I’m finally better from the hideous pneumonia.  I’m still waiting to go back in for some lung tests to see if I do have asthma.  Thanks for the feedback from those of you who have been disagnosed as adults- that’s really interesting to hear about.

We came back tonight from a refreshing 4-day to the beach with everyone in our company.  It was such a nice break from TJ with cleaner air and lots of time in the water.

A few highlights:

We dragged the kids out of bed @ 5:30 this morning to walk on the beach and watch the sunrise. Kate was NOT happy about this.  But seriously it was worth it!

I have a bit of an obsession with silhouettes at sunrise/sunset, so bear with me!

Our family:

Keith & I:

Keith jumping

The girls were in love with the sand & the water…

We generally found Kate in the sand….

And Eliza in the water… she’s fearless and we kept having to tell her to come closer to the shoreline.

I loved the purple/pink before the sun came out… (Eliza & Keith)

We had a very restful few days and especially loved breathing fresh sea air and hanging out with friends all day.

Each time we watched then sunrise, I couldn’t help but think of this song by Hillsong:

Scipmylo (that’s Olympics backwards) is an annual event at TIS for grades 1-8.   They always put families together, so Keith & Eliza were on the same team this year.  They were on the white team.

Eliza came home from school saying she needed to wear a white shirt. We don’t really “do” white here in China.  You might notice my kids look grubby in a lot of pics of them outside- that’s cause it is a little (okay, a lot!) dirty outside most places here.  Thankfully, Eliza scrounged up a shirt to wear.  This shirt is an adult women’s size shirt here (and not even size small!).  We were at the market last spring and she was hot so I bought it for her.  Do you get what I’m saying here?  My 6 year old daughter can wear an adult shirt??  Seriously?  She’s not fat, seriously, so what is up with that?

A friend of ours took some pics for me since I was (and am) still recovering from pneumonia.   Side Note: After I got my hair straightened last time, Eliza wanted hers done because she wants “straight, shiny, soft, nontangly hair like mommy has”.   I have to admit, after having hers done, it does make mornings a LOT easier now that we don’t have to fight the tangle battle!  I wouldn’t do it in the US because it is too expensive, but here it was well worth it!

Kate had no school today because the Early Childhood Center had the day off.   She and I snuggled up and watched some Korean drama & ordered in Korean food.   She is quite the tv-lovin’ little girl.  Any language, any show, and she will plug herself in and watch for hours on end.

She requests photos often now… so here are a few of this afternoon.  She doesn’t like the first one cause “why did you make it all grey and white?”  Nice.

Have a great day!  Next week is a short week for me (2 days and then the high school and middle school go to fall camp, which I am not attending).  The kids & Keith still have school though, so I will have 3 blissfully quiet days!  And then we head to the beach with everyone on our team for a little seaside retreat.  We’ll be at the same beach we went to 2 years ago (QinHuangDao).  It will be a bit chilly, but soooo nice to get away and breathe some fresh(er) air!

Last year, I made a checklist for the girls’ morning routine and hung it on the wall.  Eliza has wanted one for this year but it hasn’t been high on my priority list.

Today, when I finally crawled off the couch and went to the kitchen, I found this taped to the wall.  I’d been in a codeine-induced fog when the girls left for school.  Eliza knew I felt bad so she told me she would be “Little Mommy” and she did Kate’s hair and they walked to the bus together.  I hope they had on matching clothes, or at least daytime clothes and not pajamas! I normally am a bit more together in the morning, but seriously, standing up and walking to the kitchen to make some tea takes about all the energy I can muster.  That is pathetic- especially considering just 8 mornings ago, I ran 8K at the gym!

Oh right, where was I?  Eliza’s poster.  I love that she taped it up with the arrowed sticky piece from the beginning of a new roll!   And not too bad of a spelling job for a 6 year old!  Love the “tena shoes”.

One good thing about being sick- I am catching up on all of my Korean shows!   That’s a bit of a guilty pleasure for me.  Okay, bit is an understatement!  If I have an extra 10 minutes here or there, you can guarantee you’ll find me watching Korean dramas!  I watch on viikii.net and they’re uploaded in 10 minute segments, so I watch in bits and pieces and I call it my (ahem) “listening practice”.

And yup, that was about all of my energy for this hour to take that pic and type this.  11 a.m. = Time for another nap.

I finally dragged myself to the doctor after 9 days or so of coughing.  It was just nagging at first, but the past few days it has been relentless and has kept me up all night.

Due to swine flu, we have to walk around to the back of the hotel that houses our medical clinic because they don’t want sickies intermingling with the healthies at the normal hotel entrance.

I was distracted by coughing up a lung and paying the taxi driver and directing him to the back of the hotel… and somehow I guess my wallet fell out of my purse.  This is the only thing I can figure out, because it was the kind of taxi with bars separating you from the driver, so there’s no way he could have reached back and stolen it.

Anyway, I got to the doctor, put on my sporty white surgical mask (complimentary), and saw the doc.  She poked and prodded and drew blood and took a few steps further away from me each time I coughed.

“Do you have asthma?” she asked.  Nope.  “Are you sure?” Yep.  Never had asthma.  “No one has ever told you anything about asthma or breathing problems?”  Nope. “Wow, you sound terrible.  I really think you have underlying asthma!”  Um, ok.  Well, I have no problems breathing when I work out when I’m not sick.  Thanks though.  I’ll, uh, check into that.  “And you don’t smoke?”  Nope.  “You never smoke?” Nope.  That would be never.

She loaded me up with an albuterol inhaler, zithromax, codeine cough syrup, mucosolvan, and respbid and says I have pneumonia and she wants to test my blood for a bunch of junk.

I’m supposed to stay in bed until Sunday.  I’m ok with that.

So I’m going to catch up on some tv shows in bed and sleep a LOT.

Thankfully, so far, Keith and the girls are fine.

Oh, and yeah, the missing wallet.  I don’t even want to go there.  I’m just praying the nice taxi driver will feel compelled to return it.   The taxis here are run by several companies but all look the same- so there’s no way for me to know what company the driver was employed by or how to even begin to get that info.  But he knows where he picked me up and I can pray he feels the desire to return it.

So Kate has struggled a bit with the start of school this year.  She’s just not into the whole schoolwork thing.  Eliza would happily sleep at school and thinks worksheets are fun.  She’s just a school-lover.  Kate… meh, not so much.

She’s had increasingly vocal protests about not wanting to go to school.  I’ve talked to her a lot about it and she’s shared her opinions.  Recess is good.  Lunch is good.  Snack is good.

PE is bad, very bad, because you have to move and sometimes you get sweaty and it is hot outside.

Reading is not fun because you have to work hard and she gets frustrated if she doesn’t know the word on the first try.  Math isn’t fun because you have to work hard and she hates worksheets.

Are you seeing a trend here?  This summer I had kids’ activity books and I would pull out pages for each flight as their “Homework” on the airplane to keep them busy.  Eliza would devour them and try her best to finish each and every page.  Kate looked at me with pleading eyes and said “Can I just take a nap?  I promise I’ll be good and quiet!”

She loves watching tv or movies and playing with her toys.  She’s a great helper in the kitchen.

And it isn’t that she isn’t smart- she is- she’s just not into the whole school thing.  She has a great teacher- the same Australian teacher Eliza had.  Wait, okay, here’s a short story about that.  There are 2 kindergarten teachers this year, Miss Hull & Mrs Boyer.  Prior to the school year starting, we were out to lunch with Miss Hull.  Because Miss Hull is a very vivacious, friendly, hilarious person and Eliza had her for a teacher and Kate had never met Mrs Boyer, I assumed I was asking an innocent question when I said “Kate, who do you want to be your teacher this year?”  She looked right at Miss Hull and said “NOT Miss Hull!”  Um.  Right.  How do you recover from THAT?   I was more than a tinch mortified!  She later explained that she wanted to meet new people, so she wanted the new teacher.

Anyway, so she has Miss Hull, and she’s actually enjoying Miss Hull a lot.  She has nothing bad to say about her as a teacher- and really- when your teacher dresses up like animals and used to be a clown and is generally the goofiest/funnest person I’ve ever met- there’s nothing to complain about!

After hearing Kate out the last few weeks, I decided that she needed a bit of a pep talk this weekend.  I mean, I can hear her feelings and give her a voice and yadayada but at some point, girlfriend needs to just suck it up and accept that school is what it is and she has to do hard work sometimes in life.  Right?

So I was talking with her this morning.  We talked about all different school-related things and then I told her that when she wakes up she needs to think in her head “I’m excited about learning today!  I want to learn new things so I can tell mommy about it when I come home!”  We’re nearing the end of our pep talk and I asked “So, Kate, Monday, are you going to tell Miss Hull how excited you are to learn?”  She nodded and said “Yep, and I’m going to tell her that 5 + 5 = 6″, holding out her hands to display all “6″ of her fingers on both hands.

And that is a perfect example of why she still has some education ahead of her!

Just continuing this due to questions and comments.

And frankly, life lately has been a bit sea of school/sleep/gym/repeat and that’s kind of boring to talk about- yawn, yawn.  Oh yeah, and I turned 30 and had an 80’s theme karaoke party.  That was fun.

We’ve only been doing lunch Bento style since last spring, but it really has changed our method of lunch prep and we all enjoy it.  The girls love to “help” or watch and they love the surprise of finding out what is in their box the next morning if they’re not up when I make lunches.   And frankly, I hate boring, monotonous jobs so I enjoy that I can be a little crafty and at least cut carrot flowers or something to make the job less painful!

I think it translates to a western household quite easily because of the availability of things in the west.  Baby carrots & jarred applesauce & bags of pre-cut broccoli!  Bestill my heart!  I dream of the simplicity of those things!  But regardless of where you are in the world, this type of stuff works.

This is a one-day sample of Geswein family lunches…

That’s mine- noodles with roasted onions, garlic, and mushrooms (*see bottom for hot tip!) on top with some spicy Korean sauce on top (not sure what it is, haha, but I like it!).  The top tier is a sesame spinach salad, tomatoes, and more of the roasted veggies cause I like a lot of them.  Oops, no protein, oh well, haha.

This is Eliza’s.  Noodles with cucumber and carrot flowers, ranch dressing in cup on side for her “sauce”.  Note: All the leftover bits of cucumber and carrot are cut up and put in Keith and I’s noodles.  Top stack, dried fruit bar with dog-shaped cheese on top, heart-shaped hard-boiled egg, and applesauce.  She always wants dessert, so the sprinkles are her reminder that applesauce IS the dessert.

This is Keith’s.  I don’t have a proper container for him yet- he needs a larger-portion-size box and I’m still looking locally.   He has noodles with some roasted veggies (no mushrooms since he won’t eat them) with a hard-boiled egg … carrots, tomatoes, and a big thing of ranch dressing for his noodles and carrots.  I almost didn’t include this pic since it looks kinda unattractive, haha.  Sorry Keith!

Kate’s lunch.  This is a smaller box, because she has a smaller appetite than Eliza does, usually.  She has the same noodles/carrots/cukes/ranch combo with applesauce, tomatoes, and a cheese penguin on top.  I cut up all the leftover cheese from the animals and tucked it under the side of her noodles, so she gets SOME protein.  She calls herself a noodlevore.  It is true.

Her box straps together and she takes the fork/spoon/chopstick set that ayi gave her for her birthday.

Note: that isn’t hello kitty on the chopsticks- it is “Charmmy Kitty”

*Hot tip on roasting veggies.  This might seem obvious, but it wasn’t to me!  Chop up a bunch of veggies and throw them in your rice cooker with about 1/4 cup of water.  Turn on.  The end!  So easy!  I throw some eggs in the little “steamer” insert and hard boil them at the same time.  For us here, we have to WASH our eggs very carefully first to remove any feathers and/or dried on bits of grossness.  In other countries that may be less important!  But it is super simple and doesn’t heat the house up!

Unrelated but awesome- a family was united with their new daughter in Tianjin this week and I love everything about this story!  Please check >their blog< out to read about it!