threewillcomehome.com

Hello all, sorry for the stupidly long delay between posts but this thing called school is kicking my tuckus. I just finished up a major presentation so I have a few hours to decompress before I wrap up these two courses this week.

So much has been happening with Li Li. I don’t know where to start. She started at with her day care provider Lei 3 weeks ago and Li Li has done fabulous. We were very worried that when she started going to day care she’d get very stressed out once she started hearing Mandarin again. If anything she’s happier than ever – who knew that was possible.

Lei is amazing with her – and Lei’s children are 1 and 3 and they give Li Li so much attention – in addition Lei’s mother-in-law lives with her and she speaks no english but obviously gives Li Li so much love. We are very thankful we found such a wonderful family to take care of Li Li, it makes dropping her off completely worry free. Something I know my mom never experienced when she dropped me off at daycare (probably because I created all the problems….)

Before school started getting super intense again we snuck away to NYC for the annual photography show we attend.

We stayed in midtown because it was close to the show. It was our first trip with Li Li (aside from the obvious time in China) and she is amazing. She couldn’t have been happier being rolled around the city – she just sat and took it all in.

Our friend and artist Sara Lee was able to visit with us and we ate a very good meal together.

Thank you Sara Lee – you should check out her web site http://www.saraleemurals.com/ because her murals and other paintings are just plain awesome.

With some trepidation we went to the Photo show expecting dirty looks from the exhibitors but Li Li charmed them all. We had people wanting to hold her, people scolding us for letting her sit on the carpet (people she was in China – that carpet is just fine), and one incredibly nice gentlemen who gave us a children’s book he had published 30 years ago which included a tipped in signed photo he’d taken of Diane Arbus with her TLR camera in hand. Very cool and something we’ll treasure for a very long time. We saw lots of photography most of it insanely priced – if we had a few spare hundred thousand dollars we could have bought only a few pictures that we liked. But it was fun seeing the art work and Li Li spent a total of about 8 hours at the show over 2 days. Pretty impressive for a 13-month-old.

In China the hotels had cribs for us but now we were stateside and business hotels get a little crabby when asked for cribs so we brought our porta sleeper for Li Li. She loved it. The first night she did laps around the inside of it for about 2 hours and only stopped when we tried covering it with a coat so she could fall asleep.

After 3 nights in the city (thank you hilton points) we decided it was time to head home. Of course we chose the day with the 2nd highest total rainfall in NYC history. They had 8 inches of rain in 24 hours. It was wet. Really wet. Truly a Biblical deluge. Shortly after we left no trains were allowed to leave the city for several hours because of water on the tracks. Anyway we all took a short nap on the train.

I’ll try to post again next Sunday since I’ve been remiss in my postings.