Thanks Grandma!!

It only took grandma 4 1/2 months to get Ellie her birthday gift this year!!

The entire first year we were in China we had no problems receiving boxes from the US! We had very dear family and friends who helped us keep sane by sending care packages quite often. We were thankful last year that boxes typically arrived in one week, it rarely took longer than two. An even bigger surprise was that the boxes were in good condition! This year we obviously are not getting as many packages because our family has visited and realize we can find a lot of what we need here (at typically triple the price!)! However, we still get boxes at birthday times and the kids get soooo excited! There is nothing better than coming home from school and seeing a box waiting for you with your name on it. They always know it is love from America!!

This year my mom put El's birthday box in the mail two weeks before her birthday to make sure it was delivered on time. We were also moving at about the same time and I was unsure how delivery would be at our new place so I wanted it to go to our old place! Two weeks came and went, Ellie's birthday came and went, and our move came and went and no box arrived. Ellie was sad, but she understood that grandma had put it in the mail and all we could do was wait. We came back to the US for Christmas and found out the box had made it to Tianjin, but not to our address. Then about a week after we returned to China, mom received the box back - there was all that shipping money down the drain!!

I'm not sure what my mom was thinking, but the next birthday up was Coop's so she put his gift in a box and shipped it over. It arrived in less than 10 days. Ellie thought for sure that her birthday gift would be in there, but instead she found underwear from grandma. This did not go over well - she told me one day she was going to write grandma an e-mail, I got nervous!!

After Coop's birthday, she forgot about not getting her gift yet, and she was pleasantly surprised and a bit confused when her daddy brought it back from America two weeks ago!! This poor gift made it to China twice, but Ellie has said she is glad she was so patient because she loves it! Below she used her American Girl doll book to fix her doll's hair just like hers!! Thanks grandma!!