Yellowstone/Grand Tetons

Besides balancing on the logs near Old Faithful, I think our children most enjoyed throwing rocks into the lakes during our visit to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons this summer.  Ella's trying to dig out the biggest ones so she can make a bigger splash.

Jared is looking for the smooth flat ones that are more likely to skip.  We really had a great time, and we're so glad we could share it with Susan's parents.

Some Places We Go

Our bigger grocery store, and the ‘hole in the wall/ground.’

A place to arrange maid services (Ayi).  I’m so glad we can have a clean house after a day at the office!

A Korean BBQ and the entrance to the Raindrops Café (Western Food!).

Fostering Talent

I'm so excited to have a great illustrator tutoring Jared for a few days this summer in art!

Brent Webster
He's well-known for his "Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites" book-series illustrations.

Dirt

I ate dirt.
Apparently those peanuts I bought were not specially flavored on the outside for my sucking pleasure.  It was just dirt.  Too bad it's all in Chinese, so I didn't know.  Crazy that this food-buying-eating-not-understanding path hasn't led me here before now.  Guess I'm just lucky!

Happy Mom Day!

Great day to remember some fun times lately!  My hubby got me the perfect present: a new e-book.  My kids got me the perfect presents: pictures and things they wrote about loving me.  I got delicious crepes for dinner, and didn't have to stick to our diet :)  Hope you all have a Happy Mother's Day, too!

The receipts bonfire was a fun addition to one of our days off last month.

A fun branch Fiesta game.

I lost my spoon and went a little crazy.  Sadly that lost me the delicious Almond Joy prize.... stinky rules!

Ella gets homework help from a kind coworker of ours.  We're fairly useless as Chinese language coaches.

This is a sweet pic Ella drew after meeting her new best friend, Elena.  The two girls are pictured next to the two mommies.

So it's the end of April, and quite cold, but my little fish are not discouraged!

The next day, even the lifeguard thought it was too cold to come.

So our kids had a fun time running around and pretending to lifeguard eachother.

ROFL Vocab

I assigned a vocabulary exercise to my 8th grade Literature class.  Here’s what two of my students came up with:

One day, there’s a man called big John who fanciful very well.  It’s sensation was very bad.  Suddenly a colossal woodsman with a hearty enormous mammoth said cordially, “I am barren, so I need your help.”  Big John use his power to help him.  They lived together, and became good friend.

I really love grading sometimes.

Qing Ming (Tomb Sweeping) Festival

We visited our friend’s family for our vacation this long weekend.  After driving to Changning, Hunan (620 km away), which took a long time since we had to fight the other billion people travelling, we paid respects to the relatives that had passed on.  At first it seemed like a sweet flower planting, weed-pulling time.  Then they turned on the miniature explosions, and Jared was worried that the skeletons were going to be unearthed.

That evening, as some of the relatives went to visit other relatives, we stayed to play on the roof of Amy’s parent’s very large (9-bedroom?) home.  There was plenty of dirt and wooden planks and such to keep an 8-year old boy quite happy.  The only thing threatening to sour the mood was the setting sun.  Here, Jared started with an innocent scale, and then began to catapult small chairs at the unsuspecting Brickuns (creatures that apparently live in the lower part of the brick wall behind him).

The next day, after waking up early, we went to Hengshen Mountain, where many similar minded folk ventured to pray to Buddha and other statues built for specific family names and occupations.  Before we boarded the bus to go part-way up the monstrous mountain, Jared enjoyed climbing everything in sight.

Amy and I are ringing the bell to get Buddha’s attention.

Here’s the scary bus that almost flung us off the mountainside.

Jared got a 1 yuan whistle, and tried to train me on it (here’s what I’ll whistle if I need you, this one means come, this one means go away, this one means yes, this one means no…)

This is pretty much everybody that came in the two cars.  Karl and Ella couldn’t join us because Ella decided to catch a cold a few days before the (hastily) [un]scheduled trip.

I’m trying to keep up with my energetic and adventurous kid, here.  This was really steep, and if I didn’t have that sense of love and obligation, I probably wouldn’t have tried to follow.  He was really happy to get to the top, and not even need a path.

Jared and his friend (Amy’s neice) YaoHui got to be royal part-way up and down the mountain.  He loved helping his “subjects” get exercise.  The two of them also enjoyed getting their pants massively dirty on the gutter-slides next to the temple steps.

Such a beautiful hike.

Some of us got tired (this is BenBen, Amy’s cousin’s kid), so we went back down by bus again, instead of hiking for 3 more hours.  Before crashing at another hotel, we made a side-trip to drop off Amy’s cousin’s dad to spend a few days with her mom (house in ZhuZhou).

This toilet pic is worth a few more words than I care to put down.

Dinner was cooked for us over a dry-leaf-fed fire.  There’s her dad feeding the fire.  The pot is on the other side with her mom cooking the food.

The food was mostly fine.  Jared was such a good sport about eating whatever I put into his bowl after various people commented on how he should try this or that.  I tried to put it into my bowl usually, but sometimes they were more persistent about having him try it, too.

We passed a lot of farming land on the way home.  I loved getting so many gorgeous pictures portraying the life here.  It was also fun to see others enjoying their festival in the same surprising firecracker-on-the-graves manner.  Maybe you can see a little smoke in the distance.  I also observed a very large fire in the middle of a forested area.  Besides being sad to miss that photo, I hope everything was under control.