Visitors, Visitors, and Valentine's Day

Hi all!

Happy Valentine’s Day! Thanks for stopping by to check out what’s going on with our family. What’s new with you? Are you doing something new with your hair? It looks great!

Well we’ve had a couple highlights from this past week or so that I wanted to write about, as well as a good friend of ours coming today that we’re really excited to see. So let’s get to it.

So Sydney, Dan, a friend of ours Toby, and I all headed downtown to get some donuts at the local Dunkin Donuts. It was a good time, good food and afterwards Sydney and I headed home. As we entered our apartment complex I could see a couple people standing at the entrance of our building. As we neared I realized that it was Lily’s foster mom… I was instantly nervous/anxious because although we are totally willing to have her see Lily, we thought it would be best if we waited a few months for them to meet (so Lily can settle in) and even then we would have met at a neutral location (not our home) and so you can imagine the worry I felt when she showed up at our house, unannounced (we also didn’t know if she knew where we lived…). Anyways, she was standing there with her husband and told me that they had some things to give to us. I called Heather and we decided it would be okay for her to come up and see Lily.

(Again, it’s not that we were opposed to her seeing Lily, I mean, she did love this girl and raise her for the past year and a half or so. It’s just we don’t want Lily to be confused and make it any more difficult on her then the situation needs to be.)

So her, her husband and son (who’s in college) all went up to our apartment. I was actually shocked at how little Lily reacted to seeing them. She just sat there and watched them file in and after a little bit she went over and sat with her foster mom on the couch. The rest of the time went like that, Lily, seemed reluctant to answer her foster mom’s questions and the dad and brother seemed distant (remember it was the rest of the family that didn’t want to continue caring for Lily after they discovered she had HIV). I did think it was cool that they came though (the dad and brother) but just hard to watch them sit there and not interact with Lily. When they left Lily stood a good ways back from them and returned there waves of goodbye. I hope that means she likes living with us and feels comfortable here. I should also say that the Foster mom was cool in that like 8-10 times she told Lily, “Listen to what your mom and dad say to you” referring to Heather and I.

So something that’s caught on a bit with our family (and was started by Heather) is calling Aubrey and Lily “Shuang Bao Tai”, which means “twins” in Chinese. Lily loves it and many times has said it about Aubrey and her. What’s been funny is when we go outside as a family and Chinese people will notice we have like 80 or so kids and that one of them is Chinese. When they ask about Lily, Heather has been making it into a joke by telling them that Lily and Aubrey are twins. This usually is met by the Chinese person looking at us confused and then correcting us by saying “No she’s Chinese and she’s a foreigner”. We’re hoping at some point this joke will land really well and get some laughs…. It just hasn’t happened yet.

This is getting long but I wanted to end saying that Heather and I had a great Valentine’s Day date last night. We went to a classy restaurant here called Papa John’s Pizza. I’m not sure if you have it in America, but they make pizza and serve it with garlic butter and banana peppers . Afterwards we grabbed some ice cream from a place called Dairy Queen. Again, I’m not sure if you have it in America, but what they do is make ice cream desserts, one of their famous one’s is humorously called a “blizzard”. Afterwards we walked around the Big Goose Pagoda and it was really pretty and all lit up at night. It was a fun time and we were super happy to have some time together. Thanks Dan for watching the kids!

We are excited to say that a good friend of ours, Heidi, is coming to Xi’an today! She’ll be here for 5 days seeing the sights of Xian and visiting with one of her favorite families.

Till next time,
The Petersons