Counting 1-20

This morning I was in the shower when it slowed to a tiny trickle. This would be ok if our apartment was 85 degrees (like it was last week), but this week it is closer to 60 degrees. I enrolled Sophie to go ask her Daddy if he could hold off on doing the dishes (the assumed culprit of my trickle). She ran to ask and then came back to tell me what he said. Unfortunately, I couldn't hear her through the crack in the door and so I kept asking her to repeat it since the trickle wasn't picking up any. I say that this is unfortunate because when I finally got out of her that Daddy said he would stop after she counted to 20 that I was actually keeping her from starting to count and thus prolonging my freezing condition. After I understood her, I said, "Start counting!"
She began. One to ten is a no-brainer, but in English the teens are just difficult. If she were counting in Chinese she would have been to 20 in no time. She was so flustered by the pressure that she stopped after 12 and announced that she was done. I heard Meili and Scott help her realize she wasn't done and try to pick up where she left off.
I am still trying to warm up in the lukewarm trickle.
"Thirteen, fourteen, sixteen".
Oh that darn 15, both Meili and Sophie skip that one in English. I hear Scott helping her start again at thirteen.
"Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty!"
Hallelujah. The hot water starts to pick up and I can finally get on with my shower. I hope Scott got a lot of dishes done in those "20 seconds".

Good News!

We have decided we are coming home to America! It's good news for us, but Scott's bosses are wringing their hands and his neck. We are finishing up our contract here which ends at the end of June and then we are going back to Utah.
So what is our next step? We wish we knew exactly, but we feel like we should go home and be closer to family so with some faith and prayers, we are sure that the rest will work out great. Things are already falling into place; miracles that help us know we are doing the right thing.

Christmas in March :(

I know nobody really wants to know about Christmas in March (which is why I cheated and changed the posting date), but here are the highlights:

Our tree was small, but we were happy to have some sign that it was Christmastime since this country only slightly understands the commercial part.

Our ward Christmas Party. Sophie was Mary and Meili was an Angel. And Santa was

Chinese this year! (He must have just been Santa's helper)

I taught the Relief Society (church women's organization) how to make pies. The one on the right everyone calls Momma Goose because she is like the momma of the whole ward. I must say that those pies were pretty awesome. I tweaked an apple pie recipe and I hate to toot my own horn, but "toot, toot" it was yum-o.

Us enjoying our AWESOME Christmas, which included SWEET packages from America. Anyone who has lived so far from home understands how amazing packages can be to lift one's spirits.

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!