Learning

Grandpa's making me come over...
Casey has mad photojournalism skills. She took all the pictures!!!
This is how they store their meat. Salted and air dried. This is hanging in the nice man's home.
Public bathrooms. The men's side is always bigger, we can't figure out why.
Village beauty (girl with candied kumquat on a stick)
The grandma to Anne's right enjoyed telling everyone in the village who was the mother and who was the daughter, you should have seen her pantomiming the question to Anne "Did you give birth to Luke?" She hid behind her grand-daughter because she did not think she was pretyy enough to be in pictures. We beg to differ. The lady to Casey's left was the designated "clothes police" who chastised Mike for Luke having only 4 layers of clothes.
This was the kind man who opened his home to a busload of Americans. He followed us around with a teapot in hand drinking right out of the spout! Lots of smiling and giving "thumbs up."
Trouble in Clogs! These boys followed us around asking for more candy and pointing their toy guns and laughing. Sad to tell them, they were not the least bit intimidating.
Everyone in the village is related. This is the town council hall where all family decisions are made by the patriarch.
Chinese potty training. This lady was pleased to show us the practical applications of split pants. They wanted us to get a good shot of his "hidden dragon" but we selected this more modest angle.

Gratitude. To everyone we know and don't know who has volunteered to overnight us Enfamil, or contact Enfamil directly to see if they could ship it, or given us the name of brands in China that are the closest until we get Enfamil, Thank You. When you feel a bit helpless, it's wonderful to know that there are friends old and new and complete strangers who have heard our story, who are trying to think of ways to help. Another parent on the trip is having his father Fed Ex Enfamil to Guangxiou (our next stop). In the meantime, another parent, who's child is the queen of taking solid food, wisely brought enfamil with her, and has given us several packets, which we were able to add to Luke's increasingly nutricious bottles yesterday.

Luke is doing well. He is increasingly alert. He very much prefers to use his feet versus his hands to play with toys (perhaps due to his being swaddled so much, who knows) He has reached out and grabbed Casey's hair twice (just like his big brother at this age) and has been doing things like scratching the sheets to hear the noise, and scratching my beard while I talk to him (obviously Anne did not write this part). Every little step is a gift.

We have discovered he saves most of his alert time for when we are in the room. We figure he is probably rather stimulated when he goes out and he's busy focusing on all the noise and sights. When we attempted to feed him on the outside he smiles really big, laughs, and refuses the bottle (not funny, Luke). When we get him back to the quiet of the room, he takes the bottle willingly and with gusto. We're going to have to spend a lot of time balancing stimulation vs. nutrition.

With everything going as it has we have almost forgotten that we need to see China while we are here. Yesterday, we got out of the hotel room for a while and went to a Chinese Village. It was fascinating. It was like we were instant celebrities, kids and adults came running to look at us (people were particularly intertested in Casey, the Amazon girl with big wall of curly blonde hair) and another 14 year old boy in our group who is white blonde and pushing 6 feet. A very nice man let us wander around his house. Can you imagine welcoming a busload of strangers to just wander about your house? We brought bags of candy and at one point it got a little scary as a giant group of kids scrummed one of our group in an effort to get candy. I (Mike) was put off, until I saw one of the scrummers run over to a little disabled girl in a wheelchair and hand her his candy. Shame on me. You're never to old to learn.

Please keep the emails coming, they are so helpful. We can say for sure that we may be half a planet away, but we haven't felt this close everyone in a really long time.