Here's some pictures which I know you are keen to see. First things first, Dana has been smiling quite a bit these days and is almost able to roll from her stomach to her back by herself! I guess we can't park her on the bed unattended anymore!
She likes to smile with her tongue sticking out. Sometimes she gives me these great half smiles too, with just one side of her mouth curling. "Piao liang!" is an exclamation I hear a lot when I'm out with the kids, it means beautiful or lovely. Lots of people think that Eli is a girl no matter what he wears because he has his gorgeous blue eyes with long eyelashes and curly blonde hair. (It is also time for him to get a haircut again.)
This is our courtyard that we share between 3 buildings. It's much larger than what you can see here, but it gives you the idea of the kind of green space we have, there are more trees and grassy areas with pathways to walk on and a fountain near the entrance of our development. They pipe in music sometimes in the evening (good ol' Kenny G) out of rock-like speakers to make the environment as calm and peaceful as possible.
Eli is in the guest room in this picture. It will be Dana's room eventually but right now she rooms with us. There is a lot of dark wood: floor and closets mostly, we really like it. We are on the main floor and have windows on three sides, so it feels very house-like actually.
A family shot of us. Pretty hard to get Eli to look at the camera without turning his head away 1.5 seconds later.
One of our views from our windows. Lots of cranes working on the various new developments around our place. They start at 6am and work until 7pm. We see the workers walk or ride their bikes back from work with their characteristic orange hard hats (that don't look that hard actually, more of a uniform than a safety feature I'd say).
Our living room. We have a different couch and chair now. The ones you see here were lent to us by our landlord but we opted for more child friendly and comfortable ones. We bought chocolate brown couches with forest green pillows and we are quite happy with them. Eli already jumps all over them and has fallen off, so we think we should look into getting one or two area rugs too, to cushion his falls.
You'll have to look sideways on this one, it's our kitchen complete with an oven! (unheard of usually in Chinese kitchens). I made cookies the other day and am really glad we have one. Everything is new as nobody has lived in our place before us. It was newly renovated last November and sat vacant until we moved in.
Yesterday we bought some plants, I did some reading on-line about "growing clean air" and found that spider plants, rubber plants and English ivy (among others) are good air-cleaning plants to have inside your house, so basically every room with a window has at least one plant in it. I would like to get lots, but Scott is not as keen as me to have a jungle-like living space.
Tomorrow for our 6th wedding anniversary Scott secured a car with driver to take us to the Great Wall for the whole day. We got a baby-sitter for Eli and we'll take Dana with us. Scott and I have been to the Great Wall before, just over six years ago so we are pretty excited to be able to go again and celebrate our anniversary in this way.
Our language classes start in September but of course language learning has already started unofficially. I love having Eli and Dana with me because people just flock to them and make a lot of the same comments and questions which I am starting to recognize and reply to. Life is good and busy.
