Adventures in dining and other fun things.

Our little peanut

Well one thing that is interesting about this adoption journey is that we are living out of a hotel for 3 weeks and eating every meal in a restaurant. Talk about breaking us in! The restaurants here are really neat because they consist of separate rooms. So our group usually is in one room with 3 large round tables. The tables all have these large glass lazy susans on them where the food is placed and then eaten family style. The funniest thing is that the minute all the families sit down in our group all the glasses and plates get pushed as far away from the kids as possible. Maya has an incredible throw and thinks that it is really funny to toss everything onto the floor. This always leads to big grins and belly laughs. The majority of the restaurants don't have high chairs so we have her eating on our lap. Here is how and average meal goes:

MMMMM little steamed egg for Maya.....three pieces for mamma's lap. Rub some fried rice in our hair then squish a little onto mamma's shirt. Grab a few greasy noodles and give baba (daddy) a nice pat on the back. Eating is so much fun!!!!!! Multiply that by four babies at the same table. Seriously we look like we have been in a food fight after every meal. I'm learning to dress in layers at meal time so that I can remove my food soaked outside layer. We have also learned that if we feed her things stay a lot neater. She doesn't like the spoon so mamma has gotten lots of practice with chopsticks.

We have been extremely lucky because Maya loves to eat anything. She is not particular about the temperature of her bottles or the kind of nipples like many of the babies. She usually has a death grip on any food that is in her hand. Her favorite is watermelon. She will take a huge slice and turn into the human juicer. She even likes the rind. Today she fell asleep with her watermelon rind in hand.........don't even think of taking that away! She also loves teething biscuits which are fun to eat and then scratch her head with or clean out an ear. Hey at least she can multitask. She also has a system of how she eats things. Take her teething biscuits for example. After each bite she will turn it over and spin it clockwise to find the edge that hasn't been eaten. She will continue to do this until all the clean edges are eaten before diving in to eat the whole biscuit. We bought some of the Chinese teething biscuits at Walmart yesterday and they are more like breadsticks. She hasn't quite figured out how to find a good edge with those. She loves them but they are ten times messier then the American biscuits I brought.

Speaking of Walmart....wow what an adventure that was. The Walmart greeters are incredible. The basically do the Vanna White impression and go "dahdah" every time they point something out. Well they don't really say that but they motion their hands like they are doing that. The meat/poultry/fish section was wild. They have aquariums basically with live fish swimming around. The aquariums are lined up in a row. John said he saw a couple of the fish jumping from one aquarium to another. You have to net your own fish which we saw one woman do. Apparently she wasn't happy with the one she caught so she threw it back. Nothing is packaged. If you want chicken you just pick through all the parts or get a whole one. They like to serve things mostly whole as we have found out when dining out. It is nothing to have the beak of the duck resting on the bowl or find a claw like chicken foot too. Luckily there are lots of vegetarian dishes too. Corn on the cob is a favorite for breakfast. We found some interesting snacks at Walmart. The Chinese like potato chips flavored like ketchup, pork, or cucumber.


Gone fishin', Walmart style


Anemic chicken anyone?


Some western style food with a twist - Cucumber flavored chips and a Coke with old-style can


Today we also visited the Hunan embroidery museum. The silk embroidery here is incredible. They look like paintings and you have to get extremely close to see that they are threads of fine silk. They manage to do all the shading perfectly. They are extremely labor intensive and a person might spend their whole life working on just one piece. Many pieces are finished by multiple artists. The women working on these pieces spend ten to twelve hours a day doing so. The threads are very thin and yet I didn't see any of the women wearing glasses. It is amazing what little they get for doing such beautiful work. John and I purchased a couple for our home.



Silk Embroidery Museum of Hunan




This piece dates to 2000 BC




A woman working on a new piece

As I write this my little peanut and baba are taking an afternoon nap snoring together in a harmonious symphony. Maya slept through from 8pm until 6am this morning. Yeah! She seems to sleep better at night if she gets a two hour nap in the afternoon. Is she doesn't get it she is almost so exhausted that she just fights sleeping all night. She is still struggling with a cold and cough which John and I have gotten as well. Of course! Each day she just continues to amaze us and we still can't believe we get to take her home with us. She doesn't seem overly scared of other people like some of the kids do so many of you will probably get a chance to hold her. Just promise you'll give her back :)


Afternoon walk to Martyr's Park




Many street vendors come out in the late afternoon