I take it back...

In an earlier post, I wrote about a meeting that I was attending where a little boy, less than two, I observed without a diaper and later peed all over the floor where we were sitting and our other children were playing. Well, I need to update it. I realized, almost after I wrote it, that the only reason I was really "horrified" was because I was struggling to get along with the mother. Whatever social gathering she is in, she takes charge. And I usually disagree with her. But, really, it is just an example of a cultural difference because in meetings or social gatherings here, the Chinese always revert to the teacher-pupil relationships. And here, the teacher talks and the students listen and agree. And if I don't agree with the "teacher", I have a hard time not speaking up with my opinion, or at least other alternatives. This is one part of the Chinese culture that sometimes gets my goat and I have a hard time biting my tongue. I am, after all, an American. And we are known to have a hard time with authority. I mean, isn't that why the pilgrims came to America in the first place? Our ability to think for ourselves and to sometimes question authority is good, but like all things, can be taken too far and can lead to pride. So, I am trying to learn humility from the Taiwanese. And after a lot of prayer and biting my tongue, I am not as bothered by this mother anymore.
So, truthfully, I think it isn't that weird to be potty training your child that young (have I been here too long?). In another meeting yesterday with some other mothers who have children about the same age as Euan, I asked them about potty training in Taiwan. One said that they usually start by 18 months and are potty trained by 2. (I read a book in America about potty training by the age of 2 and I tried it and failed.) One told me that if you talk to all of the A-mah's (grandmas), they think that you should start at 6 months. And the other mother confirmed this by telling me that her 4 month-old can poop when she sits him on the toilet. I guess it would be the same story if we asked our own mothers or grandmothers who used cloth diapers and potty trained earlier than we do now.
I have to admit that potty training early is easier here, though, because the environment and culture is set up for it. They have only tile floors (much better than chasing around your child with carpet cleaner), and it is perfectly acceptable for kids to pee outside, no matter where they are-even the playground (especially boys).
Now I am even thinking about giving it a go with Euan. I might actually be forced to, since he is already in the largest size diapers that you can buy here. I'm not sure about helping him stand and go pee into the gutters in front of people-especially since we already draw crowds with cell-phone cameras clicking. So I might try my own version: train at home, but still wear a diaper when we go out and about because I still think a group of small kids playing in one child's pee-puddle is pretty disgusting :)

Thanksgiving in Taiwan

Being an American holiday, Thursday was just like any other day for us. But we set aside our Saturday to help our little TCKs (Third Culture Kids) get a feel for what Thanksgiving is like. It began with a church stake sports activity that Scott and I named the "turkey trot". Here is our ward's sweet team:

Our ward did really well and had a ton of fun together.

They had the guinea sack races (our team won)!

And bao xiao haize races (carry your child). I had to put this picture up because this is brother Xiao, a member of our bishopric, and he is usually so quiet, but he got really decked out and into these races. (Our team barely lost by a step)

And they had a relay where each team had 5 boys, 5 girls and each runner ran about 100 meters and we won (even after someone dove into the dirt)! Scott was sad at his leg because he could barely catch up to a 70+ year-old man who had a couple of legs up on him. Either that was a fast old guy, or...

And here I am getting ready for the tug-of-war. I think there were 12-14 members on each side, split between men and women. And our team chose to have the women in the back and guess who was the anchor? Yeah, me. Either I look really strong, or I've put on more weight... Diet starts on Monday. We won first round, but lost in the second. Which placed us 3rd place overall for the day (out of about 12-15 teams). It was so fun that we might turn it into a Thanksgiving morning tradition with our family in the future!
After such a fun day in the hot sun, we went back home and started prep for our Thanksgiving dinner. While we prepared our dinner, we were loving us some "Cosby Show" reruns on Justin.tv and some Christmas music from FM100 in Utah.
We invited our Bishop's family, who had lived in America for a number of years, and also one of our other friends, Carter, over for dinner. I made a soy-ginger roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, candied yams, creamed corn, deviled eggs, butterhorn rolls, and then pumpkin and persimmon pies for dessert. Some things worked with some of my substitutes or strange ingredients and some didn't. But it was fun!
One funny story was buying the chicken. The markets are open air markets and Sophie went with me to buy the food. And let's just say that it was fresher than any chicken I've probably eaten before and I was surprised that Sophie was ok with watching the process (because I wasn't). (You can see in the picture below that the table where you buy the chicken is next to the truck that has the live chickens).

Oh! And on Sunday was our long prepared-for primary program. It was really cute! Sophie said the opening prayer for sacrament meeting (in Chinese) and they both had small speaking parts in Chinese. But when Meili was all by herself at the microphone bearing her testimony, she decided that English was the way to go. But she did so well! And through the experience, I've learned that a pianist has a tough job. No one notices them until they mess up. And luckily no one noticed the pianist too much, because it was me :)
(Also, scroll down to see our Halloween post, newly added)

Moving...

No, we aren't moving home, but we are moving from one computer to a new one, which feels about the same as moving house. You still have to sort through stuff and decide what you are going to keep or trash. And, as you can tell from the lack of posts, we feel pretty displaced as well...It's a good thing we don't have to physically move anything, but instead of a backache I have a headache:) But here are some pics of the fam:

Sophie is pretty excited about a new shirt that she got. And notice the sweet sweatband which ties the outfit together perfectly

Sophie surprised us by writing some Chinese characters-advanced even if she were a Chinese kid. The characters are hua (flower) and xiao (small).

Scott's school had a 35 year anniversary last week and they asked Scott and I to dance an aboriginal dance with about 60 other teachers. They had practices every day for the past 2 months (we made it to about %10 of them), and it was a lot of fun. One of Scott's co-workers said that we are the first foreigners to participate in one of their celebrations so he called us pioneers. This pic is afterwards when the whole school was out partying with fair-type booths. We have some video of real aborigine students dancing, but we can't upload them very well. We also have some video of some sweet marching and the 10,000 students standing at attention for about 45 minutes in the hot sun. This country isn't very many years removed from military rule, so it still has some militaristic traditions. Sad, we can't get them uploaded...
And last Saturday Scott and I braved our second journey to Taipei to go to the LDS temple. We have to leave our house by 4:15 am to make the bus that leaves the church at 5:00. Then both girls got motion sick the last 2 hours of the 4 hour trip (resulting in at least 8 full vomit bags). And, sadly, all the couples with children have to split up rather than go together to make it through a session at the temple (we call it the Miller split after our old Bishop Miller's fantastic example of faithfulness in going to the temple even if you have to go alone:)), and so Scott went first and afterwards I squeezed in another and barely caught the bus home. I shopped at the distribution center at the next door stake center and got some lunch during my shift. And Scott took the kids to the nearby Chiang Kai Shek memorial during his. Here's a picture of the memorial to a tyrant that many Taiwanese want changed: (Euan's asleep)



I'm glad they had fun because, although we changed seats, Meili still threw up on the way home, too. And it is 5 1/2 hours on the way home because of traffic, and then another 45 minutes on the scooter. At least it is a good lesson to the girls at how important going to the temple is for us. But we will have to figure out another way next time-it was just too rough on them.

Happy Halloween! (Part 1)

(I was hoping to get this post up earlier, but I still haven't transferred the rest of the Halloween pictures over from our other computer, so I am publishing what I've already done)

Though it is different celebrating Halloween in a country where it is some strange foreign tradition, we still had a ton of fun. Taiwan recognizes a lot of America's holidays because learning American English and culture is such a big part of their culture. Still, we hadn't heard much buzz about Halloween other than some cheap costumes that appeared in the local stationery store (at least that's what we call it, because it really doesn't have an equivalent in America). So imagine our surprise when we get a random phone call at 9:30 pm the weekend before Halloween and welcomed this into our house:

Some of our Church ward members were having a little farewell party for our friend Mari who is moving back to Philippines in a couple of weeks and I guess they got the Halloween spirit. Or just found some face paint. Luckily we were stocked with a little candy and so we taught them about "trick-or-treat".

Then Meili and Sophie's school had a Halloween party on the 30th. On our way to school, we created more of a stir than normal and we were really late because every Taiwanese that saw us during the three blocks to school wanted pictures.



The school's English teacher led them in some songs and they had a Halloween costume contest. For the contest, each student would parade across the stage and then after they had all had a turn, they lined up and each child in the school would vote on which costume they liked the best by placing a ball in a basket in front of the child. Thanks to some sweet costumes from their Grandma in America, the girls were a hit and Meili won second place in her grade and Sophie won first place for her grade. Sophie got so many votes that her basket overflowed and they had to get a second basket for her. I guess the kids love Minnie!

Kenting on a shoestring Part 2

For my birthday at the end of July, we decided to take a trip to a beach 3 hours away by scooter. This is the second half of the story.
After close to three hours on our scooters, with only a break for breakfast, our tooshies were so excited to find our favorite beach, Bai Xia Wan (White Sand Beach) and set up shop. Things had changed since we had been there 6 years before. I was prepared for it, luckily, since I have a recent edition of Lonely Planet that I have been scouring. But even being prepared, we were both still disappointed that we could no longer camp on our secret beach. It has been discovered and is becoming developed. So instead of setting up our tent right next to the ocean with no one else in sight, we had to pay money (only $3/night) to set it up in a camping ground. What a sad
difference! The Taiwanese love to camp on slabs of concrete, and though this wasn't paved, it felt about the same. Sad! But of course the kids were so pumped about camping! They kept making sure that we were going to stay there for three whole days! "We are going to sleep in the tent? Really! For three days?" And when we answered "yes", we were followed by loud screams of joy.




So for two days, we only did 4 things:
1.Wake up and get ants off of the food which we had purchased in town the night before for our breakfast, eat it, get our swimsuits on, rent an umbrella from the campground, and swim until 11:00.

Taiwanese love our girls. (The Taiwanese are just starting to like water. When we were here before, they were almost all afraid of it-I guess that's why we had beaches all to ourselves. But still it was rare to see any swimsuits.)

2. Find things to do in town until the sun was bearable (it was mid-90s plus humidity, which means it felt over 110 degrees) after about 2:30.

After being VERY disappointed with the overpriced nasty western food in Kenting, we went to another nearby city and just went to the first noodle shop we found. Sophie made a new friend here! (The girls are wearing jackets not because it is cold, but to protect from the sun. Even the extra layer feels better than the sun scorching your skin and when you are on the scooter, it doesn't feel so hot)

These rides are everywhere in Taiwan. America banned them a long time ago for safety reasons, I think. Here are some outside a grocery store where we would pick up food for dinner and breakfast while we were killing time in the middle of the day.

We couldn't let the kids take naps in the hot tent, so they were pretty exhausted while we played around town.

Here are some 20-somethings that made the same scooter drive from the city that we did. They thought we were pretty cool to brave the trip with three kids, so we hung out together and ate at the nice, cool 7-11 together.
3. Head back to our beach and swim until the sun started to go down.



Euan and I hung out under the umbrella a lot. Even Sophie would hide away once in a while. But Meili wouldn't get away from the water the whole time.
4. Shower, eat dinner (corndogs, chicken nuggets) over the campgrounds bbq, and go to bed.

After two days Meili got a really bad sunburn, so we checked into a cheap homestay and we watched some TV and crashed until late afternoon.


Then we walked the now VERY touristy Kenting and shopped and had another horrible overpriced meal (bad luck!). The Taiwanese love Kenting after dark because the whole town is like one huge night shopping market. Scott and I took turns slipping down to the street for a peak after the kids were asleep.


So much fun for very little money! The 5 top adventures we had:
1. On the second night of camping, Scott and I woke up to an earthquake! It was a 5.5 that was centered just north of us! We were laying on the ground, and it sounded like a train was going through our campground. Scott said it was kind of nice because it rocked him back to sleep.
2. To take a ride on a scooter in nature is amazing. You really get a feel for your surroundings that you don't get in a car. You smell the jungle air, mixed with the salt from the ocean. It was so beautiful!

Me following the human GPS

For an hour of the trip the ocean is on one side and the jungle mountains are on the other. It is amazing. So are my skills at taking a picture while driving a scooter.
3. Even though we were disappointed that we couldn't camp on the beach, the kids still loved every minute of camping. And there were perks, too. We were the only ones, we got discounts on umbrellas and water toys, and we had free use of a fridge, toilet, showers, and BBQ.
4. One of the evenings as the owners were closing down the area and cleaning up, the girls and I walked into the toilet and there was a jungle spider that was bigger than my hand! I screamed and was so grateful that I had already learned the word for spider in Chinese from Meili's homework and the wife came to see and gasped, too and told her husband to come take care of it for us. EEEE! Then Scott told me the next morning that he had thought about leaving our screen doors open on our tent to try to keep a little cooler and he was so happy he didn't because he woke up in the middle of the night with the same kind of spider on one of our screen doors inches from his face! EEEE!

This isn't it (obviously), but we were happy to get a picture of one of the many creepy crawlies that we saw.
5. And of course the highlight of the trip was playing as a family at a fantastic BEACH!

Goodread!

China Shakes the World: A Titan's Rise and Troubled Future -- and the Challenge for America by James Kynge


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
If you are interested in China and it's inner workings, or why it has becomes the world industrial zone, and what this means for America's future (since our country now owes them a lot of money!), then this is a great read. The author is a British journalist who has lived in China since studying at Beijing University in the 1980's, so he has seen how China has gone from 19th century to the 21st century in less than 30 years. I loved the whole book, but a part at the end reminded me of living in Russia where I usually told people that I was from a neutral country like Canada because people had too strong a sentiment towards Americans (usually it was a weird mix of love and hate). The author insinuated that it is the same in China. It seems the Chinese put on a good face for Americans because it is part of their foreign policy, but whenever America makes them mad, it is better for your well-being if you suddenly become South African or Icelandic. Hmmm...
Awesome read, but definitely plays a little into the fears that Americans have of China.

View all my reviews >>

Kenting on a shoestring Part 1

Kenting is a beach resort about 2 hours away. And though only early 20-something Taiwanese are brave enough to take the journey on scooters, we decided that was the cheapest (and funnest) way for our little family to make the trip. So on July 29th (my birthday) we got up early to beat the tropical heat and my human GPS (Scott) navigated us on our 2 scooters, 3 children, 2 backpacks, 1 tent and 1 sleep mat through the windy and sometimes not-very-well marked Chinese streets and highways to our weekend get-away.

Here is Scott packing up the transportation for the journey in our basement garage.

And here I am with my travel partner, Sophie. (The long sleeves are for the early morning breeze on a scooter, and later for the scorching sun)

And here is the other scooter, minus Scott, all ready to go. Now, I know 99.9% of Americans (all who haven't lived in a foreign country where American safety standards aren't the norm and even most who have lived-and survived-in such places) are having a heart attack seeing our children situated on our scooters in such a way. But, we really don't have much choice. When in Rome... (Pray for us!)

Cultural Difference for the day

Today I had a leadership meeting for my church's woman's organization, Relief Society, and I noticed that one of the woman's son who is about 22 months old didn't seem to have a diaper on. Our meeting was in a normal Chinese house, a tou tien, and these houses are usually 3-5 stories tall town home type homes (all connected) and are about 2-3 rooms large on each floor. The bottom floor is used for various things. It is either a garage, a business, or a living room-to the discretion of the owner. Well, we had our meeting on the bottom floor of one of the girl's in-law's tou tiens. And I'm not sure why, but soon after she arrived, the woman who brought her near two year-old took him just out the front door to pee. It's not too unusual to see kids peeing outside wherever is convenient, but I'm just not sure why she didn't use the toilet...
Well, about 45 minutes, and a lot of juice later, the kid was suddenly sitting in a puddle of pee. While the other women helped her clean up the mess, I have to admit that I just stared in a little bit of shock (and horror) and tried to keep Euan as well as the other children out of the mess.
So, he seems a little bit young to me to be getting potty trained. I've seen other pre-two year-olds wandering around without diapers, too. Wow. That is some patient parenting. Now, maybe the average age of American children getting potty trained is a little late, but that is brave to just do a no diaper potty boot camp by two years old. But I guess it works in a country with no carpet.

Sunday Rest

I've rediscovered a truth about how the Sabbath is a day of rest. "Rest" when referring to the Sabbath isn't the same as what "rest" usually connotes. Growing up, I thought that the day of rest meant sleeping in, lazily enjoying church, gorging out on a large Sunday dinner and settling down for a long, long, long nap. Now, again, I see that instead it is a day to rest from everyday cares and to refocus our spiritual efforts for the coming week.
I sometimes lose this focus because I feel so busy on Sundays. I sometimes get home at night and wonder where my coveted day of rest has gone. The more I have grown to love the gospel and the LDS Church, the more responsibilities I have had and the busier my Sunday's have become. Add a husband who also has great faith and 3 children, and tonight (Sunday night) I am finally "resting" by the world's definition around 9:00 pm at night (and my husband is not yet home from meetings). How, after another Sunday which was even busier than normal, can I feel rested? Here's the story:
Last night (Saturday) I was tempted to stay home from our area's Stake Conference adult meeting because it was past Euan's bedtime, Meili was sick, and Scott had an earlier Priesthood meeting which only gave us time to kiss across the threshold (since he would stay home with Mei and Euan). But just as I was considering it, Sophie started crying to me that she wanted to go so she could feel the Holy Ghost and to make Heavenly Father happy. How could I stay home after that? So she and I hopped on our scooter and zoomed through the crazy Saturday night scooter traffic (think of the game "frogger" but with fearless teenagers on scooters) and headed 45 minutes to our church house. Then I struggled through 2 hours of a meeting that I didn't understand more than a few words of, hoping that at least I would be blessed for my efforts of being a good example to my daughter, and headed back to get home just before 10 pm!
So, imagine my feelings this morning after my husband has another 2 hour meeting 20 minutes away and gets home just in time to go with us to our Stake Conference (we have three kids and two scooters as transportation and have made it a rule to never ride with more than 2 kids on a scooter. Inconvenient at times-the Taiwanese often do it-but we have to draw the line somewhere). I was overwhelmed and exhausted. But I went, praying for a better attitude.
And tonight I feel more peaceful than I have all week because I was able to listen (surprise! in my own language!) to the Lord's message by broadcast for the Asian people from President Uchtdorf and Elder Oaks, as well as our Area Authority and Sister Dalton from the General Young Women's Presidency. I felt the spirit and felt more united with these people that I was feeling so alienated from; a cure to my recent ailment of loneliness. Now, if I had decided to skip today's area Stake Conference and instead decided to "rest" at home today, I would have felt no better, no more spiritually rested, which is what I really needed (and it carried me through one more meeting for me and 2 more for Scott!). And so now that I am spiritually rested, and our meetings are over, I can finally physically rest, too.

Meili's school graduation

Kindergarten graduation is the end of July in Taiwan and the whole school participates and it was about 3 hours long! Wow! Since I don't understand very much Chinese, I feel like my attention span is about the same as Sophie's and that was hard to get through, even though there were a lot of interesting performances. This is my first attempt at a video. We'll see how it goes...
It is taking forever! Our uploading is always so slow. Sad, it's not working. The video was of a sing-a-long during the program and it was just so nice to see Meili having fun (she had hated school so bad that we took her out for a two month summer break).

In one of the numbers, Meili played the symbol while some of the other kids played the sweet Chinese drums in the back. We were trying to get Meili interested in the drums, but she hated them. I think it was because she couldn't understand the directions for how to play them. And the Chinese are serious about their drumming. Sadly, it's the same situation with this little piano/organ thing that she is supposed to be learning to play. I think, from what Meili says, that the teacher has her just color her music book during the whole class because Meili isn't understanding the directions for how to play (Meili says that the teacher won't LET her play). That is the Taiwan school system in a nutshell. Where America goes at the speed of the slowest learners, Taiwan goes at the speed of the quickest learners. But, we are buying a keyboard for both her and I to practice on (I am the primary pianist for the upcoming primary program so I need to learn to play 10 songs in a couple of weeks and I haven't played for 15 years! And I only had one summer of lessons since I was about 9!).

This is what I call Meili's French Maid costume. She and the other girl are supposed to be the mirrors in Snow White, but...

Meili danced the hula to one of the song's from the movie "Lilo and Stitch". She and Sophie were so excited because they love that movie.


It was a fun experience, even though it was so long. The Taiwanese study so hard, so they really make graduation an event, even if it is "just" kindergarten.

Randoms

My friend Emily who is originally from Shanghai, but spent her teenage years in Australia, took me to her favorite hairstylist in the city. The haircut was just ok (I'm picky), but I loved that the salon was full of rockin' guy stylists. They follow Japanese style here, so I had to get a pic with my stylist. One of my friends once told me that she always tried to find guy stylists because they do the best job, but this one didn't work out for me.
During mid-July, the World Games came to our city. It's a cool multi-sport competition for random sports that nearly everyone but the U.S. follows. We could really only afford one event (and we were afraid our kids would only last through one), so we picked trampoline and acrobatics:

This was men's team acrobatics. Very strange for an American. But they could do some cool stuff.

Doubles women's trampoline. Pretty cool.

Here are the girls after the games. It is SO hot here! The Asians really have something with their umbrella use on sunny days. We are really close to the Tropic of Cancer, so our fair skin burns in minutes, literally. I've adopted some of their other methods of hiding from the sun because it's much easier than reapplying sunscreen a ton, which is really expensive here anyway. I'll have to get some pics of those techniques to post later.

Here was one of Euan's favorite hiding spots which we have since gotten rid of. It was a nasty old desk that we were using to hold our TV in our front room. It was too low and unstable for a curious 1+ year-old.

Fishing with the Chens

A couple (the Chens)in our ward took us and some other members up to their family's mountain house (cabin) and we went fishing in a nearby fishing pond. It was one of the best times I've had in Taiwan so far. It was so peaceful and relaxing. Here are some highlites:

The girls had fun on some swings at the cabin-a common toy in America, but not in Taiwan.


Scott is going to kill me for putting up this picture, but such cheese! I couldn't help it...

What a good daddy! Scott in our friend's Chinese hat fishing with his boy (it was HOT and mid-day, so those big hats really are useful to shade you). The pond was kind of like a fishery because it was concrete. I was a little disappointed at first, but it does no good to have expectations when you are in a foreign country. Those expectations are almost always wrong. Sometimes the reality is worse, but sometimes it is better!

The girls were ready for a catch with their net.

The first catch of the day! Me! I was so pumped. Too bad it was tiny and I had to put it back. I have always wanted to go fishing, but this was really only my first time! (Other than holding the fishing pole once for my uncle when I was about 7 or 8 years-old).

Next, and a real catch, was Scott! We put it in a holding net in the pond that some kids had used right before us, so we assumed it was ok. But when we went to check on the fish a little while later, we moved it and the movement helped the fish swim through a tiny hole in the net and escape! Bummer! We kept catching small ones after that, probably because it was mid-day. Then, right as we were leaving, I got a whopper! It was so huge that I broke the line. It was pulling and pulling and Scott jumped down the concrete bank of the pond to catch the line and reel it in. And here it is...

A CHAIR! It was floating as I pulled it in, so it even fooled Scott who was helping this novice. A CHAIR! Darn polluters! The girls thought it was pretty funny, though. They told that story over and over for the rest of the night.

Next it was down to the real creek to look for crawdads. No luck, but it was fun and the girls LOVED playing in the water! The Taiwanese were a little tentative about letting their children get soaked, (they think they'll get sick), but once they saw how much fun the girls were having, they let their children join in!

And then what is an outdoor Taiwan party without Taiwanese BBQ and fireworks?