Is Your Family Complete?

Visit this link to learn about some amazing children in China who are waiting for a home.

http://www.asiahope.blogspot.com/

A Visit to the Healthworks Museum

This was not the world's best maintained museum, but Jiejie and Meimei had a blast learning about their bodies, from climbing a wall of epidermis as dust mite wannabes to playing the giant came of Operation with heavy rubber organs and kitchen tongs. And where else would you find an acrylic chair stuffed with cigarette butts?

At Play in the Fields of Mr. Ranger Man

This has been the summer of travel - not too far or too fast or terribly exotic, unless you count the dinosaur bones at the mall restaurant in Kansas, but it has been rare and wonderful savoring so much of the season in the company of the girls. I'd like to post some photos of our travels, from the famous fat duck of Lake of the Ozarks to the fireside at Jellystone Park at the reunion of the "China Sisters," the girls who came home from Laibin Xingbin Social Welfare Institute in the group with Jiejie, but the photo link from the sometimes aptly named Picasa seems troubled right now until it receives more money to buy more space. It matters not that the photos are in the computer.

Oh, and the very amateurish slide show at the bottom of the page, created a couple of years ago, before Meimei, seems to be turned on its side. Wordpress this is not.

Stay tuned for the China Sisters slideshow. Maybe.

Talking in Her Sleep

Jiejie screamed out in her sleep the other night, rather angrily: "Brown head!"
It took a while to figure out that she was talking about Meimei, whose hair is definitely a toastier hue than Jiejie's inky curtain of hair.
Now Meimei has a new nickname, but finds it hard to believe her hair and eyes are not black like her big sister's.
And as long as Jiejie continues to talk in her sleep every time you poke her with a fingertip or kiss her on top of her head, we might have a clue to what's going on in there.

The Loney Ranger

Meimei has coined a versatile word: "loney."
When she wants to be alone, she says, "I is loney."
When she wants someone to join her, she says, "I is loney."
And when I went back to work today after being with the girls almost nonstop for a long vacation/furlough combination, Meimei was loney again.

Jiejie was just grumpy, but on Sunday night she had the perfect solution. When she grows up, she will work next to me, and do the same job I do. I suggested she might want to be a ballerina or a brain surgeon or perhaps do something more interesting (and lucrative, and secure) than editing, given the endless possibilities available to her, but she was resolute.

"Do you think after a while I could ask for a desk right next to yours?"

"Of course, " I told her. "Why do you want us to have the same career?"

Jiejie said, "It's so nice when you bring home new books. New books are a good thing, right?'

I couldn't disagree with that.