Christmas cookies, part 1.

Today my students were all taking tests and so I had no lessons. I was able to stay home with my baby most of the day! I took advantage of that and we made our first batch of Christmas cookies. Even though it was it was 75 degrees today and very sunny! (It is suppose to be 81 degrees tomorrow! YUCK!) Really, I miss the snow!! I need all four season in my life. Here are some pictures. I had run out of regular sugar and all I had was powder sugar, so we made Russian Teacakes. Yummy!!




I hope to be able to find time to cook half as many cookies as I normally do!

Sports Day at Yaohua

So over the weekend the Asian Games in Guanzhuo had begun. It's basically the Olympics, but only for countries in the Asian continent. However, Yaohua hosts a school-wide sports day that is similar to the Asian Games/Olympics where classes compete against each other in many different events. There isn't really a prize or reward, but it is a chance for the students to show off their athletic abilities and to not have any lessons! The first day of Sports Day was for the Middle Schools and High Schools. The second day was for the Primary School-Grades 1-6. It seemed that these days were a chance for the International Section to see if they were better than the Traditional Section of the school.


The first two pictures and the video are of the opening ceremonies. Each grade, both International and Traditional do a march of some sort in order to impress the administrators of the school. I was asked by the 9th grade of the International section to think of a cool cheer and to be with them when it was their turn. I taught 9th Grade for only 2 weeks and they have been good friends to me ever since.







The cheer: Robert would shout, "9th Grade is what?"
The students would then reply, "Red Hot"
This happened two times and then Robert shouted, "2-4-6-8!"
The students then replied, "Who do we appreciate?"
Together we all said, "9th Grade, 9th Grade!"

It was fun! Their cheer was the most unique of all the grades. They shot off these giant party poppers and we all wore flashing light pins and the cheer was in English!


Here is a pic of Kenya walking with one of the Seniors. The 12th graders do not get to participate in Sports Day because they are busy filling out applications and writing admission's essays for U.S. Universities. However, some of them took breaks to come cheer on the underclassmen. Estelle is the name of this Senior. She LOVES Kenya! She hadn't seen her in a long time and risked her life to come and play with Kenya! (sorta)



These next three pics are of some of the 9th graders that I taught. Oh, yeah, most of the International students here have an English name and a Chinese name. The guy giving the peace sign is Sky. He was the star for the males in the 9th grade class.
This is Seven. Yes, Seven like the number. Anyway, she was the star for the females. She broke 2 school records and her personal bests that day!
Here is a picture of Jackie doing the high jump. He plays basketball so naturally he loves to jump high. He did ok, but could have done much better. One thing to realize about the competitors on this day is that they really don't have any training in how they run, jump, throw, or really anything they compete in. Sometimes, they do a few things in their P.E. classes to get in shape, but they don't have starting blocks for the races, they don't have anyone telling them to use certain techniques in order to do better in an event or anything like that. They just go and do it.

People were extremely nervous as if there were some huge prize on the line, but it was more of a fun day than anything. But if you asked one of the students they would tell you that they were so nervous that they might not even compete!

Here's a video on an 11-legged race! We thought things were hard with a 3-legged race! I am pretty sure that this is the only event that anyone truly trained for. We saw them practicing this event well before Sports Day came.




On the 2nd day, only the teachers who taught Primary School were supposed to have no lessons, but our boss Mr. Tian enjoyed our support for the students so much from the previous day that he canceled our lessons so that we could be there for the Primary students! We thought that was awesome considering we had so many students that we wanted to see compete. I only teach Middle School now and so I would not have been able to see the Primary kids at all. Thank you Mr. Tian. We could have used that time to go prepare our lessons for later in the week, but we felt it more important to go show our support to our students. We were down cheering and uplifting the kids all day long. It was so much fun!

This video is of the Opening Ceremonies of the Primary School. Specifically this was the 3rd grade class that I used to teach. Lois still sees them for science, but I only see some of them in passing. they all run up and hug me every time they see me though. I like it! There were actually prizes and stuff for Primary School so they had a lot more on the line this day, but still had tons of fun!




Now here is a video of the teachers racing in an obstacle course. We raced against 4 other groups of teachers. We got second place to the P.E. teachers. (Go figure) However, it wasn't recorded, but there was a one-on-one race between the P.E. teachers and the male American teachers and we totally beat'em! Ron is the person running right before me.




Overall, we had a blast! We loved cheering on our students and hanging out with them. Kenya was spoiled so much by students and Chinese teachers and parents with candy, drinks and other food! Lois and I stayed and supported our students the whole day and loved every minute of it.

Our American Thanksgiving in China!

Our Thanksgiving Day turned out amazing! We had dinner a little later than normal, but it was nice to have all day to slowly prepare and get things done. I was over all a very relaxing and enjoyable day!

I feel we did a good job at being American today. We slept in (Kenya didn’t wake us up until 7:40), then had a lite cereal breakfast and then a few hours later began snacking. Kenya, really enjoyed this!



Kenya, of coarse wanted to help mommy with the turkey. I thought, of coarse I will let her help! Mom always let me help.

Her is our turkey in the oven. It worked great!

Dinner was done on time! That is really not an American tradition, but something we feel strongly about. Great job, LOIS (and those who helped

Our guests we had over were Amy, our friend and nanny, Laura our friend and another American teacher at Yaohua, and Pascal and his mother. It was the perfect amount for our little apartment. I made the basics for dinner: turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, fruit salad, rolls, cranberry sauce, corn, stuffing, and olives. All of which turned out amazing! I also made to pudding pies. Sorry, no pumpkin pie, this year. We even got to play a few card games. Robert cleaned up most of everything! Thanks!!

Kenya sat down to eat and after her first few bites, said, "YUMMY!"

Getting some whipped cream from the can! Yep, she loves it, just like her daddy.


These are stickers that you can put on paper faces to be funny. Kenya was putting them on her. She was so cute!
Here is our final product of our "Things I am thankful for" poster. We really like that! Kenya enjoyed coloring on it as part of her bedtime routine each night. You can see that from all the coloring marks she made.

I am still working on getting all of my tradition in for Turkey Day. I still need to see if I can catch some of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and then watch White Christmas. It is only 10:40 pm here. I can do it! It is weird to watch the parade the night of Thanksgiving rather than in the morning.

I am going to make more gravy with the leftover drippings!

What a colorful world.

Kenya now knows most of her colors. I have been working on it with her for about a week now and I think it is say to say that she knows her colors. She gets them right at least 80% of the time. She knows red, blue, purple, orange, white, black, pink, green, and yellow. Sometimes when I ask her and she does not want to think about it she just says orange.

You can ask her what color an object is, or you can ask her to find a specific color, or you can ask her to match the color of an object that you have.

She is a quick learner! And have I ever mentioned that she is so cute that she makes you want to exploded!!! My goodness! She is adorable!!! Kenya, I love you so much! and that is not just because you are cute~

Luo Fushan

A wonderful friend of ours and his awesome uncle offered to take our family for a little site seeing. We told them that we wanted to see the country, the no-modernized China. And they delivered! It was great! We went to a mountain which has a military base at the bottom of one side and on the other side is a touristy place which use to be an infirmary for the military. It was about a 2 hours drive and we went in their car. It was really beautiful! VERY green! I miss the green living in the city. We walked around the first place, which also is a famous temple for Taoism. The shrines were wonderful and very colorful. The only bad thing about it was there was so much incense burning that it kind of hurt the throat. This first picture is of some of the shrines at the temple. Really, we had a great time and it was a day trip!! Our friend, Pascal's uncle grew up right there on that mountain, so it was wonderful to hear what he had to say. He told us how things had changed and what the meaning of something were. We could not have asked for a better Monday!
This is a picture of the mountain was we were approaching it. A real mountain. They have a tendency here to call anything raise a little higher than surrounding areas a mountain. At least here in the city that is true. It looks snow capped, but it was not, that is just a cloud. In fact, it was a little hot there. This was not even a week ago and we are still getting too hot during the days. Anyone complaining about snow, I will trade you in a heart beat! I would rather be too cold than too hot!

This is a wishing tree. People would buy the fabric, make a wish and then it would get placed on the tree. It looked so awesome. The closest thing to fall here.
This is the opening of the temple.

The details were so amazing! Jack, the guy who grew up here said that the way the roof was built it never gets dirty.







This is a well that is very deep. It was a well to eternity! Pretty cool.
This shows how much smoke there was around.

Again, the details! This was on the roof.

We were told that is tree is 5000 years old! WOW!
That is Jack, our tour guide, on the left.
Here we are eating so silky tofu! It was quite good. It is something unique from this area.
This looked like it was a dragon waterside. Pascal insured us it wasn't. If we stated at this place I am sure we would try to see for sure it was!














This is pickled pork meat hanging to dry. We actually had some at lunch. It was yummy!
This is the place we had lunch. It was an organic place and very delicious!
Here is a spider Robert found. It was big!

These picture are cute. I was just trying to get a good picture to send out for Christmas of Kenya. I thought right next to some bamboo would be great. I didn't get one that I loved.



Robert eating a whole fish. Yes, we do this often here. Eyes, head, bones and all!
A different temple on the other side of the mountain. The road to get to the top and down the other side reminded us a lot of the the "Going to the Sun Road" in Glacier Park.

This is a very small village on the side of the mountain. They had electricity, but it seemed they were a self sufficient village. The way this village looked, reminded me a lot of Native American villages back home. It was run down and dirty. We were told that the government has taken hold of the property of this village and uses it as a tourist place.



This is some bamboo that was right near the village.








The river we crossed over to get to the mountain.
Again, we had a great time! We hope to have many more day trips to see the great places around us! We are excited to travel and see more of China!