Katie's Personality

It's exciting to see how Katie is adapting compared to us adapting to her. For instance, when Katie takes a nap or goes to bed, that's the time for me to ZzZzZz out too or to finally watch a dvd movie and volume level 01.

At the rate prices are going up with diapers, we thot it was a good idea to start Katie on a potty training regiment. Katie had her own ideas of what pottie training meant.

Katie loves to play with all our pots and pans in the kitchen. Our whole house is becoming a playground again for kids.


Katie has also been developing a very independent attititude toward us. She wants to feed herself and lets us know how she can do it better than us. She may develop a career in plastering. You can see how well she can feed herself and give herself a rice cereal facial at the same time and how cooperative she is with sticking out her tongue at us.



Life continues to be full of joys and challenges as Katie is growing up too fast. It's a blast to see her mimicking our family. I'm not sure if playing the piano and using a cell phone for a tutor was a good idea though. haha. Until the next blog.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Ahh the joys of Fatherhood. I'm learning a version of the game Rock, Paper, Scissors. It's called
Riotmode, Pooper, Starving. I play this game with her everyday. Most of the time she is in one of these modes when she is fussy. To make things worst, she likes to bluff here and there. She likes to do stink grenades and false hunger pains. Arlene is more conservative with the wipes. For myself, I would pour out the wipes and use as many as possible. It also makes her smell more fragrant.

Oh well, it's fun to see here grow and try and communicate with us. She is no longer afraid of our dog. In fact Thumper is more afraid of her! My next goal in the weeks to follow is to see how she likes to write or draw. I'll give her some paper and pencil or use a magnadoodle.

Anthony is now driving and Christopher is almost ready to learn. Katie is already driving, Flintstones style. Enjoy the photos.

Loy

Ground Hog Days again

It's hard to believe today is July 11th. Although we are back in wonderful Sacramento, it feels like part of us is still back in China. The weather is muggy right now and it's in the high 80's.

We finally got medical coverage from my workplace "The poor State of California" on July 1st, 2009. It took them forever. They were going to ding me on my paperwork because I used the wrong color ink and they were soo confuse which name to use for medical coverage. If we had to furlough off some more people, I know who I would recommend. grrrr.

Well it's been roughly 4 weeks and I feel like I'm in the movie Ground Hog Day like Bill Murray. I wake up each morning with the Alarm clock crying out " Wah, Wah, feed me, change me! ". I say to myself, where am I? We go downstairs and realize there isn't a beautiful waterfall downstairs nor a koi pond, nor a fabulous buffet. Oh well, it's back to CHEERios and wonderful work. Well live is actually more exciting and fun now that Katie has medical coverage. Katie still loves to eat food and somehow some of it gets stuck in her nose. Gross! We're proud that we taught her some sign language "more, hungary, and down" and she taught us some too " I want that, go down, go thataway, and change me" with just one finger! We met some cool parents at our church and they taught their boy 60 symbols and working on 61. I can only handle about 10.
Arlene and I were laughing thinking how the two kids could be eventually signing at each other about us and we would be oblivious to what they were saying.

The only ability I've learned to do so far is to watch my dog Thumper give me the poop alert and I go into my costume hero sidekick "Super Changer" where I can change her poopy diaper under 30 seconds with a singe wipe (actually it's more like 5). Thumper keeps her nose glued to her diaper until I change her.

Work has been challenging, but I have a great patient boss. Our governor is making us take off on Fridays. Our pay has dropped 14% and may drop to 19% At the rate we're going, we will have to resort to using regular cloth diapers. (NOT!) It may be better for her, it's definitely worse for me and my asthma. One advantage a cloth diaper has over the velcro ones is that Katie can't undo herself with cloth. One day she learned how to pull the velcro tab and shazam the diaper was off. Needless to say it was funny but then again it wasn't. Imagine the consequences of her doing that with a #2 diaperat your house! SCARY. I dread the day coming........................... that's why we have those diaper pants on her. They're really backup poopy catch all pants. Hmm, maybe we should put on two or three haha! Good thing we also have the PoopCon alert system.

I finally finished my China coffee book album at mypublisher.com via Costco and looking forward to seeing how it looks. I have 54 pages!

A new marathon (but I hate running)

Well, I guess we're in a new marathon of walking the paces of life. We've experience the thrill adventures of China and tasted their foods and seen the country's beauty and weaknesses. Now we're back in the states adjusting to a new precious life in our family. It's been a week and we have yet to unpack our suitcases completely. Our higher priorities is child proofing the house and cleaning it to to a presentable state for visitors coming over to congratulate us. For now Anthony is also back with us from UC Irvine ( =) ). Our church has VBS next week (Crocodile Doc) and life continues more like a fast marathon (run, walk, stand still "huff, puff", walk, jog, walk, sleep.....) than a vacation in China.

Here is a list of the top 10 things We don't miss from China

10. Hard beds. For some reason, The hotels we had in China have really hard beds, thin sheets, and you could probably bounce a coin on the bed.

09. Second hand smoke: Cough, cough, it's sad to see so many people smoke and in restaurants. What's the difference between a smoking and non-smoking section in a Chinese restaurant? Wrong, all they do is take away your ash tray, and now your table is a non-smoking area (surrounded by tables with people smoking. Yuck. ) Sadly, you can buy cases of cigarettes
while you're in an airplane.

08. Cabs. When you enter a cab, it's like going into our dog's crate. It's small cramp and their
are big bars between you and the driver. The driver goes in a direction as erratic as our daughter walks. The traffic here is a living miracle where there are hardly any accidents.
Only here in Zhengzhou where you can cross a 6 lane major intersection and walk diagonally.

07. Grease and oil. All the restaurants here use a lot of grease/oil in their cooking. If you asked for less oil, the omelets would stick to the pan and the pancakes would be permanent fixtures on the top of the stove. I drank a lot of soda to wash down the grease. Fortunately, I love soda.

06. The lack of ice cubes. When you are hot and thirsty. When you are in humid conditions and drenched in sweat from walking or coming out of a bus with no air conditioning. That's the time I want to scream because all I have is a can of warm soda (shaken, not stirred) in my backpack.

05. The lack of ice cream. We spent $12 for Arlene to have a big ice cream sundae. At least it was big in the menu. By the time they brought it out is was have the size of the picture in the menu and Arlene started to quote a phrase that we heard from a old Wendy's commercial. Instead of where's the beef? It was where's the ice cream? This was the time, when Zhang Rui learned that ice cream was a good thing to eat and she wanted more!

04. Aggressive sales people. When we shopped at Guangzhou (Sharmin Island), the salespeople at the shops are overly friendly in trying to help you spend your money. Whenever you ask about a tshirt, they immediately open a brand new package to pull out the tshirt knowing you may feed obligated to buy it. Bartering can be fun if you can shop as a team. If your spouse says I'll take it, you lost your chance to save 20%. Often I didn't want to barter because the economy is so poor and they need to make a living too. Warning: some of their products may look great but soak them first! Our red tshirts bled.

03. Sewer systems that drain to nowhere. When we went walking to restaurants or shopping with our new friends, I notice they had people (young and old) near many manholes with long poles with hooks. They were pulling up the sludge buildup in the sewer and putting it in buckets for a central collection point (near my favorite Thai restaurant). Needless to say, even N95 masks won't block out that odor.

02. Squat toilets. Overall, we were spoiled and had flushed toilets for most of our trip. The cleanest squats was at Beijing at the olympic stadiums. I had never seen a portapotty squat
toilet with bubbles inside. If you really have to go and would faint at a squat toilet, I recommend you going to a special needs (Handicapp) toilet. Those come closest to the US toilet.

01. Drinkable Water. I try to drink a lot of water to stay hydrated. I hate the idea of hoarding bottle water but that's what I did. You can never have enough good safe water to drink. I was really happy that the hotels provided 2 free bottles a day. That kept us going for Rui's baby formula bottles. Boiled water just tasted funny and had weird floaties on top. I would buy a gallon at each hotel we were at. I wish China would recycle more. There is a tremendous waste in just bottle water plastics. I love our water in the US and especially in SF and Sacramento is good too.

Mission accomplished.

l


We feel like we completed an Apollo space mission, where we rode (a manmade and extremely complex device) a vehicle an extremely long distance to bring back something much more precious that space rooks. Another analogy is that we made the home run and Rui is now in Sacramento.

The airplane ride turned out to be uneventful. We even got to taste a kids meal. It's hard to eat one meal on top of another. Rui enjoyed reading The Wall street journal and Discovery magazines and we were at poopcon 4 alert and we wanted to avoid a hazmat emergency landing due to many people being overcome by a mysterious poopy tear gas odor. Instead a senior citizen had a "P" problem and the stewardess really had their work cut out cleaning the mess from his car seat and the aisle leading to the bathroom toilet. It was not a pretty sight. It was really intense to see the workers walking quickly back and forth with white gloves on and lots of plastic bags and towels., etc. I thought they were going to use a fire extinguisher to deodorize the mess., If you didn't know better, it gave the appearance that they were doing surgury back there.

Rui was set to errupt and we were ready to respond fast. We had to do it before it errupted beyond the barriers of the bassenet. It's really difficult to change a poopy diaper in an airplane. Rui hardly cried (until the big one), and actually slept in the bassinet in front of us. When she did do the big one, it was a level 3 alert (meaning it filled the diaper and no more..... phew). But where could we change her? She was too big for the bathroom. When we brought our concerns to the staff they told us we could use the business class bathroom (big whoopee and 2-4 inches more). Wow we needed it. It turns out that Rui had really dirty feet and she left her marks on the wall. I had to stay afterwards to do the hazmat wipe down. That was our biggest hurdle and we did it with one breadth (maybe two.) The stewardess, afterwards, rushed to spray deorderizer and flower scents to make the bathroom more survivable for the next person.

She got an verbal award today. She is now the Poop queen, because she did 4 big ones in one day. yuck! Hmm, maybe she has traveler's diarrhea. Well we're back and exhausted. We hope to adjust to the time schedule in Calif. in the next few days. Chris has all ready awarded her the drama queen award. I know Father's day is coming soon. Maybe I'll get a set of those high tech headphones that filter out unwanted noises (likes screams, crying, whining, and yelling!). If they don't exist, someone should invent them..

The Home Stretch

Today was the last full day here in Guangzhou. We were sad that we had to leave and at the same time anxious to come back home. I hope I remember how to drive. We saw horrible driving all over China. The rules of driving are the following: Any street can go any direction, especially on a one way street. 1 big car will force 1 smaller car to drive backwards. 2 smallers cars though, can make a bigger car retreat!

This afternoon two bus load of adoption families went to the US consulate for the swearing in of the oath. Everyone was really nervous and made the humid weather even stinkier. The actual event was quite boring and we weren't allow to take pictures mainly because of security or because it was so anti-climatic.

Well we are rounding 3rd base and now heading home. Wow we purchased a travel case for rue and it's already full. Time for me to sign out to pack and sit on some cases to make it fill. Hmm this may be a all nighter. See you all soon.

Loy and Arlene.

Approaching Third Base!

Well we're approaching third base. Tomorrow we will go to the consulate for the swearing in process. It appears that all the families in our group was successfull in their paperwork that was submitted today for the consulate. We're so thankful for the CCAI guides who are soo knowledgeable and helpful. Today it rained and tomorrow is the same pattern. Most families are cancelling the zoo tour because of the rain, thunder, and the annoying fast mosquitoes.

The days of a luxury breakfast buffet will be gone in a flash. In another day and a half we will be on a plane hopefully back to the states and not be quarantine like some mayor I read about. Every family will need to endure a 14 hour or more flight back home. I'm thinking of buy a bunch of earplugs for the surrounding seats near Rui. We sure miss Thumper. We hear that she doesn't miss us much. We hope to differ.

I also discovered an annoying fact. The more I listen to Rui screaming in my ear, the more white hairs pop up on my head. I made a new scientific discovery! Do you think it's the screaming or is it stress or is it caused by the heavy load put on our arms? Arlene has a cool child carrier called an ERGO, and it really works well. She can carry Rui with no back stress. We both had to watch the DVD to figure out how to make it work.

Arlene decided to go soverneir hunting today and I did a little too...... Arlene puchase these cool marble like chops (rock signature blocks) and had them engraved with chinese names. Man are they heavy! Prices for things really vary here. She bought some clothes and boy are they bulky. I purchased a dvd on Tai Chi for 25 rmb and then spent 50 rmb for a Subway sandwich meal deal. Where's the logic in that price scheme?

Sadly some stores here are going out of business due to the low number of permitted adoptions and the knowledge that the main White Swan hotel will be renovating soon. There are a lot less families here shopping and business for them is slow. It's a little bit weird when every store is eyeing you and yelling at you to come in to their store. Everyone calls us "my friend, my friend come in..... I give you best price."

Oh no, our suitcases are now over the weight limit! What are we going to do? How did our cases get soo heavy. Perhaps the humidity made all our clothes heavier. I think that's why there is no scale in this room. Should we lose the chops? I wasn't going to panic. I'll super google an answer. Hey, I just found out that Rui is also allowed a check in (hurrah!) for 22 lbs. Ya Hoo! Now we can bring back more junk, uh, I meant quality stuff. I was planning to throw all non-essential stuff like our H1N1 masks, baby wipes (very heavy) and diapers (space hogs). Well it's time to shop more tomorrow to buy Rui her very own suitcase with wheels! I need one with a remote control that will follow us around like Thumper.

Well time for me to go. Hope the swearing in at the US consulate goes well.

Loy