight as I was running bath water here at the hotel, I caught a whiff of it again... whatever it is, it's China.

Our flight went reasonably well, considering it's length and Gwen's age. She wasn't much for wanting to sit. The cartoons offered on the plane are pretty yucky, and our laptop battery lasted only so long for her to watch the dvds I brought for her. Playdough lasted about 15 minutes. Food was a great distraction, when something wasn't being spilled or broken. She did nap for a couple of hours a couple of times... that about sums it up. But we made it! Just as we were leaving the plane, Seth got sick to his stomach, and then after him, it was Madelyn who got green and clammy and pinched her lips together to stop herself from vomiting. Customs was super quick, and our luggage was coming around just as we walked up. It took four luggage carts to get it all... we each pushed one and Madelyn pushed Gwen in the stroller. Our driver (we are not able to drive in China... too many signs in Chinese and all that), Mr Wu, was waiting for us right outside the airport doors. He is young and smily, and I want so much to be able to talk to him! He is my first motivation to get going on my Mandarin lessons. Rain poured from the sky as we drove from the airport to our apartment, blurring the view. The kids snoozed on the way, making them groggy when we arrived. It was odd to be in the apartment again after so many months... all the proportions were different that I remembered, and of course it looks different with some furniture in it. The kids perked up a bit as they explored. Madelyn and Gwen were pleased about their long awaited bunkbeds. We stayed only a little while and then headed to a hotel where we are now and will stay for several nights while we wait for our air shipment to arrive. As we were leaving the apartment, a Chinese man said something to Gwen in Mandarin, probably assuming she could understand. She looked at me and said, "What he saying?" I giggled... we'll probably get more of that.

Gwen is definitely getting some attention, being with us. Lots of staring and whispering about her, and lots of smiles, too. Several people have commented on the size of our family. "Big family, very lucky."

Last night we crashed hard, everyone was asleep by 6:30. That meant we were all awake around 2 a.m.! We managed to stay in bed, for the most part, until nearly 6, and were down at the breakfast buffet by seven. Breakfast is pretty neat... a combination of western, English, and Chinese food. Gwen had three bowls of noodles for breakfast and ate them fairly expertly with chopsticks. Madelyn ordered eggs and was asked if she wanted them one side or two. Not knowing what that meant, she answered, "One side", and got sunny side up. Seth said, "Two sides" and got over easy. It makes sense, now that we know. :-) I tried dim sum, with a steamed onion bun and egg custard, but I also had bacon and pancakes. The combination was interesting!

This afternoon we went shopping, with Vivian, the relocation agent, along to help us. She showed us the ins and outs of the grocery store (this was a Carrefour), and I'm not sure I will be very effective without her. I guess I will be able to find some basics, at least. The dairy isle is very different, and I couldn't tell what the milk was all about... everything is in different sizes than in the U.S. Butter is a different shape, not the sticks we are used to. There are so many choices in the yogurt section, much of it being far more liquid than the Dannon we bought before. I did get a couple of bottles of yogurt. We'll see how everyone likes it! The store was very crowded today... note to self not to go shopping on the weekend, and not to take the whole family, either. We were all spent when the excursion was over. We took the groceries back to the apartment, then returned to the hotel and after a bite to eat, everyone has crashed again.

Now everyone is asleep but me... so I guess that's my clue to finish this up! Thanks to all who are praying for us. It is not going to be easy. There is a lot to be excited about... but it will all be a process. Your encouragement is so needed! We love and miss you! :-)

P.S. I have pictures... hope to get to posting some soon.

One More

I said the post last night was my last from the midwest, but this morning I was emailed this photo from our gathering yesterday and I wanted you to see it. Thank you, small group friends! We love you all.

Last Thoughts From the Midwest

It's the last night in our house. Tomorrow night we will stay at a hotel near the airport, to be ready for our flight Friday morning. The guys have just finished shooting off a bunch of fireworks in the cul-de-sac, Madelyn has gone home with her friend Emma for a sleep over, Gwen is almost asleep in her beloved "cribby", as she calls it, and I am ignoring the mess of stuff in our bedroom that needs to be packed into our luggage.

I feel like I should write something profound. I don't think I have anything profound to say.

Our small group friends had a wonderful good-bye picnic for us today. We all hung out together for hours, with the kids swimming in a little pool in the backyard, and ate hot dogs and watermelon and potato salad, and chatted and laughed and prayed and took pictures of the kids. We love these people. They have been our family here.

It's hard to say good-bye. I'd rather say "see you later".

I had a friend in Pittsburgh, where we lived for five years many moons ago. She was a very close friend... we shared having our first babies, the first years of our marriages, prayer times, Salvation Army treasure hunting shopping trips. We spent many hours helping them work on their house. We attended the same start-up church together that met in a junior high and then as it grew, in a high school. I even nursed her baby several times, when her first child had a medical emergency and they were in the hospital with her overnight.

Almost ten years have passed since we've moved away from each other, and we've essentially lost touch. We send Christmas cards, but we're no longer a part of each other's lives.

I was telling my dear friend Sara Jane about this lost friendship tonight. It doesn't seem like the right thing to say to a dear friend that you are about to move far away from and will miss terribly. The reason I told Sara Jane was not because I intend to lose touch with her, definitely not. If nothing else, we're both bloggers, so we will always know where to find each other if too much time passes between phone calls. But the reason I told her about the lost friendship is that the friendship from Pittsburgh isn't really lost. It's over for now, but I know that my long ago friend believes with me that Heaven is our eternal home, the place that Jesus went to prepare for all who confess Him as Lord, who believe in Him and love Him.

So the good-byes are temporary. This life isn't the end. It is merely a stopping over point, a mist and a vapor. It's just a taste. Heaven is the real thing... eternal life, where old friends will meet again, and where we won't ever have to say good-bye.

Maybe it isn't profound. But it's true. It's important.

Be there, won't you all? I want to be with you forever!
Love, Lynne

Making Fun

What boys do on a hot day when the house is filled with guys from the moving company who are packing everything and there isn't anything available to "play" with....

Ready

This morning, when we were in the throes of five packers working all over the house and there were to our adult eyes miles to go before we had any hope of being close to finishing, Gwen walked out the front door to find me in the driveway, and said, "I'm ready to go to China."

Packing Pictures

Bikes and golf bags in boxes in the garage.
One of our moving guys takes a rest on the tree lawn. It is totally exhausting work... I don't know how they do it. I'm exhausted just telling them what goes where!
My bright petunias flank the front walk.

Funny to see all the boxes in the family room but the wreath still on the wall.
Boxes and more boxes.
Again, funny to see the lace at the windows but everything else boxed up.
Our playroom is disassembled....

In the Air

I've been trying to take pictures the last week or so of the kids with their friends. I think this one of Caleb and Seth with our neighbor Daniel is one of my favorites!

A Little Embarrassing

I've decided it is better to stay out of the bedroom when the guy from the moving company is packing the items from my underwear drawer.