Seeing The Unseen

Proverbs 16:9 The heart of a man plans his way, but the Lord establishes His steps. I am a planner. Left to myself I greatly value planning, preparedness, logic, and order. Spontaneity and flexibility are not traits I come naturally by. Neither is trust in other people. Before I had children I used to have my calendar memorized. I knew exactly what classes I was taking, what homework needed to be done, when my vacations were, what I planned to do. I had my life planned out at a very young age. I mean who knows what they want to be before they hit college? And even more rare than that, who meets the love of their life in high school? That would be me. By high school I was very adept at planning my steps, I could see what I wanted in front of me, and I worked hard for it. Some of those traits are things to be valued. My gift for logic ( bestowed on me by my dad) has and continues to be very useful. The ability to work hard to achieve a goal is also something I'm not as...

The other day after spending the day at the hospital with baby Silas & Mckenzie, my friend Maria and I had a few minutes to go adventuring down a little side alley that I have always wanted to visit with camera in hand. The locals tell me it's too touristy these days, which I suppose means I'm a bit of a tourist at heart because I had so much fun wandering with my camera and no kids attached. I get endless entertainment out of Chinese food. There are so many things that I see here that we simply don't have in America. Add to that the fact that Chinese people eat almost everything, and anything. There are no parts of the animals that are sacred; pit snouts, chicken feet, cow tongue, and everything in-between. Street food vendors are all over the place in China. Much of it smells appealing and some of it you couldn't pay me to eat. Some of it is normal fare like fruits and vegetables and some of it is a bit more exotic.I am not very brave ...

So this week was Chinese National Holiday. A wonderful time in which we get 7 days off to celebrate communism and explore our surrounding world! It really always comes at a nice time while the weather is still warm, with that slight fall chill to it, perfect for adventuring! We do lack the vibrant fall colors of New England fall, but at least the weather cooperated for the week so we could have fun. My wonderful sister-in-law obligingly scheduled her C-section during this holiday so we were blessed to have my niece Ella along for all of her adventuring while mommy, daddy, and baby Silas adjusted to the world. It made all of our adventures just that much more fun to have Ella around. Everywhere we went, people assumed Ella&Robbie were twins and Maddie was our accidental 3rd one. We created quite a stir! I did not previously know the Chinese word for twins (shuangbaotai) but I picked it up very quickly this week after figuring out what all the gestures and chatter wer...