Living in what I call the "desert city", because of the usual lack of rain and abundant dusty layers, I have learned to live with trees, plants and, well, about everything, being covered in orange-ish dust.  However, this being my second spring here in China, I am amazed once again with the new life.  After a very long and cold winter, I walk outside one day greeted by warm weather and, to my great surprise, green leaves!  I am shocked by the delicate light green leaves on the bushes that slowly uncurl, fresh and clean.  Then around the corner I turn to find a little tree, no taller than 8 ft, that is bursting with little pink blossoms.  The whole winter I stared at the bare twigs of that tree, and today I find it  covered in the sweet little buds.  It absolutely astonishes me when I see the foliage all around me turn from orange-ish color to vibrant greens, white, and pinks!  Isn't HE amazing, and so kind, to bless us with such unexpected surprises?!

Living in what I call the “desert city”, because of the lack of rain and abundant dusty layers, I have learned to live with trees, plants and, well, about everything, being covered in orange-ish dust.  However, this being my third spring here in China, I am amazed once again with the new life.  After a very long and cold winter, I walk outside one day greeted by warm weather and, to my great surprise, green leaves!  I am shocked by the delicate light green leaves on the bushes that slowly uncurl, fresh and clean.  Then around the corner I turn to find a little tree, no taller than 8 ft, that is bursting with little pink blossoms.  The whole winter I stared at the bare twigs of that tree, and today I find it  covered in the sweet little buds.  It absolutely astonishes me when I see the foliage all around me turn from orange-ish color to vibrant greens, white, and pinks!  Isn’t HE amazing, and so kind, to bless us with such unexpected surprises?!

Susan arranged this bamboo raft — picture worth a thousand words!

The last two weeks The Middle school has done a fund-raiser for Japan. To raise money people had to put money in a box then you could put their name in a bowl for every 10 yuan donated. There were several boxes and all of them had teachers faces on them. Whichever 3 boxes had the most money in it got water balloons thrown at the teachers. To determine who could throw the water balloons was that they picked random names out of the bowl of names. It was a really fun way to raise money for Japan. I especially enjoyed watching the teachers getting wet!

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!