A few weeks ago Eva got an award at school that earned her a free Valentino’s buffet. She was given the award because she was caught being good.
I catch Eva being good all of the time.
This girl is a helper. She loves to clean. She gives me hugs all of the time. When Caleb is sad she always wants to help calm him down. She is kind to friends. She loves animals. She is a good sport.
We love this girl.
Brandon and Lyndsi Burnett moved. We knew it would happen sooner or later. He graduated and moved on to greener pastures. Brandon and Lyndsi are “Caleb compatible” and the kids totally love them (and their dogs!). They were the surrogate parents to Caleb and Eva when we would take our overseas trips. Lyndsi was my after school help with Caleb when I needed backup. They will totally be missed.
Today and tomorrow I’m interviewing people to take Lyndsi’s place as our in-home help for Caleb. I’ve done 3 interviews and have 2 more to go. It’s not easy finding a replacement. The candidates have all been more than qualified…but it isn’t the same.
The Burnetts left some big shoes to fill.
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One of Caleb’s activities this year was participating in the Special Olympics. He chose swimming as his sport. He practiced for 90 minutes almost every Saturday and a few weeks ago he had his regional meet. He got 1st place in his division swimming the 25M Freestyle (I think he was the only one in his age group) and was SUPER excited to get his ribbon.
Caleb made a great friend and has been able to have a few playdates. We are looking forward to spending more time with his friend and his family once we get back from our big summer trip. Practice doesn’t start again for swimming until the fall. He qualified for the state meet but has decided not to compete since he would miss the last day of school to do so. We were really proud of him and the hard work he put into the sport.
The photo above does not represent Craft Heaven. It is the opposite, in fact. This is where my craft projects went to die and for over a year I did nothing in this room but contribute to the mess.
Part of my therapy included hiring an organizer to come and help me get my house in order. Did you know that if you’re depressed and lie around in bed all day watching Dr. Phil that the house doesn’t clean itself? I found that out.
I found my organizer through Google. I’m more apt to hire someone if they have a good website. Wendy is the woman behind Organize by Design. She helped me turn that mess into heaven. Check it out.
Isn’t that beautiful? If we hadn’t organized that room, I probably would still be avoiding my blog. Having a nice space to work in really makes a huge difference.
If you’re in Lincoln and want to hire Wendy, tell her I sent you–I’ll get a free hour of organizing and you’ll get an amazing lady to help you clean up your own mess. Win/win.
Motherhood kicks my butt on a daily basis.
That is all.
Eva’s dance recital was today. The way we do after school activities in our family is that each kid has one mandatory activity and one of their choice. Eva’s mandatory activity is Tae Kwon Do. We are going to make her do that until she reaches her black belt. In our family, it’s best if she’s got some defensive skills. Her choice this year was dance. I signed her up at Studio 2–it isn’t too far from our house, they are low pressure (no competition team) and their costume choices are pretty modest.
Eva’s class is Jazz and their dance this year was to Elvis’ song “Burning Love”. I know my mom loves this song. She used to sing it to me all the time. I guess she had the record growing up.
They didn’t allow pictures or videos during the recital but they allowed that during dress rehearsal. Carl left for South Korea (just for a week) today so he went to the rehearsal and took the video. It’s kind of poor quality (he just had the flip cam) and I didn’t give him the heads up on which side of the stage she’d be on. It’s really not worth looking at unless you’re a grandparent. Eva is on the far left in the back row. When they are all lined up straight, she’s the second from the left.
If the video embedding isn’t working (I was having some issues with YouTube tonight), here’s the link: http://youtu.be/28Wwe8DujIg
I think I may start blogging again. I’ll be honest, I didn’t miss it as much as I thought I would. Starting in October of last year, I spiraled down into a pretty deep depression. It was kind of scary and to think about how I was feeling just a few short weeks ago, I’m amazed at how much better my life seems (My meds kicked in!). I let myself go. I surrendered to the chaos around me and tried to crawl into a hole. What I then realized is that when I’m in a hole, my family comes with me. I’m kind of the one that keeps things together around here. It was one thing to be depressed myself. It was another to see the toll it was taking on my family. So, I got help. I started therapy again and began seeing a holistic doctor to help get me back in balance. Meds, supplements, and good old-fashioned talking is getting me back to my “normal”. I’m not quite there yet but I don’t feel as desperate and in despair as I was earlier this year.
I am beginning to recognize all the tender mercies that are in my life instead of the glaring trials that have been consuming my thoughts for so long.
This blog has been one of those tender mercies and it deserves to be dusted off. Writing here has given me opportunities I could never imagine for myself and a place to put down my thoughts and feelings that I can share with others. It’s time to get back to it.
Hello, again. Hello.
It’s been way too long and I’ve got a lot of catching up to do around here.
Let’s finish up our China trip, shall we?
Tianjin is where we actually spent the majority of our time. Carl had a conference to attend so I spent a lot of the time walking around and exploring. Tianjin is a port city with a lot of European influences. It’s really beautiful and has a river running through the center of the town.
I also did a lot of shopping but ended up not actually buying all that much.
One night the conference organizers had a river cruise for us. The tour was all in Chinese so I have no idea what anyone was saying. But, it was an enjoyable evening and I got to spend it with Carl and some of his colleagues.
The Tianjin Eye is one of their landmarks on the river. It is a lot like the one in London. We went up there on our last day in China. There had been rain the day before so the skies were actually a little blue so the view was even better.
And that’s the last post I have from China. Maybe now I can post all of the other fun things we’ve been doing for the past four months.
Writing these posts is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I thought I could just bang these out and be done with them right when we came back. Funny thing, though, life got the best of me and my time has been sucked up other places (you know, like watching the Olympics). So, back to China I go to bring you our adventures.
Going into the Forbidden City is quite the task–at least it was on the day we went. Hordes of people trying to squeeze through just a few gates. We took this picture on one of the bridges you cross after you enter the first gate. It’s amazing to think how overwhelmed we were just at this point considering I now know how much more there was to see!
The scale of everything was just so massive. You can also see how overcast (er, smoggy) it was. I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever see the sun again. Although, it was plenty hot enough without it!
This picture is of some dragon water spouts that become fountains when it rains. I thought the kids would appreciate a picture of that.
Every roof was ornamented with little animals. Some were bigger than others but again, I thought the kids would get a kick out of seeing this.
Speaking of roofs, Carl was a bit obsessed with the way the tiles were put on and how everything drained and was constructed. He’s always the engineer.
I took this picture because I loved seeing that building up on the hill in the distance.
Near the back of the Forbidden City is a beautiful garden. After seeing so many huge squares full of paved bricks and big buildings, it was nice to see some gorgeous vegetation even if we couldn’t always get close because of all the people.
This was something I thought was really cool. I knew I wouldn’t remember what it was so I included a picture of the explanation to go along with it. Clever, right?
Looks like I have enough Forbidden City pictures to separate this into even another post! Day 3 Part 3 coming soon…
We woke up early on day 3 so we could go pick up some cash from an ATM and check out Wangjufing street in the daytime (that’s where we ate our street food on day 1) and go to the Arts & Crafts building. Basically, it is a huge department store dedicated to the arts & craft of China. There is embroidery, jewelry, silk, figurines, wood carving, porcelain, etc… We didn’t buy anything but had an amazing time looking at all of the stuff. No pictures.
After that we made the short walk back to Tienanmen Square. It was right next to our hotel. We had walked over a bit on day 1 just to get our bearings but didn’t cross into the square. On this morning, it was PACKED with people! From the side of the square you look across to the Forbidden City. We took a few pictures of us with that in the background although you can get an idea of how smoggy it is in Beijing from those shots.
The bottom picture is the National Museum of China. We didn’t go inside. There was a really long line.
Speaking of lines, there was one that ran the whole length of the square and even snaked back and forth for what we can only guess was at least 1 mile worth of line. We tried to capture the enormity of the line but there was really no way.
It goes as far as the eye can see and then on the other side of the square it curves around a couple of times and comes back. All of those people were waiting for their chance to go inside to Mao Mausoleum (which Carl dubbed the Maosoleum) to see Chairman Mao lying in state. We decided against waiting in that long line to do that so we waited until the afternoon to come back and take a picture in from of the “Maosoleum” without all the people in front.
After walking down one side of Tienanmen Square, we went looking for a Peking duck restaurant that was nearby. We didn’t find the one we were looking for but we found another one. It was delicious and you can see my China food report on Real Food Really Good some time next week.
After lunch we walked back through the square over to the Forbidden City.
This post is getting long enough so I’ll add the rest of the Forbidden City pictures to the next post.
