The Best Date Night EVER!

Lee had a birthday! October 8th was Lee's birthday. Our tradition is to get a sitter and invite a few couples out to dinner with us to celebrate. We invited Greg and Tracey Butters and Emily and Craig Woll to go out with us and we left Ally and Eve and Cooper home with a teenage girl from church. Greg and Tracey have lived in China for 12 years (I think) so they really know their way around. Tracey sort of took over the planning for the evening, which was perfectly fantastic.

Tracey and Greg have 6 kids and a big van so we all piled in and off we went. We started out at a hot pot restaurant, which I had never even heard of prior to the night. Greg is very fluent in Mandarin, so he ordered for all of us. It's kind of like the Melting Pot, in that they put a huge pot in front on you on a gas stove. It's full of tasty broth and you just order whatever you want to cook. Since Greg ordered, we had no idea what we were getting into. The servers wheeled out this huge cart full to the brim with meat sliced thin like deli meat, a whole plate of just mushrooms (more varieties than I even knew existed!), lettuce, spinach, cilantro, some other green vegetable, and more and more meat. Everyone just threw in whatever they wanted to eat and then you wait for it to boil for awhile and then just hope you can find what you put in. The pot looked absolutely disgusting by the time we were done, but it all tasted great. I avoided the meat (of course) and stuck to the vegetables. It was fantastic.

Next we headed off to get foot massages. I have never ever been out on a group date where we finished off the evening with a massage. It was totally awesome! They brought all six of us into a room with eight recliners lined up along the wall. We rolled up our pants and started out with a short back, neck and shoulder massage and then had 30 more minutes of foot and leg massage. It was really cool. About 15 minutes into the massage another couple from church showed up. It was really funny to have all 8 chairs full of Mormons! :) So we have decided that we like this new lifestyle, right down to date nights.

Thanks for the Suitcase!

We are so thankful to Jon Spencer for bringing us a suitcase from my parents in Georgia. Thanks a million Jon!!!! Jon came to Shanghai for business last week and was kind enough to bring a suitcase full of goodies from the US! My mom and dad are so awesome. They packed cereal, chocolate chips, pop tarts, twizzlers and spree, brownie mixes, egg noodles, and all kinds of wonderful treats that are either hard to come by here or cost prohibitive. But best of all were the pajamas and slippers that my mother made for the kids. Before Jon left for Shanghai I got out the measuring tape to get measurements from the kids. Eve saw the tape and yelled "Yippee!!! Grandma's making clothes again!!!!!" Then when I measured her feet she yelled again about how great it was to get slippers made. That girl knows her clothes!

We had a heck of a time meeting up with Jon once he got to Shanghai, mostly because Lee and I didn't really listen when Jon tried to tell us he wasn't inside Shanghai. We were embarrassed when we finally figured things out. So Jon was kind enough to come to Shanghai and visit with us. He had lunch with us and then we took him to the Bund, which is a touristy site along the banks of the Huangpu River. We took a tunnel under the river which was kind of cheesy but fun. You get in a tram and go through a tunnel of different kinds of lights. It's supposed to be futuristic. The kids thought it was great. We walked around a little, took a few pictures and then let Jon experience the subway for the return trip. While we were on the Bund there were several weddings going on. One couple stopped us and begged Ally and Eve to be in some pictures with them. I don't know what it is about western kids, but the Chinese are always asking to take pictures with them. We usually let the kids decide if they want to do it or not. That day Ally and Eve refused, so I, like any good parent, paid them to be in the pictures! :)

We fed Jon some dinner and of course it was Lee's signature pasta and white sauce. While we were cooking, Cooper got in trouble for turning off the dvd player right in the middle of a movie that everyone else was watching. So Lee had Cooper come in the kitchen and sit in the corner. A few minutes later I asked Cooper how he was doing. He was silent, which is a big indicator that something's not quite right. I looked down and poor little Cooper was all tuckered out from a big day of walking. He was snoozing in the corner! We had to get a picture, it was just too cute.

New Addition to the Family

We were going into withdrawal. The symptoms were obvious: shakes, uncontrollable need to pet other peoples pets as they walked by, scanning the neighborhood for cats who might let us pet them. Yep, we needed a pet and we needed it NOW!!! Ally cried night after night wanting a cat to sleep in her bed so we finally made the move and adopted a kitten. We have long had the habit of naming our cats according to the place where we lived when we adopted that cat. In Athens, GA I had a cat named Finley, after a street in town which has a tree that owns itself. It was a famous street because there was a man who owned some land with a tree that he loved dearly. So when he died he left the land to that tree. Now all the land around it has been built upon except for this one tree which has a sign in front of it... I digress. In San Diego we had a cat named Jose because we lived in the barrio. So here in China we decide the new cat needed a Chinese name. So, we named him Joe. How is Joe a Chinese name you may ask. Quite frankly and obviously... IT'S NOT!!! For some crazy reason all the Chinese who work in the service industry that caters to western expatriates choose western names. It is so crazy to me. Our realtor's name is Joe and he found us this great apartment when two other realtors failed to do so. So, the cat is named in honor of our wonderful Chinese realtor who still helps us out when we are in a pinch.

Joe is tiny. As you can see from the picture he's just a little thing of about 8 weeks old. He has the loudest meow I have ever heard. He cries a lot right now, just walking around looking for his sisters and mother. In this picture he is sleeping on our CD rack.

We had to go to Puxi to pick him up, which is about 45 minutes from our house by taxi cab. The other picture I have posted is of the children squished in the back of the taxi.

Only in China

Ally came home from school a few days ago with a nice gash over her right eye. Upon further inquiry I discovered that she had been 'hit in the eye by a chopstick." Yep, you read right. Her friend was sitting next to her in the cafeteria. She was trying to open her chopsticks, which are wooden. You have to break them apart when you get them because they are disposable and that's how they are made. So while trying to break them apart, when they finally snapped apart one went flying and managed to hit Ally in the eye. This picture is about 3 days after it happened so it looked much worse than in the picture.