Little Things | First Half of October

Hope you had a great Halloween! Can we just talk for a minute how Halloween should never be on a Monday.  Come Tuesday, we were beat! Wes said our house reminded him of a frat house - candy wrappers everywhere (representing beer cans), the girls chairs were turned over and they were both sluggishly hanging out on the couch eating waffles for breakfast.  I guess it is a small price to pay for all the fun we had the night before ;).  I am happy to be back with a more regular schedule for November, although still quite busy and I am going to make an attempt to catch back up sequentially and at some point still re-cap the rest of our summer vacation.

Ok, back to October 3rd - it was my first day to "commute" home.  On China holidays that conflict with the close schedule at work, we still go to work.  Unfortunately on these days, we have to pay our driver an absurd amount of money just to sit around and wait for me.  So I took our car to work and then I 'commuted' home.  This involved having someone on my team drop me off at the metro station/call an uber to drop me off at a metro station, take the metro, and then take an uber home/wait for the neighborhood shuttle bus... whew, it was exhausting and about two hours long.  I realized that I should no longer complain about my car and driver situation because commuting was brutal. When I hopped off the metro on the first day, I took a picture of these and asked Wes if he thought it was safe for me to take this ;). He said nope, so I waited for my uber (I had ask L's mom to call for me since I speak very little Chinese). And by very little, I mean three words.  Pathetic, I know.

When I got home, these two were being ridiculously cute! They were out of school for 11 days straight and Wes reminded me that they were not this cute all day ;).

One night after I got home, we headed to the playground with Cinderella, Elsa and Everly Bear (I forgot that I haven't told you the story about Everly bear, I will have to do that soon!).

I texted this picture to my mom to confirm her decision to get the girls dress up clothes for Halloween - Emma wears everything she got from her birthday so much, that it is falling apart!

This is how we watch TV sometimes - the Mac hooked up to the TV and our other computer on the coffee table, it never fails that one will give out mid-show so we hedge our bets and run both from time to time.

On Saturday, I recorded a day in the life which you can see here - we had a blast hitting up the playground, a tex-mex restaurant and Ikea!

On Sunday morning, the girls stretched before heading out on our bike/scooter ride.

Her scooter skills have come so far in the last six months - she zoom zooms!

I love chasing after these two!

Then, Everly and I went on a walk just the two of us that we dubbed special time.  I would love to take each of the girls on special dates but it is a little bit trickier here - so sometimes we do walks just the two of us (either Emma or Everly) and I love getting to talk to them one-on-one.

She is obsessed with being five years old - she talks about it nearly day so I am pretty sure that is why she is holding up the number five.

We got dressed and headed to a mall to meet a few of my co-workers for lunch! You cannot go anywhere in Chengdu without running into a panda!

There was an art installation on the roof of the mall.

And another giant panda.  And if you are wondering about Emma's outfit, let me try to explain.  She had her airport dress on, with her Elsa towel and crown.  Before we got out of the car, I had to convince her to remove one of my tank tops that she had over her dress and Elsa towel.  She had baked pumpkin scones for everyone (that were disgusting and that is putting it nicely) and this was her leftover baking/princess outfit. This kid. She is not lacking in personality and confidence :).

This was my burger and it was delicious! We were there because we had heard good things about it - it turned out this was the last day they were open, what are the odds??!!

Family pictures with the panda once our bellies were full :).

As we were walking back through the art installation to get back inside the mall, I noticed that Everly had paused to take some pictures of the flowers with her 'camera' (which was really a pamphlet).  I wish I could have got a video of this - it was so endearing.

On our way back to our car, we had to hug on and love another set of panda's! They are everywhere here!!

Riding on my neck is her favorite - her new smile for the camera is not my favorite ;).

Emma and I had our special time later that evening and she even found a feather! And by the way, doesn't she look so grown up here!!

I don't think I have mentioned this, but starting in September, Emma started taking swimming lessons two days a week after school.  You have to have your own ride home from school, so we are thankful that L's mom is able to bring her home (since we only have one car).  We are going to try to figure out something for the spring so Ev's can go too, it just doesn't feel right to ask someone else to be responsible for two girls + their own daughter.  Ev's said she didn't want to go, but as it turned out of course she did, once she heard Emma talking about all of the fun she was having.

I am almost embarrassed to type this because to me it is almost like admitting that I have failed, but since we have moved to China and had the girls sleeping in the same bed we have ben struggling with them not sleeping through the night (this seems like a constant struggle for the last 4.5 years).  We got in gear during September and started working with them on sleeping through the night.  After they were getting pretty good about going back to sleep on their own if they woke each other up - we made a chart and after 7 straight days, they got a watch they had been asking for! It was a pretty big morning at our house when these watches were opened!

Wes took the girls to the bank with him one day and he said they were delighted to find one of their favorite princesses - Cinderella as a cut out!

As we started approaching mid-October we started to watch the Disney app to check out the wait times at Shanghai Disney - they vary so drastically, but I think this is one that Wes sent me about an hour after the park was open.

Whew! I think that is enough for one day!! I am going to skip over Shanghai Disney, but we are going to move right into holding the baby tigers next!!!!