Tuesday, December 15, 2009
A DAY WITH NO AGENDA

After we put the girls in bed last night Brandy and I realized that we didn’t have to be anywhere at a specific time this morning. It was nice to have a relaxed morning. Plus this morning went more smoothly than any other morning since we added to our family. The girls were extremely well behaved. They all had better attitudes. They also seemed to be happy.

We were lucky to get a table right next to the waterfall at the breakfast buffet. We had put the girls in matching purple dresses and Brandy has a matching skirt. They were a sight to seeing parading to breakfast.

We could count the necessary disciplinary actions for all three girls combined on one hand today. For us, at this juncture, this is a minor miracle. It was nice to have the girls actually responding when we said no to something. What a relief!

We met another family that is here from the Kettle/Colville area today at breakfast. It is Dave and Bill Hewes’ sister Katie and her husband Tom. They are here adopting their second daughter. Their daughter had a minor reaction to the TB test and they needed some cortisone cream for the itching. We let them have our tube, we haven’t needed it much. They seem like very nice people and it seems amazing to be half way around the world with another family from our area. Indeed it IS a small world.

We didn’t have any commitments until dinner so we had a nice relaxing day. Brandy took each of the girls out again one at a time to do a little more shopping. I found myself in the room with two girls at a time watching Monday Night Football live late in the afternoon on Tuesday. I guess that’s Tuesday Morning Football. Of course all the commentary was in Chinese. The only thing I could recognize was the player’s names. The girls seemed to be content to watch football with me and play with Barbie dolls. For me, this constitutes a perfect Tuesday morning.

Brandy brought back deli food for lunch. The great news about that is that it is good and cheap. It looks like our money will hold out but we don’t have a bunch extra. It’s nice to have simple food that fills us up and doesn’t cost much. After lunch Brandy headed back out with Amalie, who was the last of the three girls to go with her this morning, for some more shopping. I took Opal and Sophie down to the Swan Room for some play time. We had a blast and the girls got to blow off some steam.

The hotel has an amazing collection of Chinese furniture for sale here. I think I may try to make some reproductions back home at the cabinet shop in Kettle Falls. They use black lacquer and jade to decorate the cabinet and casework. The painting and artwork will be the hardest part for me but I’m eager to give it a try. I took several photos to help me recreate some of the details. The tops have unique scroll work and the sides are almost always splayed out at the bottom in all for directions. I’m not sure why this is so popular here but it makes the casework infinitely more complicated. The scrollwork and splaying is what gives the cases their unique Oriental look.

On the way back up to the room we passed one of the shops here in the hotel that is under construction. I could hear the unmistakable whir of routers and table saws. I stopped to peer in between the draped off glass fronts. When I walked off I realized that the girls were behind me. They were looking in at the woodworkers too. I stood there for a minute wondering how they’d react when they saw ME working in the cabinet shop. Good things to come I think.

When Brandy got back with Amalie we chilled out in the room for a little while with the kids. We had about an hour and a half before we needed to start getting the girls ready for their Red Couch Photos. Brandy dressed the girls up in traditional Chinese clothing and did a number on their hair. We went down to the lobby and met the other families for the traditional picture on one of the hotel’s red couches. It was difficult to get the kids to sit still for the pictures. It was also difficult for us to get a picture of all three of our girls with a genuine smile at the same time. When we were finished we met our guide and headed to a noodle house for dinner.

Brandy and I had invited Tom and Katie to go with our group so we had a full tour bus. When we got to the restaurant we needed two tables. We let Kelly do the ordering and we ate like kings. I watched as one of the cooks spun out a noodle. I say “A noodle” because he was throwing a noodle into the water to cook that must have been 100 feet long. He was literally throwing it from one pot to another. If you look closely at the photo you can see the noodle in the air. We had a heck of a time trying to get the noodle into our soup bowls. After we struggled for about 10 minutes, looking like idiots with our chopsticks, a man came around with a pair of scissors. Oh…………….. NOW you tell us! Anyway, it was easier for a minute until he left with the scissors and we were free to act like idiots again, lifting the noodle out of the bowl 3 or 4 feet above it and then trying to put in down into one of our bowls. Maybe they just wanted to watch us and laugh.

There was a man in the restaurant making clay figurines that were catalyzed somehow so that the clay hardened almost instantly when he was finished. He was busy making Santas. I took some pictures of him at work. He was selling them for 10 Yuan each (less than 2 dollars). We got animals for each of the girls representing their birth years. We made sure to get ones attached to a sharp stick so that I could have the pleasure of worrying about one of my girls stabbing her eye out on the way home in the bus. Oh the joys of parenting!

We made it home with our eyeballs intact and put the girls through the usual nite (:) a Taco Bell spelling for night) time routine. (Next time you go to a Taco Bell check out the signs there. I’m convinced that this is why youth today can’t spell………………. Nite Drive Thru………etc……………..I’ll leave that rant for a future time! :o)). The girls are sound asleep now and Brandy and I get a few hours of peace and quiet. Or maybe it’s Piece and Co-why-it! LOL…………. Everything is underlined in red!

Hoping the spell checker can save us from ourselves,

Brandy, Ted, Amalie, Opal and Sophie

P.S. I tried to get permission to delete the last part, but Ted said nope. Forgive us for the insanity…grin! Three girls are affecting our mental capacities.