The Odd Family

So our blog has been on a pretty wild ride these past few days, since being entered into this competition (Top 25 expat Moms). Yesterday, we had close to a 1,000 people visit our blog. My first guess was that my mom was just refreshing the page a lot to make me feel good, but in reality we had a friend promote our blog to a pretty big audience and it has brought a lot of new readers to our blog.

And that is good timing, because a week or so ago I was sitting in a grocery store play place with our three girls and was struck with a thought. We are such an odd family. Let me take a minute to introduce you to our odd family.

First off, we have 4 children. In America, that would be no big deal, but in China 2 kids is seen as a lot of kids. So you can imagine how many Chinese people will stop and stare at our family, simply because we are so many. Not only that, but our family speaks in a mixture of Chinese, English, and Chinglish. I only just realized that Sydney (our oldest) uses a lot of Chinese with Lily (our Chinese foster child). Everything from manipulating, trying to trade toys, and coaxing into playing whatever game she’s wanting to play, has the potential to be a conversation done in Chinese. Heather and I have tried to speak with Lily in English so she can learn it, but we too, from time to time, will explain stuff to her in Chinese.

So not only are we twice the size of a big family in China and use multiple languages to navigate through life, but we really don’t even look like we belong together. For example my wife is a gorgeous blonde (think Scandinavian), and I look like a Middle Eastern homeless man. Top that off with our Chinese daughter and we look like we would be strangers walking down the street together. Our second daughter, Aubrey, has curly hair (curly hair skipped both Heather and I, so neither of us have curls) and she has a super wild personality and is borderline crazy. Caleb may be the most normal of us all and he’s only 10 months old (plenty of time to become odd). You could make the argument that Sydney (our oldest) is normal, but as I write that I’m reminded of her quote a couple weeks ago about why she wouldn’t move to Australia, in case you didn’t read it, it was because “THERE’S BEARS THERE!”.

And the last piece, to our odd family, is that Heather’s brother lives with us (think another Scandinavian). Most foreigners living in China have a Chinese helper that they employ, we have Dan. So yeah, when we walk down the street, all 7 of us, I would think we look a bit odd.

And as I sat here pondering all of this I’m filled with a deep sense of gratitude and the realization that I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Till next time,
The petersons