One Month of School Completed; It's time for a Vacation!

No really, this week is vacation.  All of China will be off celebrating a national  "Golden Week" and we'll be getting the heck out of dodge.  It's been a busy first month of school, I do think a break sounds good.  

ChinaBean headed back to her little preschool at the beginning of September.  Could she be any cuter?!  She attends a Chinese preschool three mornings a week.  If you ask her, she eats rice and soup every day for lunch (which is probably true).

ChinaBean was walking home from school pretending to talk on her wooden iPhone.  She's a woman with a mission.

EBean was very excited to be recognized as her class's Golden Child.  She was honored during the weekly school assembly for her perseverance while trying to write sentences.  We celebrated with the traditional visit to Cold Stone.

EBean has also been taking swimming as part of her PE classes this term.  She loved it!

Nice form EBean!

Girl Scouts has resumed.  This is the start of my 4th year as a leader!  Now I have a better sense of how women end up leading for 20+ years...they must have several daughters too.  LBean is a second-year Brownie and EBean is finally a Daisy.  The poor girl has watched her sister do activities and make crafts for the last three years and she is super excited to be an official member this year.

Our troop has grown so much that my friend Sarah will be leading the Brownies and Juniors and I will be taking on the Daisies.  We have around 21 girls in our lovely troop.

Bridging ceremony.  Time to welcome the new Brownies. 

EBean playing a game at our first meting.

 Each class at the girls' school takes a turn to give a class presentation at their school's weekly assembly.  LBean's class performed at one of the first assemblies and I think it's nice to get it out of the way.  Her class performed a skit, sang a song, and showed a video about endangered and extinct animals.

LBean with one of her closest classmates

Taking a selfie

Class 4D at Dulwich

LBean's entire grade took a 3 day, 2 night school trip.  The kids were bused to Taihu, a lake situated about 1.5 hours from Suzhou.  They took a ferry to an island called San Shan where they learned about ancient temples, hiked a Buddha trail, picked oranges, made s'mores, watched a movie, took a night walk, and lots of other interesting sights.

Packed and ready to go!

Selfie has been mastered.

I was teasing LBean about this picture.  I asked her if she
realized that this was someone's underwear.  She said
that one of her teachers made a joke about the undies being
ancient artifacts!

Let's see, I know I'm leaving out something...homework, after-school activities (knitting & ballet for LBean), lunch-time club (ballet for EBean), violin practice, birthday parties, orthodontist appointments, colds, strep throat for me, and on and on and on.

Maybe we really do need a vacation...

Emergency Contact Information Form in English & Mandarin Chinese

Jamie's travel schedule, activities at my girls' schools, volunteer commitments, my birthday and a Girl Scout meeting converged at the same time.  Blogging has taken a backseat for the moment.  

My Brownie Girl Scouts are earning their First Aid badge this year.  One of our goals was to put together an emergency contact sheet that had both English and Mandarin.  One of the challenges expats face is what to do in an emergency, how to communicate that in another language, and how to equip people in our home to handle an emergency even if we don't speak the same language.

LBean learning more about first aid
during a recent Girl Scout meeting.

I'd like to share our emergency contact sheet that includes both English and Chinese.  We plan to post ours on our refrigerator and hope we never need to use it!  I had a native Mandarin speaker translate it for me, but I can't tell you if I copied and pasted it correctly.  I apologize for any errors that you might find!  

If the link doesn't work properly and you'd like a copy of the document, please let me know and I will email it to you.  I'd really like to make this available to anyone that is interested.  It is a docx format, so it should be possible to edit it.

Click here: Emergency Contact Sheet in English & Mandarin Chinese

The document doesn't appear to open correctly in Google preview, but I think it will download properly.

Birthday Recap

A little over a month ago we celebrated LBean's 6th birthday.  I read a quote once that I think sums up the experience a parent has with young children, "The days go by so slowly, but the years go by quickly."  I shouldn't have a six-year-old, she was just born, right?!

It seems that we gravitate towards Disney show themes.  Last year LBean celebrated with a Jake and the Neverland Pirates party and this year we had just discovered a new show Doc McStuffins.  Through the magic of the internet and Apple TV we have been downloading Doc McStuffins episodes and enjoying some new TV at our house.  LBean agreed that this would be a pretty neat birthday party, especially if we transformed our apartment into a doctor's office and let her friends bring dolls to play with.

Her entire Girl Scout troop and some siblings were able to come and enjoy a day of playing, watching an episode of Doc McStuffins, and munching on some yummy treats.  Instead of traditional gift bags, I decided that each girl should take home their own "doctor kit".  I assembled kits (with a little help from Papa Joe & and an incoming expat family importing a few things) that had real bandaids, felt bandaids, medicine droppers, ACE bandages, cotton balls and all of the kid medical exam sheets I discovered on the internet.  The medical checklists were a great excuse to run to the local printer and to the neighborhood center to buy a laminator, too!

My girls are still playing doctor with their kits.  I just posted on Facebook a conversation I heard this week during playtime.  "LBean you have to take care of your animals, they are waiting for you." "Yes, this one was in an E-bike (electric bike) accident."  And, "I don't have time to see patients, I need to go to the copy market".  The copy market just happens to be where I go to buy knock-off purses and sunglasses, inexpensive scarves and other Chinese trinkets!

Here are some pictures from LBean's special day:

Checking in at the "front desk"

The "exam room".  Each girl had their own
doctor's badge too.

Time to check the patient's eye sight!

Going over the checklists.

Taking care of the babies.

Mesmerized by the television!

Playing medical BINGO.

LBean's cake was heart-shaped with a
stethoscope on it.  She asked that her friends not sing
Happy Birthday to her (which is on par with her personality).
So, they stood behind her and just said "Happy Birthday"
and posed for a picture.

LBean opened her presents in the "waiting room".

At the Suzhou fabric market I had
a dress-up veterinarian's jacket copied in white
so LBean and EBean could have their own doctor's
jackets to wear to the party.  Mine was a left-over from
my hospital clinical rotation in graduate school!