Wonderful Weekends - Sunny Days

It's hard to believe that it's almost the end of October here! The air and skies have been clear in Pudong, the temps have been warm during the day and cool at night, workers are still mowing lawns and I'm still cutting roses off the rosebush! Maddie loves to be outside right now.... she's such a homebody these days too. Anytime we suggest going someplace in town, she' simple says, "no thanks!"

Feeding the fish in Jinqiao is a sure fire way to get the peanut out of the house though. The fish are now huge since it's the end of summer feedings by children begging to feed them just a little bit more!

Heading to Decathalon with the hope of buying a new ball or golf club is a sure fire way to get her out of the house as well. Ever since Andy bought her a golf club over the summer, she's convinced that she's the next Anika. They practice putting it the garage in the evenings... I wish I could say it was a cute father/daughter bonding moment in the traditional sense, but it's usually filled with screams of "I CAN DO IT BY MYSELF!" Maybe she'll be interested in learning later - for now, it's all for fun!

In the end, she's a home body though. She wants to come home to play with her things - to play with her friends. The fact that we live across the street from the playground gives her a birds eye view of who is there and who is not. This time it was Cooper. So, we came home and they played on the tire swing for what seemed like hours...

Shoot - it felt like I just of glass of lemonade for the this lazy afternoon in Shanghai Summer!!!

Warm Afternoons After School

This week at school was China Alive, which means that all middle school students go to various places around China for a week long field trip. The 8th grade trip is quite grand with kayaking, rock climbing, caving, mountain biking, traversing through the air 100ft up along a rope. Basically, it's everything a pregnant woman should NOT be doing so I was lucky/unlucky enough to stay home and work on the middle school schedule for next year. What this means though is that I don't have kids staying after school everyday so I'm able to come home at a good time that leaves lots of play time with Maddie.

Today we sent daddy off to the driving range and just played across the street at the playground. There is a trampoline over there that Maddie simply loves. She jumps 6 inches off the ground but the look on her face makes it seem like she is jumping 6 feet! We jumped on the trampoline and went down all of the slides before making a couple of hopscotch patterns with chalk.

This was Maddie's first experience with hopscotch! It was fun to write the numbers down and have her tell me what comes next. How did that happen? She kind of had a hard tie with the hopping on one foot thing so we practiced jumping with our feet together onto one number and then our feet apart for two numbers. What a blast it was! we hopped and laughed before coming in to enjoy an apple juice ice pop. The sky was so blue and wind was just slight - it was a perfect day after school! Even Lester sat with us the entire time - I actually think he was considering climbing up the slide. Hope to have more of these this week as we wind down the school year!