Monday, August 31, 2009

First Day of Preschool

It finally came...the first day of school! We were so excited to finally be able to put on our uniforms and pack all of our new school gear into our backpacks.
We are just like all the other big kids in our neighborhood now...except we don't get to ride the bus. Mommy and the driver take us to school with some of our friends.

Caden liked music class and the spaghetti for lunch. I liked the puzzles and apples and rice. We didn't have time to brush our teeth and it rained so we didn't get to go on the playground - maybe tomorrow. We liked our teacher Robin, but we didn't like the Chinese sticky rice cakes for snack. We both cried a little bit, but the teacher gave us ooh ahhs to make us feel better.
We were very tired when we got home and Mama said we were whiney the rest of the day. I will go to school tomorrow, but Mama needs to stay with me.

Day two of school... no pictures, too many tears.

Until next time...here's to hoping the" first day enthusiasm" comes back!

Monday, August 17, 2009

A Bit of Our Time at the Home of the Panda

This past June, Brandon and I took some time to visit Chengdu, China. Chengdu is the home of the panda. So I looked into the opportunity and happened upon..."feed the pandas". So we visited the National Panda Breeding Center high, high in the surrounding mountains... but before we could feed them we first had to put on these goofy coveralls.
On this day it was about 95 degrees with about 85% humidity. Needless to say they were not comfortable (nor stylish) but we did get to feed the pandas as you can see below.
The pandas native diet is one of bamboo. The bamboo, they told us, is only found high in the mountain tops in the surrounding area. We fed them panda "cookies" which is their main diet at this facility. The cookies are made from a combination of rice, sugar, wheat, and ground up bamboo. After we fed the pandas (about 6 of them), we then had to carry some bamboo into their roaming area.
The feeding experience was rather surreal. Though one must keep in mind - these are bears - they are very gentle animals. They would grab their cookie and sit on their rears with their hind feet out in front of them. These bears were in captivity obviously but I did not get the impression that they were aggressive. Having this said, we didn't take our chances and we were very cautious.
Until next time...a hard days work deserves a bowl of noodles (and a Coke).

Saturday, August 15, 2009

We are back...

Sorry for the long time since we last wrote. It has been more than 2 months since our last post. The reason for this is delay is two fold. 1. We were in the US over the summer for only one month and this was an action packed month as Sabrina typically spends two months in the US. This didn't afford us any real time to sit down and pound out a blog. 2. We then left for China at the end of July and arrived August 1st. As noted in previous blogs our blog is still not accessible in China. This is rather frustrating, but it is what it is. We did find a secret way to get on so I think our blog posts should increase. I am also heading to Taiwan this next week so I'll take some time and provide an update. Taiwan does not have a block on any websites including Facebook or Blogger...

Until next time....