Monday

Last night you lost your first tooth!!!! We were so excited for you! You kiss on command now.. now that you know what kisses are!

We are enjoying the gardens here! Today after breakfast, I took Anna, Ezra and Eli to feed the koi and we named some of our favorites. Some names the kids chose were Bob, Jeffrey, and Joe. The gardens are huge and have different paths with huge waterfalls and trickling ones.. beautiful flowers, and places to sit and just breathe. I watched the kids play hide and go seek and I laughed and laughed at that. There are so many paths that they couldn't ever tag one another! I plan to take some photos of the kids tomorrow in the gardens while you girls wear their new silk dresses. We came to the room to wash clothes for a while (we don't have to meet our guide until 2pm). In Hohhot, the clothes dried easily because it was in the desert and dry! Here, the clothes are having a harder time, so we've made our dryer out of the closet and a blow dryer now. We washed everything today and hopefully will make it on the clothes we have until we leave. We hung and and played checkers and just had good conversations. We met Elsie at 2 and headed to tour. We went to a Buddhist temple at first. We found out that this guide of ours is Christian. Her mother is Buddhist - that must be hard. Seeing the people worshipping... wanting to know God .. it's just hard to watch. Seeing people being all they have to sacrifice things on the altar. Hard. The kids were amazed and I'm glad they got to see that not everyone is Christian. They needed to see it.

We left there and went to the Chen Clan Academy, also known as the ancestral hall. It was built in 1880 and took 6 years to complete. It started as an arts school for the Chen family. It also was a place to worship the people's ancestors.

It includes, but not limited to, ceramics, painting, carving of wood and jade, calligraphy, and embroidery of silk. When life was more simple and slow-paced, people could spend more time on their gift. The carving of all the wood was exquisite. Everything means something here.. there is a wall carved inside the entry to keep ghosts out. Tall things to step over in doorsteps to keep spirits out that cannot jump, but can walk.

This is is a beautiful place and very nice to see the artwork - which is dear to my heart.

We will never have a family photo where everyone looks again, but I'm glad we have photos of everyone presently in our family. :-)

We bought our teapot here - finally! We've looked all over China for the perfect one and now we found one here that is special because it came from a beautiful place that we've visited on both adoptions.

Here is the man painting with ink with only his hands. Anna and Joy both bought a painting and he gave them a free bookmark that is beautiful as well.
As we were shopping for a tea set and watching kids backpacks from hitting thousands of dollars worth of goods and stopping your grabbing hands, a 16 year old girl stopped me to ask where we were from. We ended up talking about adoption and our family. Beautiful to see seeds planted. She said "I've never thought of the children in the orphanage. What makes you adopt?" I said "JESUS, this was His plan for our family.. there is more than one way to grow a family. Adoption is a picture of us... adopted into God's family.. all because of Jesus . " she walked away with a lot of thinking to do.. I could tell wheels were spinning.

We left there and went on the Pearl River cruise. We ordered pizza (our guide did) ahead of time to be delivered to the boat before we boarded. We ate our pizza and complimentary watermelon and tomatoes. We were with the CCAI crew as well and we got to chat with our old guides from 18 months ago. Jason and Kathy were stellar! I miss them so much , but we keep up on wechat! Thank goodness for that app to keep up with all my China family! We met our friends, Jon and Andrew White that live in Nashville. We have been wanting to meet for a while.. and we finally did.

We made it back to the hotel and while I was getting other kids ready for bed, Evie crawled up into my bed herself. Goodnight, Evie Li! Mama loves you!!!!

Mama