China Day 4

The food is quite strange.  Green beans and mystery meat just aren't the breakfast of choice for me and I can't seem to stomach the common plate thing.  I guess it is a good fast track to weight loss. :)  

Watching my older girl discover the escalator was pretty funny yesterday because she rode about 1/2 way with her legs stretched out over 3 steps and then nearly fell of at the end not knowing how to take a step.  

I let her drive on the bumper cars and she was just screaming laughing and spinning the wheel so the picture where I am screaming is not an exaggeration.  It was truly that terrifying. :)  

We drove these little cars around and the instructions were for the "best" driver to drive them.  Well my translator has never driven a car so I was in charge.  There was a point when my younger one was close enough to me that she was able to drive if  I would let her.  All week she has been very compliant and obedient so I let her control the wheel.  Little did I know that it would bring out the hidden 16 year old in her and make her want to steer towards all the Chinese people on the sidewalk.  I told her that she didn't get extra dessert if she hit someone. :)  She would push my hand away when I tried to take back over.  It was pretty cute though. 

I think Jamie is having a good time.  She had some adjusting to go from expecting a young girl to getting 2 older boys.  She is seeing however that she is right where she is supposed to be as she is really making a difference in these boys' lives.   One keeps asking her when she is leaving like he is preparing himself for her to go.  It is really sad and touching. Yesterday they both told her that their favorite part of the week was shopping with her.  Is that not so Jaime?  I think it made her day. :)   

My younger girls' new name will be Joy Clark and her mom has a blog (www.adecmusic.com/joy) for her adoption.  The shirt she is wearing in the placement photo (from 2008)  is the same one (and only) shirt she brought to camp. I am not sure she had another shirt before coming here.  She does now and she has new shoes too.  I discovered yesterday that she didn't come with underwear either so we got her some boys underwear from a common clothing bag here at camp.  She looked at it like "what is this for?" so I had to lift the corner of my undies out of the top of my pants to show her.  I saw the light come on in her brain and she put them on.  Not having underwear she didn't seem to notice that they were for little boys and had Lightning McQueen on them.  So many memories.  

Time to start a new day now.  I told the translator to send the girls down when they woke up.  They have both so taken to camp that they are fighting sleeping and then talk during rest time and wake up super early. That poor translator is going to need a week to recover.