Day 15 - A Quiet Last Day in Guangzhou

We spent our final day in Guangzhou enjoying a quiet day around the hotel. We fed the koi in the Garden Hotel's garden while Steve and I planned the creation of our own backyard koi pond (because we totally need another project!). Then we had naps, played a few games of chess, headed to the grocery store to stock up for Hong Kong (or "honk honk" as Sasha likes to call it), and gorged on the Discovery Channel (not having TV at home makes us extremely susceptible to hotel TV).

Part of the reason for our quiet day is that I seem to have developed a little umbilical hernia. At least that's my diagnosis because it looks like the hernias that Ben and Sasha used to have. I spent the morning worrying that my intestines were poking out of my abdominal wall, but after some delightfully disconcerting internet research and the counsel of a good friend (thank you!) I've decided that I am not in any immediate danger of going septic and I can probably wait until I get home for medical intervention. I found some "make you look skinny" underwear at the grocery store that are helping to keep everything together and those are helping a ton with the pain. For now, I'm trying not to do any heavy lifting (so easy with 2 girls under 4) and we'll just see how it all goes. Needless to say, this is a total drag, but we press on.

In the afternoon we headed to the park by our hotel and rented a paddleboat! Sam steered, much to our collective concern, but we managed to successfully navigate under 4 bridges without a single person falling overboard. Ben was a magnificent paddler and singlehandedly (double-footedly?) propelled all 6 of us for half of our trip - we've finally found a way to work off that kid's energy!

We also enjoyed several delightful "blood sacrifice" pavilions in the park. We *think* they are memorials to fallen heroes, not actual sites of blood sacrifices, but to be honest we're not too sure. Either way, they may want to work on the translation...

Oh, and today we got WanYing's Chinese passport, complete with U.S. visa - hooray! We're starting to collect quite the rainbow of passports between WanYing's red passport and Sasha's turquoise one.

WanYing continues to do well and every day we see new facets of her personality and our fledgeling relationship shining through. She still insists on interjecting herself if she sees Steve or me holding Sasha, but Sasha is dealing with WanYing's jealousy with such compassion and we all know that eventually WanYing will realize that there's more than enough love in our family to go around. Until then, we'll continue to make sure she is completely secure that there's more than enough love for her.

WanYing has been mimicking our words more and more and definitely understands a lot of what we're saying (especially the important words like kiss and cracker and tickle). She can clearly say Mama, Baba (that's Chinese for Daddy), Sam, Ben, Sasha, wawa (doll in Chinese), and ball, so she has a fully-functional two-year-old vocabulary already in my book. I think we got so used to the delays that came with Sasha's cleft palate that we forgot that your average two-year-old actually has a lot to say! She hasn't latched onto signs yet and she may just skip signs and go straight to spoken language. We'll continue on with both and see what works best for her.

Tomorrow (Friday) morning we leave mainland China for a few days in Hong Kong and then we head home. Our next post will be from Disneyland Hong Kong :)

Today's prayer request:
Please join us in (furtive) prayer that my little hernia stays little and doesn't require any medical intervention while we're overseas. Pray that I can avoid lifting up the girls without causing stress to them or to Steve.