Waiting for Baby...

Wow! It's been a long time - sorry! I suppose I've lot track of time because I've been doing lots of shopping and getting ready for Christmas. It's odd though that I rarely ever think to blog until something exciting happens, food-wise.

With that said, I will share my excitement for the day: I figured out how to making icing sugar, I've tested the Chinese chocolate and it's great for baking, AND I found out where to buy corn syrup! These factors combined mean that I can now MAKE CANDY!!! Yippee!! I've been wanting so badly to try making mint patties, cherry chocolates, gumdrops, caramels, truffles, and so much more...Mmmmm... Too bad I couldn't have made these discoveries before our Christmas party. Which brings me to my next exciting news...

We had a Christmas Party!! It's wasn't a big thing, and we didn't do formal invites (seeing as we weren't sure if we'd be at the hospital) but it was still fantastic! We had all of our decorations up, along with our Christmas tree, I cooked up a storm for two days, and we had a blast!

I'm a little exhausted after getting ready for the party. We put out bowls of candy, nuts, crackers, and all that fun stuff. On top of that, I made two veggie trays (which disappeared in a flash), meatballs, sushi, apple cider, banana bread, cookies, and bacon poppers. The most popular seemed to be the bacon poppers, which were my special dough with garlic and sesame seeds, stuffed with a mixture of bacon, cheese, green onions and tomatoes. Gosh, I love cooking!

We also went to a staff Christmas party last week. Unlike the Thanksgiving fiasco, the food was amazing! We had a spread of turkey, garlic mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, and much, much more. We stayed just long enough to socialize, eat a great meal, and dance once. People seemed quite shocked to see the giant pregnant lady up on the dance floor!

Aside from that, we're still waiting patiently for Baby Lily to arrive, which should be any day now, seeing as I am now officially overdue. My preference would be that she either comes today, so we can make it home for Christmas or Boxing Day, so Daniel gets lots of time off. I'm sure she'll come, however, whenever she feels like it!

I've also been slowly checking things off of my list of things to do while in China! This is what I've been up to lately:

26. Learn my alphabet, and 100 words/phrases in ASL - COMPLETE!

We decided that we would like to attempt to teach the baby sign language so late last week I set forth on my sign language journey! So far, I have the alphabet and numbers, as well as approximately 150 words!!

31. Host a Holiday Party - COMPLETE!

Well, as I said earlier, we did indeed do this. It went so well that we are already planning for next year!

33. Host a potluck - COMPLETE!

It's kind of cheat-y, seeing as it's a two-birds-with-one-stone kind of deal, but our holiday party was actually a potluck!

76. Learn to knit...again

I learned somewhere around five years of age and distinctly remember thinking, "It would take me forever to knit a scarf!" Well, I have tried again! I still have roughly the same feeling - it is quite a laborious process - but I actually find it soothing. So, we're starting with a scarf, but my ultimate goal is a knit teddy bear! We'll see...

100. Go to a Chinese Opera

I may have already written about this, but I can't quite recall...Technically, the Chinese opera came to us, and not the other way around. Early this month, the school hosted a performance of the Beijing Opera, so it was as easy as walking across the street to the auditorium. We both enjoyed the performance very much. I was especially fond of the first two acts, where they had LED panels with the Chinese characters of what the performers were saying. It helped me to understand a little bit more, as I could read much more that I could catch coming from the performers!

Overall, the costumes were beautiful, the performers were great, and the music was fantastic. The one thing that I had a slight problem with was the steel-drummy-type instrument that was roughly just below the pitch that only dogs can hear. This wonderful instrument was played NON-STOP throughout the entire performance, resulting in a three hour headache. Other than that though, it was superb.


So, we've been keeping plenty busy while we wait for the arrival of the new addition to our family. Keep watch, we will be sure to keep you posted on any exciting developments!