Holiday update 2011

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Time again for my annual update! We have seen some old firends from Xiamen this year, as Michael spent a month at XiaDa this spring with students from Canisius College, and we also welcomed Tian to Buffalo/Niagara Falls. Thomas is now 15, Helen, 10 and Sophia 6. We are contemplating going after another China year after Thomas leaves for collge -- stay tuned!

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Post script -- Life in "Meiguo"

I happened to notice that we are still getting a lot of hits every day to the site....I am having trouble weaning myself from blogging , too....
I wanted to introduce our newest member of the family -- Merton the 7 week old Beagle..!!!


In an effort to really do this American culture thing right, we have gotten ourselves a dog -- well, Helen thinks its her dog! He is sooooo cute that it makes up for the housebreaking efforts which are akin to potty training a baby!



While he sleeps -- we have been reorganizing the house, getting bunk beds, having a yard sale, trying to walk to the supermarket instead of drive, searching for "real Chinese food", and looking forward to lots of visitors coming up....

In short, we are doing well -- the big kids are in day summer camp -- Thomas as a counselor-in-training and Helen as a camper. Sophia and I are reorganizing our lives and watching the puppy, Michael is finding his office again and all of us are enjoying speaking English and telling stories about China. Buffalo is beautiful in the summer time and helping me to put off thinking about the onset of winter.

Its the final week before the Olympics -- looking forward to hearing lots more from China in the weeks ahead.

The journey home

The journey home...for us, and for my mother, Barbara, who found her way to eternal life yesterday at 2 am, thankfully 18 hours after we made it to her bedside.

She was able to acknowledge that she knew us before she began to slip away, and died very peacefully surrounded by her family.

While we are profoundly saddened, I am taking comfort from her life and her faith, and feeling very blessed to have made it home to her.

This is a solemn postscript to a blog which has been about living life, and about living it to the fullest. My mother was the person whose abundant love made me capable of that.

I want to thank everyone who has been following along, my family and friends and people whom we have never met, for all your support and love.

This is my last post, I think. I am ready to begin the next stage of my journey with a little more privacy. But doing this blog has brought me a lot of insight and we have no regrets..My sister has done a beautiful blog about my mother's final weeks..the link to it on http://www.caringbridge.org/ is above.

Blessings to all our readers...

Off we go

Of course it has just occurred to me that it is almost time to say goodbye to this blog and all of my readers! It has been an interesting exercise for me to try and capture some of our experiences this way, and we are amazed at the people who don't know us but who have been tuning in anyway. So thanks for your interest. I hope that some of you are crazy enough to give this a try. For the kids and certainly for ourselves, it has been a great ride, and none of us will ever see China, or the US fin the same way again. Now its time to figure out how to integrate it all into our "normal" lives, a daunting task from where I sit this morning..

I am sure I have at least one more post inside me...but 3 airplane rides, a night in a hotel and a 7 hour ride to my folks stand between me and access to the computer again. And I think I will find myself quite preoccupied when I arrive in Michigan to see my mom. So I guess it is time to sign off for now.....all the best! (Check back in a few days for a post script:)