For Megan’s birthday today I took a cake to school to share with her
class. Just as we were getting ready to light the candles, suddenly our
friend, Zhu Laoshi appeared with a stuffed animal to give to Megan for her
birthday. He had secretly e-mailed Megan’s teacher and found out the time
we would be having cake. Zhu is a Sean’s Chinese language teacher. He
has also spent time with the big kids tutoring them in their language
goals. Zhu has always adored Megan. We are so thankful for special friends.

Sometimes in China you walk into a store look around and see that one item that makes you think to yourself "who in the world would eat that?" Well at least I'm sure that I am never going to at something like Spicy Duck Necks……

The girls and I always like to snuggle up and watch a movie on the weekends. One thing we'll always need to make sure we have is a snack sometimes it's tea, sometimes candy, and sometimes popcorn. But whatever it is we always enjoy it! This time our category landed on popcorn and a coke yummm. But to make sure this was a winner night we had to pick the perfect movie and we did. We picked out the best movie, an old classic, 7 Brides for 7 Brothers. We enjoyed our time so much!

On Dads birthday weekend me and the kids happened to come by some bubble tea bubbles. When I saw them I was very excited I wanted to buy them badly… so I looked at the price tag (thinking it would be expensive) but it was 8 yuan (about $1). I immediately put them in the stack of things we were buying. On our return home me and Michael decided to experiment on these bubbles we knew we had to boil them so we set some water up to boil. after we put the bubbles in we put a ton of sugar in with it (maybe a little too much). We let them boil for about 30 minutes and then let them soak, meanwhile we were picking out the perfect tea for it. AH we found it, the best tea, Jasmine. We boiled up the tea added some bubbles and it tasted delicious!

** special thanks to Michael for the picture editing 🙂

Recently a few of my Mom's friends from America came to China to lead a woman's retreat and brought some special craft supplies to make journals.  They, generously, gave the left over supplies to my Mom when they were getting ready to return to America.  So, one night Rachel and decided that we'd try it out!  We had already previously received scrap booking paper from another friend that we also used to make these journals.  We bought small spiral notebooks to start out with.  Then we cut two pieced of paper to cover the front and the back covers.  Then we took a thin ribbon and tied it to the top ring of the spiral notebook, as a bookmark.  After that we used different paper, cut into a strip about 2 inches wide, and glued it so that it folded over the spiral part of the note book.   For a finishing touch we glued a ribbon over the line where the two papers overlapped.  This simple process turns a boring spiral notebook into a beautiful journal in just less than 30 minutes and costs a lot less then one you would buy at your local book store.  I had so much fun making them and I was so pleased with the end result!

On Friday night I was chatting with a friend talking about the weekend.  They were going to a soccer game in the morning.  They really wanted me to come and even though I wasn't keen on going to a soccer game early in the morning, I made a decision on a whim to go.  So I got up and stole Michael's Blue sweatshirt and put on some white jeans (Our school's colors).  I got a thermos of tea, Mom got a thermos of coffee, and we grabbed some granola and was out the door!  We took the bus at 9am to the field and watched the game.  Then others from our school came in a later bus to set up their bake sale.  Though TIS lost the boys JV and varsity boys games, the girls won their game.  I so enjoyed sitting on the bleachers cheering on our school in the cool morning with my breakfast then later eating Kim Bop (Korean Sushi) and Brownies from the bake sale!  All in all I really enjoyed my Saturday (and way prefer it to being asleep)!         

Recently a few of my Mom’s friends from America came to China to lead a woman’s retreat and brought some special craft supplies to make journals.  They, generously, gave the left over supplies to my Mom when they were getting ready to return to America.  So, one night Rachel and I decided that we’d try it out!  We had already previously received scrap booking paper from another friend that we also used to make these journals.  We bought small spiral notebooks to start out with.  Then we cut two pieces of paper to cover the front and the back covers.  Then we took a thin ribbon and tied it to the top ring of the spiral notebook, as a bookmark.  After that we used different paper, cut into a strip about 2 inches wide, and glued it so that it folded over the spiral part of the note book.   For a finishing touch we glued a ribbon over the line where the two papers overlapped.  This simple process turns a boring spiral notebook into a beautiful journal in just less than 30 minutes and costs a lot less then one you would buy at your local book store.  I had so much fun making them and I was so pleased with the end result!

On Friday night I was chatting with a friend talking about the weekend.  They were going to a soccer game in the morning.  They really wanted me to come and even though I wasn’t keen on going to a soccer game early in the morning, I made a decision on a whim to go.  So I got up and stole Michael’s Blue sweatshirt and put on some white jeans (Our school’s colors).  I got a thermos of tea, Mom got a thermos of coffee, and we grabbed some granola and were out the door!  We took the bus at 9am to the field and watched the game.  Then others from our school came in a later bus to set up their bake sale.  Though TIS lost the boys JV and varsity boys games, the girls won their game.  I so enjoyed sitting on the bleachers cheering on our school in the cool morning with my breakfast then later eating Kim Bop (Korean Sushi) and Brownies from the bake sale!  All in all I really enjoyed my Saturday (and way prefer it to being asleep)!         

Sometimes in China you walk into a store look around and see that one item that makes you think to yourself “who in the world would eat that?” Well at least I’m sure that I am never going to eat something like Spicy Duck Necks……

Each year the student council in middle and high school hosts some sort of sleepover party.  For the Middle Schoolers it is named the Lip Sync Party because they have a Lip Sync competition the night of the sleep over.  For the High School they just name it the Lock In.  Because I am Freshmen Class President I am part of the planning for the High School event.  Even though I have been at this school for two years I have never participated in the sleepover part of the Middle School Lip Sync party, so this was my first year to sleep over in the school.  I was so nervous that some part of our planning would go wrong, however God really blessed our party!  Everything stayed on schedule and all of the activities we planned went smoothly.  I had a blast!  Every activity was a ton of fun; among the different activities, my favorite was the Student vs. Teacher Dodge ball, Dice Game called Screamo, and a game called assassins.  All the food, Korean, American and Chinese food, was fresh and hot when we ordered it; in one case a place delivered the food at midnight for our midnight snack!  Once it was about 3am, the activities were finished and we could either play ping pong or bad mitten, watch a movie, or play board games or cards.  I opted to watching the movie because I was too tired to do anything else, additionally there were cushions for you to lay on in the movie room, where as in the sleeping room it was only the hard floor.  I purposely fell asleep on the cushions to catch a few hours of comfortable sleep. I had a ton of fun and will always remember this Lock In!  It was everything I hoped it would be and more!