Thank the Lord!! The hotel finally decided to switch from heating to air conditioning!! We will be able to be in our rooms without sweating the entire time. Although the adults in the group are able to dress appropriately for the weather here, our poor babies can not. The “clothing police” around the city will come up and scold us if they think that our children are dressed inappropriately. We are having to dress our babies in long sleeve shirts and long pants when we leave the hotel. Chinese people do a lot of touching of children here and will let you know when they feel like the children are not dressed warmly enough. I have seen children on the streets here dressed in what amounts to snow pants and winter coats. OK…….let’s get real, it’s 80 degrees out there. Our poor babies are sweating here! The other day when we were at the monument there was a child with his mother and grandmother. The child had on snow pants and winter coat. He had fallen asleep in the mother’s arms and so she sat on a bench and then the grandmother came up and cover him with two additional coats. The child’s face was bright red from the heat. It’s tradition here and I totally get it, but come on…….you don’t want any of their skin exposed but you let them run around with split pants on and their butts hanging out!! It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. We are all hoping that in Guangzhou the people will be a little more relaxed about “tradition” there.
This morning we made our way to the police station to get our babies passports. YEAH! She is able to leave China now. Once we get to Guangzhou tomorrow we will immediately go to apply for her visa to come to the US. We will leave for the airport tomorrow at about noon, so not much to do tomorrow morning except eat breakfast and get our stuff all packed up. We will need to check our baggage to make sure that we will meet the weight requirements at the airport. For each seat you are allowed 20kg…..doesn’t matter if you have one bag or 10 bags. May have to do some creative packing!! It should be an interesting flight with all the babies and new parents.
A bunch of us are thinking about heading out tonight for dinner. The hotel buffet is getting a little old at this point in the trip. We would all like a little variety here soon. Well, we actually just returned from dinner. We all had a great time and the food was really good. It was a fancier restaurant than we have been to so far this trip. You go up to the front and they have all the food dishes in a display case and you just pick out what you want. For the six of us dining together we had 6 entrée dishes, we each had rice and a least one beer each and the bill was less than $30 US total.
Alicia is still doing really good. Paul said that she cried for about an hour this afternoon after I left for our meeting. He finally put her in the Baby Bjorn and she settled down and fell asleep for a little bit. She is needing Mommy a little bit more yesterday and today. Paul is having a hard time comforting her. She took her nap this afternoon laying across my chest. Total fun and sweet, but that’s not going to be practical at home. Well, I guess I'm not the best housekeeper anyway......so it won't make much of a difference.
Marcus - we can’t wait to see you next week. We miss you so much!! Love you buddy!
We can't wait to be home! Have a great weekend!
Paula
