Back To School

This week marks the first week of my second semester in college here learning Chinese. I’ve had the past 5 weeks off as a winter break and am now back in school. To give you a picture of our school, it’s kinda like High School Musical, because we run up and down the hallway’s singing and dancing with strangers in perfect unison, the only difference is that we sing in Chinese. O.K. that’s all made up, if it were true I would drop out immediately.

Some of you may already know, but my brother and his wife are expecting their second child!!! This is incredible news and we’re really excited for them. However we will miss them as they are planning to go back to the States to have their baby, but will then return. Last semester we were in the same class learning together and had a blast so I’m sad to have to continue it alone.

I will write more about my new class in the next post.

Sydney story. So we have good friends of ours that are leaving this week to have their baby in the States as well. And we had a little going away dinner with them. We made some signs and put them up to decorate a bit (there son is Sydney’s best friend, his name is Joshua). So Sydney helped Heather make signs and hang them. When Sydney was going to bed she turned towards the wall and waved to the signs and said “Goodnight Signs”. So cute. It was weird when the signs replied “You too Sydney”.

With hope,
Matt, Heather, Sydney and little Aubrey

A Year Following The Blog

So it's been a year since I started tracking our blog's visits. I wanted to make sure more people then my mom were coming to see our site. So anyways I thought I would pass on this info to our readers. Here's a look at our blog's stats over the past year:


Visits - 2807
Pageviews - 4109 (a pageview is when a person clicks on a previous post)
Visitors - 868 (this is how many different people have come to the site)

Top site that people come to our site from:
1. http://JeremyJennyLevi.blogspot.com, which was 220 visits.

People from 41 countries have come to our site.
The top three countries with most visits;
1. Colombia
2. China
3. South Korea

People from 45 states have come to visit our site.
The top three are;
1. Minnesota
2. Colorado
3. Montana

62 people are subscribed to our blog.

Aubrey's birthday was our busiest day.

We have uploaded 7 videos to YouTube.
In total they have been viewed 894 times.

"The last 4 months in China" is our most popular video with 175 views.

That's it for stats, but what would a Peterson post be without a story about Sydney. We recently posted on the right side of our blog a link to some pictures. If you saw the picture of the melted plastic fork on the light bulb... here's the story. I was putting Sydney to bed one night and as we walked into her room I could smell burning plastic. I had no idea where it was coming from so I walked around a bit and couldn't find anything. I turned and saw that the lamp next to Sydney's bed had something in it. I walked over and looked into the lamp and saw a melted plastic fork sitting on the bulb. I didn't know if Sydney had put it in there or if it was put in there earlier when her and Joshua were playing. So I didn't want to accuse her without knowing what happened. Then Sydney asks me something like this "Can I see my spoon?". Granted it was a fork, but either way I knew that what had happened was intentional. Well hopefully next year is as good as this one.

'Till next time,
Matt, Heather, Sydney and little Aubrey

Life After Chinese New Year

Wow, it has been a long stretch since I last wrote. Sorry about that. Well since my last post we have finally seen the end of the Chinese New Year. As you may recall it lasts for 15 days. The last couple of nights had some good fireworks shows, Heather took Sydney (I stayed back with Aubrey) to our neighbor’s roof (on the 24^th floor), so they had quite the view. Other than that we have continued doing little odds and ends around the apartment with our time off.

One thing we did was move the bunk bed that I set up last week into Sydney’s room. When Aubrey is ready for her big girl bed, both her and Sydney will share the room and bunk bed. Getting it into the girls’ room and the old bed out was not without incident though. Moving it in and setting it up was fine, but it was the other bed that was a hassle and a half. I couldn’t get it through the door, that discovery came a mere 30 MINUTES AFTER STARTING! So I cracked and did what I didn’t want to do, I took the door of the hinge. It then took another 5 minutes to discover that it still wouldn’t fit through the door. During this time my wife (who is so sweet) had her own opinions on how I should try to move it, which at the time wasn’t needed. I remembered that when I first moved the old bed I took it apart, so I eventually did that. After I finally got everything set up and cleaned up Sydney came into the room to see the bunk bed and to play on it. She asked if she could climb the ladder and I told her she could. When Sydney started to climb the ladder it was a little wobbly, she climbed down and said “It’s not perfect Daddy”. Thanks Sydney that was the “perfect” ending to a horrible afternoon.

Like I mentioned above we officially ended the Chinese New Year, but I wanted to add a couple funny things about life here while this is going on. The kids here were one thing that we had to be careful of during the past two weeks. In the States kids don’t use fireworks as young as they do here and the ones they use here are much more powerful. A couple of times in which I was scared for my life was when I would be walking down the street minding my own business, when a group of kids would run past me covering their ears. It is at that point that you start to think of all the little things you enjoy in life and the people you love as you scan the nearby area looking for whatever explosive was about to go off… making sure it didn’t end you. I’m exaggerating, but only slightly, because this scenario would play out, but generally when the fireworks would go off it would just be really, really loud… and leave you soiling your pants. I’m glad this 2 week stretch is behind us.

Also, it would be funny to see these Chinese fireworks vendors. Because, they would have a massive table set up on a street corner. When I say massive, I really do mean massive, and stacks of firework barrels taller than me. What was funny is that as they’re selling their fireworks they‘re sitting their chain smoking right over there table. It’s an image like this that will make you pick up your pace as you scurry past them.

Until Next Time,

The Petersons

P.S. It’s been almost a year since I started tracking my Blog’s visits. I will update you on some of our first year numbers in the next couple of days, but here’s a sneak peak. Did you know we have had people from 41 countries visit our website, besides the U.S. the top three countries with the most visits are; Colombia, China, and South Korea. Check out these stats and more in the next post!