Week 1 with the cousins!

It's hard to believe they've already been here a whole week! We've been having too much fun to keep up with blogging... ;) It also rained almost all week. But we still managed to stay pretty busy!

Sunday after church, since it was a beautiful day, and even had BLUE SKY(!!), Ryan took Danielle and Alex out to lunch with friends and then to the Bund. They got to eat authentic Muslim Chinese food, enjoy the sites, and went to prayer meeting to finish off the day. I opted to take the girls home with PB&J in the car to get them naps. ;)

 Monday it was raining, but we managed to walk 20 minutes to the supermarket with umbrellas. And we need to buy more while we were there anyway, as we always seem to lose or break ours! I've decided shopping with kids is a breeze when you have teens along! Though we made quite the caravan winding our way through...

After our store excursion, we went out for supper for authentic fried rice and delicious tang bao (soup dumplings). Perfect for a slightly cool day. They haven't fully experienced Shanghai summer weather yet, as all week has been pretty cool with all the rain.

And yes, you can even use chop sticks for watermelon! ;)

Ellie enjoyed her squash and spinach puree :)

With two children now, Ryan takes care of getting Dassah her food (a feat when the dumplings are full of steaming hot soup!) while I feed Ellie. Love being a team with this man!

Since Danielle & Alex are spoiling me, doing almost all of the dishes and making meals 2-3 times per week, I was able to finally make Hadassah a play house her size! I'd been collecting boxes for a while. Didn't have one big box, but a few diaper boxes stacked up did the trick!

Ellie enjoys crawling in and playing peekaboo too! :)

With rainy days, we had to do something active, so we set up pillows for Hadassah to sumersault off the couch. Like anything in toddler hood, it was all the rage for about 5-10 minutes! :D

Ellie is so enjoying having extra playmates. Alex is so good with her, making her animals talk and letting her practice walking with help and fly through the air!

Tuesday was a picture free day. But we filled it with play and work. With extra hands here to help, I'm taking friends who just had a baby a meal every Tuesday for 6 weeks. One of the hard things about being far from many western friends is no meal train when babies arrive! She blessed me when we came back with a new born, so I'm glad to have time to bless her! So Alex and Danielle watched the girls in the late afternoon so I could finish making a favorite: homemade chicken pot pie! We'd planned to have them come here since baby hadn't arrived yet, but got news that morning that they were in the hospital! So all but my friend and the new bitty girl came, and we celebrated the joy of new birth!

Wednesday morning found me walking to the supermarket again with Alex and Hadassah, while Ellie napped at home with Danielle. So nice to be able to go places while baby is sleeping! Alex played with Hadassah at a play place there... You have to pay for it, so it's a rare treat, but on the third day of rain, we make the exception and pay to help her get energy out! I got to shop in peace and buy tons of plastic containers that Alex carried home for me. With extra arms to carry babies and things, I finally got my kitchen organized!!

We then went to a pizza place near Ryan's work for lunch, meeting another friend from church there too. And they got to see real life, as it took me 30 minutes to try to get a taxi. Neither of the ones I called with the app understood what I was saying... pretty frustrating. This is why I hardly

Ever since Hadassah saw her Grandpa's office, she's been saying "I need to see Daddy's work!" Since I had never seen it either and we thought it would be fun to show our visitors, we made it an event. Hadassah was super excited!

Family picture where Ryan spends his days!

We had told Hadassah not to expect to see an airplane, since Daddy doesn't actually build the airplane, he just works on a little chip that goes inside of it. But when she found this one in the display portion at the front of the building, she couldn't contain her excitement: "I found a feiji!! Daddy, I found a feiji!"

Their setup with video and displays were pretty cool!

When talking about going to Daddy's work for weeks, Dassah would often say " I'm going to build a big BIG feiji to fly back to America!" Guess it made sense to her two year old brain... My grandparents are in America. I like to be with them. Daddy builds airplanes at his work, so I'll go there and build us one to go back to America! So that she could actually make one while there, I asked Danielle to come up with something she could put together. I was thinking a simple paper one, but Danielle made a super cool one out of cardboard!

Now Dassah's dolls are enjoying many trips in their airplane. Often Dassah acts out the story of the family flying and then getting out at the doll house and running to greet the grandparent dolls. Oh how she loves grandparents...

Ellie is enjoying all of the extra love and attention and practice walking around! She's pretty happy to have extra arms willing to help her! And on Thursday, after a pretty relaxed day, with friends coming to play in the morning and me organizing my kitchen during nap time (yay!!) the big cousins babysat the little cousins so we could have a date! Oh how easy it is to go on a date with people who are already familiar with your kids and home set up and already right there! We are going to love these weekly dates!

We went to BiJiang Guangchang, a mall that has the few western restaurants in our area. But this time we decided to try a Chinese restaurant and be adventurous.

Pretty snazzy looking! It was a Muslim Chinese place, and Ryan had been there with coworkers before, so he knew some of what to order.

The chopsticks matched my dress! Hadassah had helped me get ready for my date, very seriously telling me what looked good and picking out my hair clip. :)

And the food was delicious! We weren't a fan of the carrot + raisin sweetish fried rice, but the grilled lamb meat and honey fried bananas and honey and yogurt to help cool everything off were incredible! But best of all was the company. ;)

On Friday we went to Nanjing for an overnight trip. But that's going to take an entire blog post of its own!