Go Twins!

Riley is lucky enough to be watching the Twins as i type this...a friend has a slingbox which allows them to watch it real-time. There are quite a few people from Minnesota in our school so i think there were going to be quite a few people over watching. I am home waiting for a few deliveries-one of which just arrived.
In addition to air purifiers, we have been told it is good to have a lot of plants to help with cleaning the air. So last night, the four of us went to a HUGE local flower mart and got 4 large plants with nice pots. we did a little bargaining but i think overall we got a good deal. They look really nice in the house so now the key will be just keeping kellan's hands out of them! He is pretty good-we just have to make sure to tell him NO right away!
Today is the first day of our holiday break.....we had workshops the last 2 days on Understanding by Design (you educators reading this probably know what that is!). anyway 2 days and no time in our room later-we are ready for a break! i think after our next delivery ( a little fridge for drinks) we are going to take off and go down to the pearl market again. we promised kieran we would take him there so he could use the rest of his birthday money to get some toys. Riley decided he and kellan would come as well and look around. maybe we will go over to the Temple of Heaven --we will see how much energy we have.
we are going to dog-sit today. A colleague of mine and his wife and kids are going for an overnight trip and we had told them we would help them out whenever they needed it. They brought the dog over a few hours ago----i thought kellan was going to tackle to poor golden retriever (MIA).....he ran so fast to him! So it will be fun to spend some time with a dog again.....i know it will make us miss Juddy more, but we will still enjoy it.
Tomorrow we are off on a camping adventure with about 40 other people-it should be great fun as long as the weather cooperates. They say it has never rained in Beijing as much as it has the last month--so we will see. It has been cool in the mornings...and warms up in the afternoons. We are all still wearing shorts and probably still will until we could see our breath (I think I could see my breath the other morning when i was running :( ) but winter will come soon enough here. Everyone is tellling us how bleak and dreary winter is...gets us really excited for that! I am sure we will survive.....it will give us the opportunity to go out and explore indoor places i guess.
The corn is in a new phase-i will have to get a picture of it. It is now off the cobs...they use some old machine and enter each cob one by one and then the kernals are returned to the road and s pread across one entire lane to dry. I guess 2 weeks ago they were really worried b/c some of the corn was getting moldy b/c of all the rain. So they ended up covering it at night with a tarp and then taking the tarp off during the day. For the local villages, that is their only means of income and they would not be able to feed their kids if they lost that crop. I hope it all turned out ok b/c it has been dry since.
Kieran and Kellan are doing well. Kieran has a good buddy from school who lives right across the street....they can't get enough of each other. Fight like brothers too! Owen is his name...his parents are from Connecticut. They have been here for a year and will prob ably stay another year and then return to the states. His other good buddy is a girl, Taylor. There are very few girls his age around here-so he feels right at home b/c that is the way it was in Delano.
Kellan is in some playgroups....Tuesdays we have some kids here and a couple other days he goes to the little kids house. Jack, Kya, and Locke are three of his buddies---once again boys boys boys! (yes kya is a boy). It is so good for him and our ayi for him to play with others. Probably breaks up the day for everyone! I think he gets pretty worn out during the day b/c he has been sleeping like a log. i thought maybe putting the boys in one room would cause problems, but i don' t think kellan wakes up at all during the night so that is great!
Riley is doing well...he is in heaven b/c last Sunday he got to go and buy a guitar so he is back to playing in the evenings. He is getting really good-fun to see him progress.
I am doing well also-got to go out and venture with another MN girl, Mary, on Saturday. We went down to a "lake" called HoHai.....just walked around the shops to look around. We even sat and had tea with a few ladies in their shop. I am not a tea drinker at all-but i choked it down! It actually wasn't too bad...some kind of fruit tea. We ate at a pretty good vietnamese place.....where i continued to struggle with chopstix! Then we were going to head towards starbucks to get a hot chocolate to walk around with when we heard some guy singing some really good music so we popped into a local bar where nobody was and sat on the couch, had a drink, and listened to music and talked. It was great--it was a Chinese guy mainly singing American songs. Some Chinese girl came up and took her picture with me and asked meif i was the girl from Prison Break. I don't watch the show so i don't know who she was talking about, but she thought i looked just like her. I got a chuckle out of that!
Sounds like the Twins just lost..too bad:( Oh well....maybe next year.
Gotta go shower before we head out on another adventure!
WE hope you are all doing well...
love
The DuBois' Family