Garden Pics and a Few Blogging Thoughts

I mentioned the Cleveland Botanical Gardens in the last post, and I wanted to share these couple pictures I took the day we visited there last week that I am especially pleased with! This one below features Gwen running across the little footbridge, but its the amazing lushness of this part of the garden that I feel like I captured in this photo. Doesn't it look so cool and inviting? Looks like a place fairies might live, I think. :-) Click on it to enlarge, and you might find that you want to step into the photo yourself!
For the thoughts... I feel like I am in a bit of a blogging rut. Lots of photos but not anything unique to say about them, I guess! Summer in the US is a wonderful time for our family, but it has us out of our regular life. Perhaps that is part of my blogging block. Scott's gone back to Shanghai now and so I'm looking that direction myself.

Also, I've been hungrily reading the blog of college friends who are in China adopting right now and it has me thinking back to those days when we were waiting for Gwen and then traveling to get her. She was the reason I started this blog, wanting to keep people in the loop with what was happening in our adoption process. Then it was to chronicle our life in China. Now that Shanghai has been our home for three years, it seems I have less to write about daily life there. Not saying I am hanging it up, but I wonder if my blog outlived itself. Thinking about it tonight.

Thanks

Thank you to all of you who commented on Madelyn's new blog, Cuddle Crazy. She is thrilled to have so many comments and followers! She has just completed a new post, so mosey on over (link in my sidebar) and check it out. :-)

Cuddle Crazy

Madelyn has started a blog by this name, Cuddle Crazy. She intends it to be all pictures she has taken of pets. :-) Click here to get to it or find the link in my sidebar. She is super excited for someone to comment on her first post... can some of you oblige her? Thanks!

New Link

I've just added a new link in my sidebar, The Gift of Change. My friend Tracy is setting off on an adventure with her family, moving to the opposite side of the country, in just a few days. God has blessed her with amazing perspective as she processes this life change... Tracy has wonderful insight on many things in every day life, and now even more so. I told her recently that I need to talk to her frequently so she can help me interpret my life! I think you will enjoy her thoughts.

Frisbee with Friends from Afar

Saturday afternoon we played at Century Park for a few hours... with old friends that we met for the first time! I know, that sounds funny, but here's how it happened. Donna and I "met" in the fall of 2005 when she found me through my blog because she had done a search for "Gwen" and "adoption". It just so happened that Donna and her husband Andrew adopted their Gwen from China just a few months before we adopted ours. Then the following year, they adopted their Madeline! Fast forward to last Saturday... Donna and Andrew and their Gwen and Maddy are touring China for several weeks. We arranged to meet in Century Park for a couple of hours, where we enjoyed frisbee, bubbles, and photo shoots!

Here are the daddies with a Maddy and a Gwen... And the mommies with two Gwens, a Madeline and a Madelyn!

The girls had fun running around in the grass, chasing the Frisbee. Looks like our Gwen is laying out the rules for everyone in this picture! The two Maddys go for it...

Great catch, Maddy!

Run, Gwen, your sister is after you! Maddy's about to throw... which Gwen is going to get it?!
It was so surreal to meet Donna and Andrew and their girls after all this time of reading each other's blogs. What a treat to walk through the gate at Century Park to see them waiting for us on the other side! Thanks, guys, for making the effort to see us during your travels. Maybe we'll meet again someday... in another country... who knows?!

You'll enjoy the photos on Donna and Andrew's blog here.

Techincal Difficulties and Other Thoughts

Is anyone else having trouble posting pictures to blogger the last couple of days? They seem to duplicate themselves miraculously, causing each picture to appear a dozen times in each post... weird. It's probably one of those OIC things... you know, only in China.

Anyway, I am a little frustrated because I have photos from Chistmas to post. I hope to post them eventually!

In other news, I am just now enjoying some Christmas cards! Before we left for our trip to the US, we had only received a couple of cards. Scott went into the office last Friday, the day after we got back to Shanghai, and he came home with our weekly packet of mail from the States. I was so excited to find a nice group of Christmas cards and photos among the usual mail. Just yesterday I hung the photos up in our kitchen doorway... I'm enjoying your smiling faces a little late, but they are all the sweeter for the wait! I'm hoping for a few more cards in next week's mail!

Numbers

This is officially my 500th post since I began blogging in August of 2005, while we were waiting for Gwen's referral. I never imagined that the blog would continue like it has, let alone that we would be continuing Now We Are Six having returned to live in the place we were so longing to reach when the blog began. Thank you to all who have been a part of this journey... it's so very good to have friends and support along the way!

In other numbers, I realized today that we really do not live on the 48th floor of our building. Yes, our apartment unit number is 48G, but the Chinese seem to have a thing against the number four so they avoid it whenever possible. This means that our building does not have a fourth floor, but skips from the third floor directly to the fifth. It is funny to watch the numbers climb on the digital display in the elevator. We skip 4, then go on to 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13... aha, there is no 14! The pattern continues this way. There is no floor number 24, no 34... but then we get to the forties, and apparently it's just a little too obvious to skip all ten of them, so they skip only the double, floor 44. So I figured today, skipping those fours, that we actually live on the forty-third floor of our building. Does this really matter? Not in the least. I just found it funny!

Upturned Faces

Upturned Faces.

That's the name of the new link I'm adding to my sidebar. My sister Sarah has re-entered the blogging arena after much battery from me. :-) I am so glad to have her... it means I get to see pictures of and hear cute anecdotes about my neice and nephew on a regular basis. Besides, Sarah has some really good thoughts about how parenting mirrors our relationship to God.

Go check it out. I know you'll agree that the kids are adorable!

Links

Just want to make some notes for you about the links in my sidebar~

My dear friend Rebecca (author of As In A Mirror, which I have referenced here before) and her family are in East Africa right now, on a missions trip with a group from their church. I don't fully understand all that they are doing on this trip, but I know that they are seeing and experiencing things that many of us never will. Check out her blog... you will find that she is a wonderfully entertaining and gifted writer.


Blessed is the FRUIT of My Womb follows the pregnancy and first months of new parenting for Judith and Lance and their adorable daughter, Bella. If you want to see a Really Cute Nursery, scroll through the archives and see what a cute room Judith and Lance created for Bella! Scott and I met Lance and Judith through a church small group several years ago. I love checking this blog to get my baby fix!

Chopsticks and Tabouli is the relatively recently created blog of my friend Carol. Scott and I met Carol in China on our adoption journey... her daughter Kimberly is from the same orphanage as Gwen. You can't help but feel a special connection with someone that you go through such a life altering experience as adoption with! Carol and I have kept in touch via email and love to "talk" to each other about our girls. Carol has just switched to a blog from another type of site. You'll find that she is a great photographer and does creative things with the pictures she takes of her cutie.


My friend Andrea took my recent post about wishing all my friends had blogs to heart and started one of her own last week. It's called Cleveland Sports Nut, and already has several posts! Andrea and I are friends from junior high, double dated in high school, had our third children together (our due dates were 9 days apart!) and have shared lots of fun times together with our husbands and children. Our family moved away from Andrea's family three and half years ago, which was sad for the adults and children alike, and now we are about to move even farther away. I'm so excited and thankful that she has started a blog... I look forward to getting a little more news from her family this way!

I've never actually met the author of Double Happiness, but I feel like I know her! She is Donna, the creator of the Family Fun Foto Challenge that I often participate in on this blog. She has two Chinese daughters, named Gwen and Madeline (Maddie). She found me in the early days of Now We Are Six, because of our "Gwen connection". We have emailed ocassionally, but I check her blog often, and have loved watching her beautiful daughters grow up! Donna is also a wonderful photographer, and does creative things with her photos.

OJ is the blog of Rebecca's friend, Beth. I haven't seen Beth in years, probably because Rebecca lives so far away from me that I hardly ever (recent visit aside!) get to see her, let alone her friends. But I love Beth through Rebecca, and I love reading her blog... when she posts (wink, wink, Beth!). It's thoughtful, different, funny, quirky, and she posts cute pictures of her kids. What more could you ask for?!


Photo Diletantte is the blog of my sister-in-law, Mindy. She has just recently taken up photography, but you'd never know it from her amazing pictures. Her goal is to post one picture a day, taken on that day, for 365 days. She on a roll, having done this since March, and I love checking her blog every day for the new picture.

My dear friend Sara Jane is, of course, the author of Sara Jane Says. She is a writer waiting (hopefully not much longer!) to be discovered. Full length devotionals seem to flow effortlessly from her fertile mind. I love how she can turn an everyday event into a spiritual lesson for herself and those who are blessed to read her thoughts. Check out her blog... someday soon you may see it bound on the shelves of your local Christian bookstore!

The View From Valpo, by "Lanasplit", is a also a blog that is currently chronicling a pregnancy. Our sweet friends Brian and Lana moved from our area last summer, and we are moving from their country just one month before their first little guy is due to be born! I am so bummed to miss seeing him in his infancy, but of course I will be able to see him on the blog! Lana sees the bright side of most everything... you'll enjoy her blog and her encouraging words.

Hope you enjoy some of the blogs that I enjoy... happy reading!

Wishful Thinking

I wish everyone I know had a blog.

I've warned some of you that I was thinking about writing a post like this! :-) And I know blogging isn't something that everyone is interested in doing. But sometimes I can't help but feel like it's not fair that I write about bits of my life, but don't get in on yours. Oh, I know there are phone calls and all that, but somehow when things are recorded "on paper" as they happen, they take on a different quality.

Some of you have blogs, and I check them eagerly, many of them daily. Will there be a new post? Oh, not today. Or, yes! You've posted something new! What is it? What are you up to? What have you read, or seen, or photographed, or thought about, or heard from God? What have your children done? What cute outfit is your baby wearing today? Where are you going soon? What do you think about the movie you've just watched? Why is today a hard day for you?

I know you can't be completely honest and transparent in a blog. I know I'm not. After all, you don't know what stranger might read your thoughts. But a taste of life, here and there, just a sampling... that's what "Now We Are Six" is for me. Sometimes I put a nice, shiny finish on a day that you would see wasn't quite so sparkling if you had been privy to all the details. Sometimes I let you know that I was very anxious for my little one to be napping so I could have a break. Sometimes I tell you what great fun we had. Sometimes I tell you how very un-fun it was to be in the store too long with a restless child. It's a sampling of my life. Just a taste.

Could I taste yours too?