Merry Christmas!

'Tis the day after Lily's

first Christmas at home.
The gifts are unwrapped.
The guests are all gone.

Empty boxes, dirty dishes,
No turtle doves here.
Hope your Christmas was merry!
Have a happy New Year!

China Sprout

I just added a new link to the sidebar for anyone who is interested. It's the website for China Sprout, a great resource for all kinds of Chinese cultural and educational products. China Sprout also has a "community" section where other resources are available, including news from China and TV listings of China-related programming.

By the way, you may notice a slightly new layout to the blog. Blogger has a new interface that makes it easier to update and make changes to your blog, including new features such as categorizing posts. I may include categories in the sidebar in the future, but that would mean going back and editing our old posts and adding category labels. We'll see how ambitious I get.

Two News Stories

Checking the morning news online and ran across a story about new adoption rules that China has enacted.

Also, this one was in yesterday's Everett (WA) Herald about another family who has experienced their own "red thread to Marysville"...now twice.

My Trusty Assistant

As some of you know, I've been taking violin lessons since February. Lily enjoys listening to me practice and is a very forgiving critic. She applauds after each piece. When she forgets to applaud, I turn to her and bow and say, "Thank you very much," and then she remembers, "Oh, yeah, I'm supposed to clap now," and does. Tonight, however, instead of clapping, she started bowing back to me!

But here is my favorite thing she does now. I'll start my practice session by standing up in front of my music stand. Lily will then disappear from the room to go get one of our folding chairs from the kitchen, and drags the chair to where I am practicing. She will place it carefully in front of me and pat the seat, saying, "Mmmm...mmmm....mmmm....mmm." In Lily language that means, "Sit here, Pop. Take a load off." I do, and she sits down beside me, and the concert continues.