The fun continues.

Friday night we went to a Halloween party hosted by a Canadian family. Within 20 minutes, Ryan cut his finger carving a pumpkin. Thankfully, there was a young Chinese doctor at the party and she called ahead to the hospital and stayed with us the entire time. Ryan is doing great - he got three stitches. I brought an anti-biotic with me as a precaution, and Ryan is taking it 2x per day (just in case). I cleaned and re-wrapped his finger last night and it looked good. He is feeling fine, too.

Jake woke up with diarrhea this morning, so it has already started out to be a long day. Many of the babies across the hall are sick with fevers so we will not be visiting them today. We spoke to the Chinese contractor last night and the site is not ready to be painted today, so we will likely stick around the apartment and walk to the grocery store a little later. I will also go upstairs and bring one of the babies down - they are short nannies this weekend. Unfortunately, Jake will not allow me to be out of his sight. He will let me hold the babies, but he wants to be held at the same time. I had to run out to a bakery across the street last night and he cried the entire 10 minutes I was gone.

Yesterday, Wenli and a translator (one of her colleagues from work) spent the ENTIRE day with us - we went to see the Terra Cotta Soldiers and then we went to the City Wall. We did a lot of walking and saw a lot of interesting sights. The Chinese are the most gracious hosts I have ever met.

Wenli also bought our train tickets - we are going to leave Xi’an Tuesday night and fly back to Chicago on Wednesday night. There are currently 41 seats available on that flight and we have listed as standby passengers. We have mixed feelings about coming home early - Ryan wants to stay. Glenn and I do not. Unfortunately, we arrived too early to really be effective (paint, tile, assemble cabinets) at the worksite. They are at least 1 month behind schedule.

We did go back to Home Depot again on Friday and found out that we can not purchase 5 gallon buckets of oil based paint. On top of that, the paint we chose (and bought latex paint) is not available in an oil base. It took no less than two hours to determine that….At the work site we swept and removed debris from eight rooms and removed the rest of the old cabinetry. More later.

Babies

Babies and Nannies

Jake