baby shower

My dear friends here hosted a baby shower for me on May 30. I realized the other day the pictures were on my camera and therefore hadn't been shared with you yet. 

In China there's a tradition at Chinese New Year to give red envelopes full of money called "hong bao."

The shower adopted this tradition and we were blessed to receive diapers, wipes, and hong baos. 

We played a few games, one where the ladies had to guess if a certain statement applied to me, to James or to both. The highest scoring pairs were both the pairs that had a local participant (not two foreigners paired together). Even with a language barrier of playing a game their second or third language, our local friends still know us best :)

The hostess of the shower has two daughters who made this sign for the door so we would know which house to enter :)

Robot restaurant

A new restaurant opened not far from our house recently. It's just like every other Chinese fast food restaurant, with one major exception: Robots. 

When you walk in downstairs there's a coin-operated robot that will move around and speak to you in Chinese and English for 1 RMB (about 15 cents)/

Despite Catherine's love of robots, the voice, the lights, and the movement were better enjoyed from the safety of daddy's arms.

Upstairs in the actual restaurant, a robot delivers the food to your table. 

They were even smart enough to divide up the food (dishes, then rice, then drinks, etc) so the girls got to watch it move more than once. 

The robot in action below. One would hope that with a food-delivering robot in the place, we wouldn't be the biggest attraction, but I'm not sure that was true. We still got stares and folks asking to take photos with the girls. :)

more videos, alternatively titled "sometimes we fully dress both our children"

The girls gave us a little performance yesterday. I hope you love Word World like they do....

And this is them playing "at the beach." I think they were pretending to jump into the ocean. And, for the record, Ann normally does wear pants. 

where we plan to deliver baby #3

There's a book called There's a Sheep in My Bathtub that tells the story of an American family who lived in the country of Mongolia in early 1990s. It's humorous and heartbreaking. You can read it for the real point of the book sometime, but I'd like to highlight a very minor detail the author shares in the book. He is sharing how his family decided what parts of their host culture to absorb and which parts of their home culture to retain. He recommends engaging fully in the culture where you're living and taking on as much of it as possible. However, he offers three exceptions that one should retain: giving birth, death/funeral customs, and what one eats for breakfast. He furthers explains these reasons by saying that when a woman is in labor, it's no time to convince her to do something differently or accept a new culture, that when one is grieving a loss they should do that in a familiar way, and that no one should have to eat a sheep's head before 10 am. :)

Anyway, the point of this post deals with that first exception. There are so many differences in the birthing experience in my home culture and that of my current host culture. Here are just a few:

• For one month after birth, Chinese women practice a custom called "zuo yue zi" or a "sitting in" for 30 days. They don't shower, they eat special foods, they can't get out of bed often, they put cotton in their ears, and avoid a host of other bad things (cold air, radiation from television, computers, phones and other devices). Maybe I'll write more about this particular customs in another post. 
• It's not a big deal for the husband to be present at the birth. I mean he's generally at the hospital, but it's rare for the hospital to let him actually be present at the birth. It is slowly changing, but mostly the woman's mom or mother-in-law accompany her. (Only one person is allowed at most hospitals). 
• In urban areas, C sections now account for about 60% of births. I could write another entire post about some of the reasons behind this fact, but not today.
• "Informed consent" as we know it doesn't really exists. I mean, the hospital will ask someone for consent, but it may be a family member and not the patient herself. It's not common to question doctors about what drugs are being administered or what procedures are being done and why. 

We considered many options before we decided to give birth. We first thought we would use one of the large, international hospitals in Beijing or Tianjin. But, the cost is well above what it would be even in America and it still wasn't the environment I was looking for. (Remember the other two were born at home). 

We called a hospital that was recommended by a foreign friend in Nanjing. It seemed like a good fit, but it's really far away and not a city we have any knowledge about or connections to. 

I considered a home birth here, but since James wasn't comfortable with that idea, that was a no. 

We corresponded with a couple of midwives from America about coming to attend our birth here, but that didn't work because there aren't good transfer options from home and the local hospital wouldn't agree to let us bring our own provider in. (I knew it was a big stretch when asking)

We considered delivering here and had chosen the local hospital we would use and were feeling pretty good about our decision. They doctor is the one I've seen for prenatal care for my pregnancy with Ann and this pregnancy. She's nice and willing to allow some concessions to make us comfortable and knows our customs are different. BUT, in the end she doesn't have the authority to guarantee that those things will happen. (like James getting to be there). She also speaks no English and James was concerned he would have problems communicating when I am in no state to be trying to pull up Chinese medical terminology from my brain. :)

Then there's one of the biggest issues for us here in our city: foreigners are still very much a novelty. At my last check up, a few random strangers stopped by the exam room just to check us out. Granted, we had the girls with us which always draws more attention, but it wasn't comfortable. I was pretty sure that they actual delivery in the delivery room would be private, but the days in the hospital afterwards I'm pretty certain we'd have lots of curious people stopping in, peeking in the door, or doing what they can to check us out. And I just wasn't sure that my sleep-deprived, hormonal, post birth self would be able to handle that. Actually, most days my "normal" self doesn't handle it well. And I started thinking more about the quote I started this post with....about labor and delivery not rally being the time to try to acclimate to a new culture or way of doing things. So, we started over with making the decision about where to deliver.

Through an internet search and a call to a friend who lives there, we found a service in Chengdu that provides natural childbirth and breastfeeding education classes. I called to ask them about delivery options in Chengdu or other parts of China that would be natural birth friendly and reasonably priced. They have a relationship with a doctor who speaks excellent English, has a birthing suite where you can labor, deliver, and recover in one place (none of the other options other than Nanjing had that) and the price was half of the least expensive international hospital.

I ended up flying to Chengdu the next week to meet the doctor and see the hospital first hand. The first question he asked me after taking a history was, "Are there things you'd like to consider at the birth that aren't the normal protocol for Chinese hospitals?" I rattled off my list and he was happy to oblige all of them. It was such a different experience than anywhere else we'd been where we felt like we were having to push and advocate forcefully for everything we wanted (ability to move around during birth, for example).

I came home and gave the full report to James and we started making plans to go there for the delivery.

Here are some pics of where we plan for smallest Judd to be born:

Three other GREAT things

1. A few folks who went to my college live in Chengdu. One of those families are in America now and will let us live in their house while we're there!
2. James' mom will join us in Chengdu to help out with the girls while we deliver and acclimate to three small Judd girls. 
3. The consulting/education service I first called to ask about options in Chengdu provides doula services as well so we'll have a sweet, sweet lady assisting us at the birth. 

And, that's the very long version of the story. We'll leave on Friday and have a 20+ hour train ride to get there. That's right folks. 20+ hours in a train car with Catherine and Ann. (China's airlines have more stringent requirements than the US about flying when pregnant so I'm already past the point they allow pregnant ladies to fly). Perhaps another time I'll tell you the story of buying our train tickets. :)

We appreciate your prayers for our family!

trip to a "ghost city"

Our family took a mini-vacation to a somewhat famous city in China about 6 hours away. The city is famous for being one of China's "Ghost Cities." The moniker has nothing to do with being haunted, but merely means empty. It was a city that was planned and developed and invested in with the hopes of roughly one million inhabitants, but those inhabitants didn't arrive initially. So, there were fancily built buildings and wide streets and infrastructure, but no people! However, since it's creation is has filled up some, so we didn't find it to be as "ghost town like" as many articles portray it. There were definitely businesses there and lots of commerce, even McDonald's, Subway, and other chains that even larger cities don't have. It may not have the anticipated population and it may indeed be financially defunct, but by our observations, it was far from a ghost city. 

Here are a few articles about such cities in China if you're interested.

http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1975397_2094498,00.html

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/04/21/the-myth-of-chinas-ghost-cities/

http://multimedia.scmp.com/china-ghost-towns/

The great thing for us about this particular ghost city is that even the nicest hotels aren't full so you can get an excellent deal for a much nicer room than we would typically stay in. On this trip we got a deluxe room at a 5 star hotel for about $50/night. 

not bad, right?

We rented a car and drove there. We saw lots of stunning bridges along the way. China does architecture design very well.

This was a large plaza/square along the river/lake in the city. Catherine has been a bit obsessed with ferris wheels recently so it was a "must see" on her list. There were also carnival-like rides for the kids (more of those pictures later).

I need one of these for our house. Seriously. Hey girls-go run off some energy!

We went to a big park in the city. It was big and even designed to drive through whereas most of the parks in our city don't even allow bicycles, much less cars. We did park and walk a little while and stumbled upon this enclosure with dear. 

One development that may be evidence that perhaps it is a "ghost town."

part of the skyline. This location is famous for having a fountain show. We tried to show up twice at the times published on the sign that the fountains would be on. No fountains. 

sisters driving a car

daddy helping with the remote control. (for the safety of everyone!)

And this is our life most of the time when we're out and about with the girls. Lots of attention, lots of stares, and lots of onlookers taking photos. 

There was one particular housing development that was HUGE! We could see it from everywhere we went. But it was so large we could never get the whole thing in one photo. 

Until we went to a wetlands park outside of town. All those pink-ish buildings are ONE housing complex. But again, occupancy is very low. 

We wrote in our newsletter a bit about the culture of swimming here. What we didn't say was that like always, strangers wanted to take pictures with the girls. You may remember from last summer that Catherine doesn't like swimming because it makes her swimsuit wet. One such onlooker was trying to take a picture with her as she is standing on the side of the pool crying and trying to take off her swimsuit because it's wet. We're telling at her (and him!) and trying to get out the pool quickly enough to stop the inappropriate photo and disrobing!

Doesn't your local indoor pool have a lounge chairs where you can sit and smoke?

Some of the carnival rides the girls enjoyed. 

This ride was cars that rolled in a circle around a small track. A device in the middle shot up ping pong balls which one attempted to catch in the net. Catherine has asked to go back and do this weekly since we've been home.

I have so many more pictures, but as I need to pack for our next excursion to the border, we'll finish here. Hope you enjoyed seeing part of our vacation!

What a week! Alternatively titled: pregnant and cranky

This week's frustration #1: Finding out that we do indeed have to authenticate our PASSPORTS to be able to finish our business registration.
That's right. Passports. I've lived in and out of China for 12 years now and I've never heard of anyone having to do this, nor has anyone I know ever heard of anyone having to do this. (other documents, yes).
Also, we know that the law firm we contacted has never had a client in ANY PROVINCE have to do this.
I want to add this to the list of "crazy things I've heard in governmental/official offices" not the fact that they are requiring it, but that the boss said the authentication process is free. Umm, it's not free. There's a charge at the Embassy for the official copy, notarization, and certification. There are the postage fees, the agent fees, Department of State fees, and the Chinese Embassy fees.
So James is on his way to Beijing tonight to go to the Embassy tomorrow to get a certified copy of our passports authenticated so that we can send them to the US to get authenticated by the Chinese consulate so that they can have a stamp so that we can continue the process with our business registration.
We're taking good notes of the business registration process and we'll write a complete post with all our snags (this one being the largest) so that hopefully you can avoid them.
In the meantime, here is the link to service we've used in the States to authenticate our documents if you find yourself in need of such documents. In the past we've had to get our marriage certificate and our kids' birth certificates authenticated in order to get our residence permit.
This week's frustration #2: being pregnant and cranky. I mentioned earlier that I made the mistake of going to a newly opened Carrefour on a public holiday, which didn't put me in the most culturally appreciative mood. When I got home I parked my trike in the shed beside our building while I unloaded five or more large bags of groceries. I'm six months pregnant currently. While unloading bags of groceries (and waiting for chivalrous husband to come downstairs and help) an able-bodied 40 something year old man stopped me to tell me that I shouldn't park where I did. I should park in the main shed by the gate which is 300 or so meters away so that "kids don't play on my vehicle and it will be better and safer for everyone."
I know being pregnant makes me more irritable in situations like these, but I can happily report that I didn't say anything like, "Men where I'm from would offer to help me instead of complaining about where I parked, which by the way, was in a bike shed!" Instead I just told him I would move after we had unloaded the groceries.
I should also note here that I have been here long enough to understand that mostly random strangers say things like that comment out of concern (concern for the safety of my trike, concern for public order, etc) and I try to remember that when I feel frustrated with what I perceive to be criticisms from locals.


This week's frustration #3: not being able to clearly communicate after 12+ years of Chinese study.
I wanted to buy some contact paper like stuff that is sold in office supply stores and the stores that make advertisements. I stopped in the office supply store near the gate of our complex. I don't know the actual word for that kind of paper (or if they even call it paper). I asked for "the colored paper that is sticky on one side that comes in rolls and is sold by the meter." She seemed to know what I was talking about but said she didn't have any. I looked around and didn't see it either. I asked if anywhere nearby sold it. She said no. I went out and saw that the shop next door was a printing shop and decided to give it a try. They had it! I could see the rolls on the shelf in the back. But then I noticed something else....these two shops, the one I had just been in and this one were one shop! Adjoining doors on the inside and same family running both parts! Clearly, I hadn't communicated with the lady in the first shop who said it wasn't sold nearby if indeed it was sold in the other half of her shop.


Warm-hearted gesture from a stranger making up for most of these things: free sewing repair to my clothes. Seriously. I dropped a few things off to be mended and when I went to pick them up, the shop owner wouldn't let me pay. I needed one little bright light of gladness in the midst of not doing a great job of navigating life here this week.


Consolation gifts for having a bad week will be accepted in the form of positive comments, salty snacks, or good quality dark chocolate. 谢谢你的合作 :)

International Playgroup Half-way Report

I have been hosting an international playgroup at our home. We don't plan to send our girls to local schools, but I still want them to have social interaction with local kids and I wanted some structure/schedule to our daily routine here. However, I'm also very pregnant and feel my energy waning so I didn't want to over-do it. So, we planned a sort of trial-run for this playgroup which would only be two mornings a week and only for six weeks. 

We have some local kids, some foreign kids, and some kids who have one local parent and one foreign parent. We also have moms, dads, and grandmas who come along and others who come alone.

We learn two letters and one color each day and have some kind of a theme for the vocabulary we learn in English (for the locals) and Chinese (for the foreigners). 

We're just over half way finished now so I thought I'd give you all a report. Here are some pictures of our participants and some of the activities we've done so far. 

This day was a crowd favorite. A guy we know who trains a police dog brought the dog and taught the kids about how to train a dog. They LOVED it. Also, are you as astounded as I am that we got this many little kids to sit still and look at the camera? 

This day we talked about feeling words and practiced making different kinds of faces. 

And each of the kids made their own "emoticon" of sorts. 

Ann's friend Molly

We made green paintings.

Snack time. Also known as the only time the kids sit still in one place and are relatively quiet. 

Another kid favorite: we made an "ocean in a bottle." 

Today we took a field trip to the museum, but today technically is the second half so I'll save those pictures for the next time I update.

Announcement #5: Gender Reveal

Well, we've promised this announcement for some time now.

When we left America we were a bit too early in the pregnancy to know the gender. We thought that might mean that we wouldn't get to know the gender, since it is not common for doctors here to reveal the gender to the parents. (The main reason is the number of female babies who would be aborted). In fact, at most hospitals, the ultrasound screen is positioned in a way that the mom can't see it and most hospitals won't let fathers accompany the mother to the ultrasound room.

However, our first prenatal check up once we returned to China was performed at an international hospital in Tianjin. They allowed James to accompany me and had a large screen we could both see. We decided to ask if they would tell us the gender. Sometimes not all the rules apply to us as foreigners so if we could play the "foreigner card" in this situation, we wanted to.

But, the doctor performing the ultrasound said she couldn't tell us. So there you have it. No gender reveal.

JUST KIDDING!

She told us she couldn't tell us, but suddenly, she started dropping all kinds of hints. OH, for this story to make more sense you need to know that "he" and "she" are written differently but pronounced the same in Chinese. You also need to know that most Chinese people think baby girls look like their father and baby boys look like their mother.

She would say, "ta" (he/she) is very pretty. We didn't get it yet. Then she asked us who our other girls looked like. Then she said, "This one looks like dad, too." We (James and I) started exchanging questioning glances with each other. "Ta" will look good in a skirt. AH HA! We got it. She couldn't directly tell us the gender, but we realized she was dropping us every hint she could to let us know this baby is Judd girl #3!

So there you have it. The long version of the story to simply say.....She's a girl!

Cultural dancing

In this video you can see one of the more interesting and endearing cultural practices of the local people.  In parks, apartment complexes, or other open spaces; in the morning and in the evening you often see older ladies dancing.  Line dancing.  Some are just there for exercise, but some are quite serious about it.  You can also see two other girls who are "quite serious about it".

If you will play this video on repeat from 7-9pm each day you will know what it sounds like outside our apartment... every day... same song...

I told Jill I would give her 1 yuan ($0.15) if she would join them.... so far my money is safe.

-James

It's fun being two and three!

I'm under no illusion that you guys read this blog because of my stellar writing. I know the vast majority of you just want to check in on the girls and see their cute faces.

I hope this post satisfies :)

This was the attire the girls chose one morning. Pajamas, outside shoes, hats, and backpacks.

This was taken later the same day. I did at least get them out of pajamas and more presentable to go outside.
By the way, what are these contraptions called in English? Anyone? In Chinese they're called yao yao che which translates shake shake vehicle. The girls love them and we love that they only cost 15-30 cents to ride :)

One of Jill's friends opened an English library that also teaches English classes. The girls got invited to participate in one of their special activities. 

We didn't master the jump rope yet, but we had fun trying.

This archway is just outside our front door.

taking a stroll through our complex

at a wedding we went to a couple weeks back

This is the girls' friend, Michael. His dad is British and his mom is a local. We've had a few playdates together. This day the girls especially loved that Michael shared his kite with them.

Ann riding Catherine. It was all fun and games until someone face-planted on the tile.

Catherine is getting better at coloring all the time.