Christmas in October!

I have some very good excuses for being a bit lax on blogging this past week!! Not only were we extremely jet lagged, but our shipment finally arrived after 14 weeks!!! We were so excited to dig through all of the boxes and find treasures that had been packed since July!! We were very excited that almost everything made it to China that was supposed to come. So far I have only discovered that we are missing three things - a shelf unit for the kids' toys, El's favorite princess blanket, and my pizza cutter! That being said, we were the lucky recipients of some huge blankets and comforters that were supposed to go into storage because we have very little storage here!! My ayi made out with three boxes of goodies that we just couldn't find a place for, including my king comforter set from the states (dog hair and all!!). She is so funny, I would ask her to look through the things I didn't want, but she never even looked, she just took! She was so thankful for these items - I'm assuming she will pass things out to her family! She even took some of Danny's clothes which I'm sure are huge for her family, but maybe she will hem and sew to make them work!! I was happy to give all of this stuff to a good home - in the states, no one would be particularly excited to get 2 matching cereal bowls or a small set of silverware, but here, they take what they can get - especially if it is from America. It's interesting though because probably everything I gave her was actually made in China - just payed for in America.

We had a total of 127 boxes arrive along with my "big red chair", 1 king mattress, 3 twin mattresses, shelves, and outside toys like the picnic table, slide, and teeter totter. They brought the first truck at 9:00 and when they finished unpacking I was overwhelmed, but thought it was manageable, then, they said the second truck was arriving in about 1 hour. I was scared and kicking myself for bringing so much "stuff"!! In the end, it all worked out and we are so happy to begin making this feel like "home"! I even made an e-mail buddy with the guy coordinating the movers and translating. He loved that I was a teacher and he "adored" my accent (what accent you might be asking - I'm not sure!!!)! Anyway, he asked if we could e-mail and I could help him with his English!

Here are some pictures of the chaos that occurred two days after we got back from the states!!

This is half of the boxes that we unpacked. It was amazing, by the next morning, all of the boxes were gone!!