my 2 peas in a pod!

i love this, they said mommy mommy take our picture! for some reason they enjoy swinging on the same swing together!

my 2 little tikes are the best of playmates these days! they even make us feel guilty if we punish one of them and the other one tries to console the one in trouble from the evil parents

but nonetheless they are best buddies and it is a delight, we couldn't be more pleased and thankful for their friendship!

even though i set them up at 2 tables, they wanted to be at the same one!

playing games with our princess neighbor

a little girl in our building was all dressed up for a performance on Children's Day and the kids thought she was a Princess, so that's what we call her

She has come over a few times to play, she practices a little English and the kids a little Chinese...

this day, they played an intense game of duck, duck, goose, followed by an intense game of hide and seek, followed by 'exercising like mommy'...and then play shopping i think! haha!

Princess neighbor above!

Josiah hiding?!

Princess' friend!

graffiti fun

here we are showing some self expression :) and encouraging all our little xiao pengyou-s around here to graffiti haha! this wall at the playground is fun to practice our letters, review our bible story, just scribble...

this little kid was super excited about his first graffiti experience!

these kids crack me up!

their dress up choices are quite hilarious- josiah wore ej's butterfly & EJ wore Jo's Super Why cape and 3 pairs of his underwear...haha...check out Thomas on her!

this is what chinese class looks like sometimes!

our sweet friend Nancy comes over 1-2 x a week and gives us private tutoring

we actually really like it- we just play and practice Chinese at the same time

sometimes it doesn't really look very organized :) but i promise we are learning!

she is going home for her summer break and then her internship so we won't see her until November :( we will definitely miss her and we are so thankful for all our classes with her!

recent artwork

this top one was from school, his teacher was helping him be a bit more meticulous about staying in the lines than i am
i wanted to share and document how he is using so many different colors these days and actually trying to stay in the lines more...before his love for coloring/painting was expressed in just scribbling one color everywhere

and i thought these were pretty good letter tracings :) he really doesn't like practicing writing his letters much, he likes practicing his name but not really the rest of the alphabet :)

super baseball josiah!

i love how daddy is teaching him to grip the bat and jo is intently listening!
and here his intense facial expressions!

here is is playing super josiah on his swing!

sand pit playground

we thought we'd try to jump over to Renmin Gongyuan for a little fun before school lets out and it's packed everyday! we were pleasantly surprised with even fewer people than expected so we loved it! the lady at the sandpit even remembered us, haha, said we came in the Winter and took our shoes off! haha! what a name we have made for ourselves!

EJ is cracking me up whatever she is doing with her feet here!

very strange foreigners indeed!

so it's hot and our pool isn't open yet and other than our apt, there is no air conditioners around here cooling us off...so we bought this big basin and decided to create our own kiddie pool
we knew we'd attract lots of attention because we are always out of the ordinary around here
over all we were very kind to all 50 or so folks who came over to have a short or long peak, give us their opinions how in 90 degree weather our kids getting wet was going to make them severely ill...etc...etc...but our sweet workers in our complex lovingly and willingly filled up our pool for us and we enjoyed ourselves for almost 2 hours! yippie yay for large basins that cost 3 dollars!

ej couldn't quite figure out how to blow the bubbles, it was either eat them or stick them up her nose, haha!

our new friends

these are more action shots of us playing with our new friends, um, sorry they weren't really into posing for shots, but we enjoyed going to their house and playing with all their various kiddy vehicles and other toys and not really toys and eating some donkey and coloring...coloring was interesting because they wanted us to tell them what color to color everything on the picture...interesting...anyways, 2 little girls, 4 and 2, we just call them big sister, little sister