Saturday, March 26

Yippee!  TingTing slept soundly last night and we all got to sleep in a little this morning!  And she is sleeping quietly right now as well!  We pretty much decided to skip napping right now at least while this is all so new.  She does get a little high strung in the afternoon as she gets tired, but then she seems to move through it and does fine in the evening.  It just seems bedtime is a non-issue if we don't actually have her nap, but just have some quiet down time in the hotel in the afternoon.  If she seems to need one, we can deal with that down the road.  But for now, she is going to bed very nicely at night after doing a typical bedtime routine.  

Today, we didn't have our guide Theresa with us at all.  It was just a free day.  We went out around our hotel area a couple of times bumming around doing a couple of things.  We had lunch at the place where we ate the first day she was with us.  We ordered the exact same things we had last time because it was so good!  And again, TingTing LOVED it!  Definately noodles are her favorite thing - Chinese noodles that is.  It's like what we would call Lo Mein.  She out-ate me again.  Oh, and she's got me beat on the chopsticks too!  Check this out....

One of her favorite things to eat.  And I don't blame her - this stuff is really good!

We also explored a supermarket for the first time today.  There were a few things we did recognize but a LOT of things we had no idea what they were.  It's really hard to tell exactly what something is when you can't read any of the writing on it!  There was one thing that we bought because TingTing instantly seemed to recognize it and told us something very emphatically and then wouldn't put it down!  They came in a pack of four and looked like little tiny bottles of milk, but they weren't refrigerated.  We still don't know what they are, but when we got back to the room she wanted one right away and she downed it in about 10 seconds - if that long!  Here are some pictures of our excursion to the market...

We found Lays potato chips!  But wait...Blueberry flavor???

Cucumber flavor???

Rice anyone?

Um...not quite sure what this is.  I can read it, but I still don't know what it is.

We decided we would only do trips to the market in small doses because she was very busy and pretty much wanted everything she saw.  And of course we had no way of knowing which things she actually knew and liked, and which things she didn't!

She seemed to know just what to do at the checkout.  I'm not sure how, but she did!

She was very proud of our bag of snacks!

Our grocery store finds.  We got all of this for $5 US!

Seriously proud of her finds!

For dinner we ate at the Pizza Hut again - the same one where we discovered the Teriyaki Octopus with Quail Eggs.  We just ordered a stuff crust pizza with pepperoni and mushrooms - no teriyaki octopus tonight.  It was just too bad they forgot to put sauce on the pizza.  Then we got a really big laugh as we tried to communicate with a waitress to ask for a side of sauce.  In the end we just ate our pepperoni and mushroom cheese bread, but it was sure funny having her try to figure out what "sauce" is.  She would repeat the word several times, think seriously, and then say "just a minute".  Then she would hurry off and and come back with something that she hoped these crazy Americans call "sauce."  But ketchup is definitely NOT the same thing as pizza sauce!

Yum!  American food!  Well, almost.  We do prefer our pizza with pizza sauce.  It came with it the first night we went there.  Not sure why it didn't this time - and why no one seemed to know what sauce is!

We are glad she seems to love pizza.  This is very important to her living in our house!!

Ketchup and pizza sauce.  Nope.  Not the same.

Pizza Hut is in a big mall, so we walked around a little after dinner.  We borrowed a stroller from the travel service who is helping us here, and we tried it out for the first time tonight.  We weren't sure what TingTing would think of it, but she seemed to love it.  We'll see if that wears off quickly or not.  Different than most three year olds, she would just sit quietly and wait in it, even if we stopped to look at something for a while.

Also at the mall we were finally successful in getting her another pair of shoes.  We tried that a couple of days ago, but had no luck since we couldn't communicate with the employees in the shoe department.  So before we lost our guide for the weekend, we had her write out some phrases for us in Chinese characters so we could take them places and get what we needed by showing the phrases to the employees.  For example, "Could you show us what shoes you have in her size."  Or, "Do you have these shoes in her size?"  Or "Can you measure her foot?"  It worked much better this time!  We found a cute little pair of pink shoes with a picture of her favorite chinese cartoon on them - it's a cartoon called "The Pleasant Goat and the Big Big Wolf."  She was thrilled to have little sparkly Pleasant Goats on her toes!  

A funny thing we saw in the Gap when we were buying TingTing a spring coat.  There were these tags labeling the different styles of cropped pants on the mannequin.   You know, we might have Relaxed style, skinny style, low cut, etc.  Here's what they had...

Not so unusual...

Wait......what!!?

 We pulled out the crayons this morning...it was really more about lining them up meticulously than it was about coloring.  Or putting them in and out of the plastic case, all going in just the right direction...

This goes along well with the skill of folding her blanket.  We couldn't believe it when we saw her do that for the first time.  Oh yeah, and today she made our bed.  Our king size bed.  Pulled the covers up, straightened them all out, made sure it was smooth and straight.  Wow.

One new thing we noticed actually yesterday for the first time.  She will leave food on her plate now when she has had enough.  That first two days, she would not stop eating even if she was full.  She would eat every last bit on her plate.  Yesterday for the first time, she chose not to finish something.  And today, more of the same.  If she likes what she is eating, but has had enough and is full she will stop eating and shake her head and wave her hand in front of the plate.  Or, if she tries something and doesn't like it she will actually not eat it.  Today and yesterday that was what she did with the fried eggs at breakfast.  She will eat fried eggs in things, like in fried rice or Lo Mein noodles.  But she doesn't seem to like them by themselves.  Clearly a couple of days ago she just knew she was getting a big meal with as much as she could get, so she would eat as much as possible of anything at all.  But then again, at that point she really didn't know who we were at all and if this would continue this way or not.  Several days of being with us and clearly she is starting to trust that there will be more food each day and that she will always have enough.  Bless her heart - what a sweet thing to build that kind of trust that quickly.

It has been such a blessing to see how she has relaxed with us in the last few days.  We have a couple of videos of the day we got her, and when we watched those this evening it was suddenly so obvious how much she has relaxed.  She seems very comfortable with us already, regardless of the fact that we speak different languages.  We have learned a few of her words, she has learned a few of our words already, and we have all learned a few effective hand signals that work quite well.  Another sign that she is more comfortable is the fact that she tests behavior a little more now.  Not a lot, and nothing too astonishing.  But a little more testing, like trying to not hold our hand outside, or picking up a toy off the bed and throwing it back down.  Again, thankful that we learned the Chinese word for no.  She seems to know that one if we say it sternly, and she is beginning to recognize English "no" as well. 

Ok, I think I'll wrap it up.  Super tired again tonight - my body is in mommy-of-a-three-year-old shock!

Three things we are thankful for today:

1.  That in America, cars are not allowed to drive on the sidewalk!

Watch out!!

2.  For laughter.  We are having so much fun making TingTing laugh with the simplest things.

3.  For the prayers of family and friends back home.  God is good and prayers are being answered!

and