At least Kai and Shen are. China is the number one destination for their imaginary travels. Sometimes China is in their bedroom, sometimes it's in the kitchen, sometimes they never actually get there, but simply journey endlessly towards it around the hallway/kitchen/livingroom loop that makes up the main part of our home (I recall the actual flight feeling endless in this way on both our actual trips there). This morning they took turns driving one another to China on one of their ride-on cars. The passenger would keep his feet up and the driver had to bear the rider's weight like a rickshaw driver. Kai is much more willing to drive Shen around this way than visa versa, but they do pretty well at taking turns.


Occasionally it's necessary to stop and check your map for directions...


As I recall, the passenger legroom on their ride is about the same as on the flights we had too...


*Funny side note: the jammies Kai is wearing in these photos are the ones we dressed him in the first night we met him. He found them in his room and insisted on wearing them all day today. They fit him quite well two years ago, but are starting to look a little short on him I think.

Oh my gosh, it's taken me until the 28th to make this post. Was Christmas really three days ago? I've got a bit of a holiday hangover going on. I get two weeks off from work at Christmas, so we were thinking this would be a nice relaxing time. Somehow that hasn't happened yet, but I haven't given up hope. So what have we been doing? Well let's see...

Christmas morning was actually very, very nice. Somehow Kai managed to sleep in his own bed until 8:15 AM. I think this is a new personal best, and was a very much appreciated Christmas gift to me and Tina. He came into our room very quietly and seemed to have forgotten it was Christmas. We reminded him that Santa had probably came and suggested he go check. He quietly went down the hall to see and was very excited to find the presents under the tree. Santa had set out a small Brio type train set for each boy made up of the letters of their name.

We let Kai play with this and the stuff in his stocking while we waited for Shen to get up. Shen appeared a few minutes later and we basically got to repeat the same little moment of discovery with him.

The little boys stayed busy with their stocking loot while we waited for everyone else to get up.

Cameron and his girlfriend Brittni came at 9:00 AM and we opened the presents under the tree. Stuff-wise, I'm glad to say we managed to go pretty light this year. Kai and Shen got some new cars and trucks, some clothes, we got them each a nice baby doll. It's funny though what ends up being the most played with toys, Kai latched onto a little $3 pair of toy binoculars and has been carrying them around constantly. For our extended family we bought little souvenirs while we were in China last August and it was really fun to finally give these gifts.

As most years, we had my mom here with us for Christmas eve and morning. After we finished the tree we had a really nice breakfast casserole which we prepare the night before then just have to throw in the oven for an hour in the morning. This with mimosas makes an absolutely perfect Christmas breakfast and is super easy to prepare.

The award for "The Most Horrible Gift to the Little Boys" goes to my dear brother Mark, who I'm sure worked pretty hard at taking this honor. One year when Cam and Ben were little he gave them big plastic swords that lit up and made awful noises. This year's gifts were on par with the swords: a pair of 18" military jets laden with missiles that are covered in flashing lights and have an amazing number of truly obnoxious digital recordings.

To top it off, they are mounted on a pistol-grip handle so they function perfectly as giant guns! Somehow these presents managed to be the last ones under the tree to be opened. The packaging they came in was almost worse than the actual toy. There were 12 phillips screws that had to be removed to extract the toy from the box! When asked what their favorite toy they received was, the answer was, "Airplane!" We let the boys take these with them when we went to my sister's family's home later in the day for dinner, but somehow they disappeared upon our arrival back home. Nobody has asked about them, and now three days later I'm pretty confident these won't be making another appearance here.

Usually by the end of Christmas day I'm ready to be rid of the tree. I've read a number of blogs by people who actually had their trees down by then, but our tree went up so late this year and is still so fresh that I'm sure we'll have it up till New Year's day at least. After all, Christmas isn't truly over till the 6th. So our plan was to enjoy a lingering Christmas, and spend some time getting things organized around the house. That plan derailed a bit the night of the 26th. Kai and Shen were playing around as usual, but then they were in the bathroom messing around and we heard water running. We called to them to shut off the water, but there was no answer. We called again, no answer. Again we called, this time they both came out of the bathroom and out to where we were in the living room. We could still hear water running so we told them to go shut it off. They gave us a blank look like we were crazy. Then Tina says, "that's not the sink running." I got up to go see, and sure enough, it wasn't the sink. The toilet was full to the brim and spilling over, flooding the floor with nearly an inch of water. I shut off the valve and got the plunger out, but the plunger had no effect whatsoever. We filled the tank and tried flushing again, but there was none of the usual "action" one hopes for. more plunging, more plunging... nothing. This was one good clog. The interrogation of short people promptly began. "What did you put down the toilet??!?" - - blank stares.

So it was off to bed with them, and then a few more rounds of futile plunging. Finally we gave up and resolved to pull the toilet up the next day. You know what? It is impossible to make pulling up a toilet a child centered activity. But I got the toilet up and cleared out. In doing so, I learned that you cannot flush, or clear with a plunger, a dixie cup. I cleaned up the bowl and the tank as best I could, but in the end couldn't bring myself to putting a 30 year old 5 gallon a flush toilet back in. So it was off to Home Depot to shop for toilets. This ended up extending the project another full day as I don't know the first thing about shopping for toilets. So our bathroom looked like this for another 24 hours...

We ended up getting a pretty standard unit and installed it pretty easily, and now, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas! The bathroom has a new throne...

Ho Ho Ho!

Twas The Night Before Christmas,
And all through the house
were the tracks and the trails
of one Stinky Mouse!

It's been a busy week here at the Stinky Mouse Head Office. Baba, Kai and Mouse dropped off our Christmas cards at the post office this afternoon, so they'll have a December 24th post mark on them. That's as close to on time as we could get. It's been a glorious sunny day, which is a nice reprieve from the torrential rains we've had most days lately. Nai-Nai (Grandma) is here to celebrate with us, the stockings are all hung. The wrapping is yet to be done, but it feels pretty close to "all being right with the world!"

We wish you all a Very Merry Christmas! 聖誕快樂 Sheng Dan Kuai Le!

Today was Kai's 5th birthday. I can't tell you how ready he was for this day. Having celebrated Shen's birthday less than 3 weeks ago, he was very excited to have his own Birthday celebration. Tina cooked up a huge dinner of Chinese food. Kai had several helpings of egg drop soup, (his favorite!) and he really enjoyed opening his presents. Shen was a little put out that the party seemed to be all about Kai this time, but he held up pretty well.
If you look closely at the picture above you can see that Tina also made Kai a fantastic "Stinky Mouse" cake! I think you can also see that Kai was very happy with it!

Today was the day to get the tree. We always get a "real" Christmas tree. Not a live tree. Tina and I tried that once when we were younger, but the tree eventually died after we replanted it. Besides, The last thing we need is more trees in our yard, there's a long list of trees we want removed. I have at times been sorely tempted by the newer artificial trees, especially the pre-lit ones. But even the best ones I've ever seen look more like giant bottle brushes than trees. We have bought trees off of lots in the past, and for a good part of my childhood my family lived in a place where this was pretty much the only local option. But we live in tree country where they grow like weeds and cut trees are part of the local economy. I also heard somewhere that most artificial trees end up in landfills within 5 years. This is probably propaganda from some Christmas Tree Growers Association, but I know my tree will be hauled off by the Boy Scouts and turned into compost to be used in the local parks.

So, today we headed out to get the tree. this is later than we usually get the tree, but to be honest, it's feeling a bit early. We are a little worried how it's going to be with Shen and the tree. To be fair, we're worried about Kai & Shen and the tree. This is Kai's third Christmas with a tree and he's done fine the last two years, but he and Shen together are sometimes more than just a little naughty.

Besides getting the tree a bit later this year, the other thing we changed up was where we went to eat on the way. The last several years we have always gone to a funky little country market called Everybody's Store to get these great deli sandwiches they make there. This year we decided to breakfast on our way to the tree farm instead of lunch afterwards, so we went to our favorite little breakfast place, The Olde Town Cafe. There's always a line to get in, but they have a little play corner with toys where the little boys can play while we wait for a table and we had coffee while we waited. We didn't get that early of a start so we had fed them before leaving the house - oatmeal for Kai, Cheerios for Shen (this is what they each usually eat each morning), but we ordered them a pair of eggs over easy and a teddy bear pancake plate to split. I was impressed with how much they both put away. Ben and I both got the deluxe home fries with eggs (No. 11 1/2 on the menu) which is absolutely huge. I was glad we weren't able to park close to the cafe so we got a little walk in afterwards.

Turns out we all got a little more walking in as well. The tree farm we like wasn't running their hay wagon rides out to the trees and we were following Ben in search of this tree. He amazes me. Ben has a very strong opinion as to what kind of tree we get. At 17 I'm just happy he's willing to come along with us on this outing, but he is full on into it! We followed him out through 170 rows of trees in search of the Perfect One. Kai & Shen were both very much into it too, and suggested many candidates to us. As we have absolutely no room for a tree it was agreed we were looking for one as skinny as possible. However, Ben and Tina both wanted one as tall as possible. Seems though that the taller trees get the wider they get as well. Still, we found one we all agreed was the very best one, and managed to tie it down on top of the minivan. I always worry about driving 50 miles an hour down the Mount Baker Highway with a tree held to the top of my vehicle by bailing twine. I've never had one fall off yet, but the effect of this form of transport seems to somehow cause the tree to posthumously grow to about double it's size in the field. Still we managed to trim it up and fit it in the living room. Here's a little slideshow of our outing...

I am very pleased with myself! I have wanted to do these little books for some time now. Finally about a month ago I found a program for digital scrapbooking on the Mac called iScrapbook. It is a pretty easy program to use and has some really nice tools for doing basic scrapbook layouts. Then I bought some Asian graphic sets from scrapandtell.com to use as background elements. The next step for me was to choose who I wanted to use for printing. I looked around at a several different services online and chose Shutterfly.com because they do a simple full-bleed layout specifically for scrapbooking. They have good documentation on how to format the pages and the cover graphics, which I was glad

Last night the Tivo recorded a program on our Canadian channel called "China-Canada: Hand in Hand" CBC's programming guide describes it as a joint Olympic celebration gala marking the one-year count-down to the Beijing 2008 Olympics. It was interesting to watch for us mainly because it reminded us so much of the giant spectacle music variety "specials" that were on TV in China pretty much continuously while we were there. There was other stuff on too, but if you channel scanned at any point in time you would almost always come across at least one of these giant stadium shows with singers and dancers and various performers. This show on CBC (filmed in Vancouver) was identical in format to the ones on CCTV in China, especially on our last trip as they were all celebrating the upcoming Beijing Games.

We were watching it with the boys and there were singers and dancers and lots of the program was in Chinese, and then a sequence came on of a Tai Chi group performing a very high energy style of Tai Chi that was quite entertaining. As soon as it began, Kai was on his feet performing along. It was so cute I had to get out the video camera. I actually taped him and Shen dancing around through three repetitions of the performance (thanks Tivo!). Kai was very into trying to dance, while Shen was more interested in trying to get a martial arts combat thing going so we held him back a bit while we let Kai do his thing, but you can see how Shen changes the mood of the piece at the end...

Well, we've been doing better on the Advent Candle than I've been doing on the blog this month, but we had a pretty busy weekend to get through. We had a little joint Birthday celebration for Kai and Shen on Saturday. Then at the last minute we decided to go to the Waldorf school's Holiday Faire that morning. It wasn't exactly a last minute decision, we had decided over a week ago that we would not be going to it (which is a big break in tradition for us), but we felt it was just too much for one day. Then on Wednesday night someone from the school called up and asked if I would do a shift of "PocketMan". Tina knew this would be too much for me to resist, and it was. I'll probably write another post explaining PocketMan later this week. Anyway, we went up to the school and had a fun morning. I went up first and Tina waited for my mom, sister, nephew and nephew's friend to arrive, then they all came up to the school together. In addition to Kai and Shen, they had our little friend Mimi with them too. The little kids got to visit the Snow Queen and go to the Gnome Village as well as hear some great live music in the cafe. Then we all came back home for a little birthday celebration. We had cupcakes with candles, I made balloon animals for the kids, the big kids gave the little ones horsey rides and played with them, and we enjoyed general chaos for several hours. It was a very fun time and completely wore all of us out. Kai and Shen were in bed by 6:30 last night and we all slept pretty late this morning.

One of our family traditions is lighting an Advent Calendar Candle every night in December before Christmas. My mom buys one for the boys every year. I remember having them in our house when I was a child and always looked forward to seeing it lit. I always loved it when it was my turn to blow it out. I remember the thrill of seeing the candle getting shorter and shorter until on Christmas eve it was just a tiny stub.

As an adult, I find I find myself feeling somewhat differently about it. First there is the whole open flame thing with young children. Tina and I love candles, we like to burn them for the smell and the soft light, but now with Kai and Shen we use them much less - just not safe. Add to that the promise of being able to blow it out and they can hardly contain themselves. They arch up out of their chairs at the dinner table toward the flame as if they were little moths, puckering and blowing long before it's time to extinguish it. And then when it is time to blow it out they practically put their face into the flame.

On top of that, there's the problem of remembering to light it every night. This should be easier than it seems to be, we sit down at the table for dinner almost every night, but lately we've taken to feeding "The Littles" earlier than the rest of us so we can have actual conversations at the table on occasion. When we do this though we forget the candle. Forgetting to light the candle creates another problem. It means you have to burn it extra long the next night. This usually means we are done with dinner before it's time to blow it out, so we leave it going while we clear the dishes. Inevitably when this happens we forget to blow it out until it burns past a couple extra days. Then you have skip lighting it to catch up, which puts you out of the habit of lighting it so you're behind again and have to burn extra long. We missed tonight, so we're behind already. We'll see how it goes tomorrow...

Everyone knows what Santa is doing on Christmas eve, but I often wonder what he's up to the rest of the year. It seems obvious that he must be the sort of person who keeps up with technology in order to streamline his work, after all, elfin magic can only do so much. Assuming this, I guessed that he probably keeps a blog. I did a Google search to find out and wasn't too surprised to find quite a number of "Santa Blogs" out there. This makes sense I guess, if you take into account the number of Santas you find in most towns. A number of the ones I clicked on had a somewhat commercial feel to them, with ads or products and services for sale which didn't seem quite right to me. There is one though that I really enjoyed reading. It's a very simple blogspot site and includes year round entries that detail his off season life and problems. Apparently there was a labor dispute with the elves that broke out last summer. Fortunately it's been resolved and things seem to be going more smoothly, though there are some production issues in China and India he's working on right now. You can check it out here...
Santa Claus Blog
Periodic Updates From North Pole, Inc. Chairman & CEO Santa Claus

We are getting ready for Christmas here at the Chou Chou Shu head office: lights are up, decorations are out, stockings are hung. No tree yet. There is some concern still about the tree. Well, not the tree exactly, more about Shen and the tree. Actually I'm sure he will do fine with it. Yes he is impulsive and seems a bit naughty, but it's not the kind of naughty that would get you on the wrong list.

So with all this preparation we have also gotten out the collection of Christmas books and have been reading them at bedtime. One of my favorites is The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg. I have been quite skeptical about the movie that came out a couple years ago, but it was on TV the other night so we Tivo'd it. I read the book to the boys a couple times, and previewed the movie before deciding to let the little boys see it. I'll be honest, I prefer the simplicity and understated beauty of the book. The movie does a good job of delivering the message of the book, but it is pretty over the top with the multiple roller-coaster scenes. We did enjoy it though, and Kai was absolutely mesmerized. He is really starting to put together the whole "Christmas Thing". He loves the idea of Santa coming down our chimney and leaving presents. He doesn't have any idea what he might want for Christmas. I tried coaxing him in a convenient direction, "would you like some new train cars to play with?" He answered that he already had trains. After reading The Polar Express he thought a bell would be nice. It's so sweet, he's just in it for the magic, and not the swag. Shen, is just along for the ride this year, but I have no fear that he'll be on top of it all next year.

He was more than happy to visit Santa with Kai the other night. We took them the same night we did the family portraits (two birds/one stone) and they were really into it. Kai was talking about "Ho-Ho" (his name for Santa) and was all about going to see him, right up until it was time to do it. So we had to kind of railroad him at the last minute, but he got over his hesitation and sat for the picture. The mall uses a "natural Santa" which is nice but I thought this year's guy was a little grumpy looking. His demeanor with the boys was very nice though, and they were happy to go see him.

Today Shen turned Four! We celebrated his special day a little quietly with just our immediate family. We had a few presents for him, a cake, and we sang Happy Birthday. We don't know if he's ever had a birthday party before, it's not likely, but there's a lot about his life before us we just don't know. So we decided to start this tradition a little slower with him. We are going to have a joint birthday party for him and Kai next week. Kai will be Five on the 20th, and right now the two of them are so close, and the competition between them is pretty intense, so we decided for this year at least, we would mark each of their special days simply with just our immediate family and have a joint party that was a bit bigger. I'm sure this will change as they get older, but it seems right for now. Kai was really into it today. He was singing Happy Birthday all day, and loved wearing the party hat, but when the presents came out and they were all Shen's he had a brief melt-down. Fortunately there weren't too many gifts and the last one was a tea-set they could share. Shen enjoyed the whole thing, it all seemed very new to him, he didn't know how to open the presents, and he didn't know how to blow out his candles, but he was a quick learner and had a really great day!

My Goodness, right on time. It certainly looks like December outside. Shen got snow for his birthday! I Googled "snow in Xi'an" and found a stock photo of the city wall we toured covered with a pretty dusting, but I don't think they typically get a lot of snow. Still, Shen may have seen it before. Either way, he really enjoyed going out and playing in it with Kai. I got out the sled, and even though we only got a couple inches, we were able to take a few runs down the neighborhood sledding hill.

I won't subject you to looking through all the outtakes from yesterday's photoshoot, but Tina and I were both a bit dissapointed that our of favorite pose/backdrop, of which the photographer took seven shots, there was not one in which we all had a decent expression on our face. We bought the Photo-CD with all the shots on it, so I loaded them all into iPhoto and started looking through them. Cameron is the most photogenic guy I think I know, he pretty much looks great in every photo we've had taken of him, but in the only shot we got of this pose with a decent expression on Kai's face, Cam is looking down at the little brothers, and Shen had a puzzled grumpy look on his face. So I picked another picture of the same pose that had good expressions on them both and moved their heads to the other photo. Cam was actually positioned perfectly so I was able to select just his face and drop it on like a mask; a few smudge strokes to blend in his beard and hair and voila! Shen was a little trickier. I tried the "face-mask" thing but it didn't work right as his head was at a different angle, so I just moved his whole head from the other photo. Now I'm really glad we all wore white shirts, it made Shen's head transplant go much smoother!

Now just switch it to black and white for a more dramatic look, apply a vignette affect and use an oval cropp to lose the yellow duck Kai would not surrender, and check this out...