So, now that I've posted every day for a month, what happens next? Well, I'll probably skip a day just because I can. But it actually wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. Some days I found myself skipping over ideas to post about daily happenings. The graphic nature of this blog makes daily entries a bit tougher, but this regimen has helped me build some techniques for faster production.
There was a point around day 5 when I started to panic, but I was able to keep going, and it was actually quite thrilling to get past the halfway mark and suddenly realize it was going to be possible. So, you can expect more frequent postings here on The Chou-Chou Shu Blog, but I don't promise they'll be daily. Not until next November anyway.
Thanks to everyone for reading, and here's your last Fortune Cookie for November...

Wow! Were we ever surprised to find that the Chou-Chou Shu Blog had been singled out as one of the

TOP 10 NABLOPOMO BLOGS STARTING WITH THE LETTER "S"

Good thing we registered it as "Stinky Mouse"! To see the criteria and the other winners, CLICK HERE. Everyone here at the Chou-Chou Shu Head Office is so proud of this achievement and we want to thank everyone who has contributed to our success. With only one day left in November, we are hoping that the power stays on and that we are able to finish this challenge.

Don't worry, loyal readers, we aren't completely selling out here yet, but we have added an Amazon.com store that lists books we know and like, that are associated with adoption or Chinese culture. All profits we earn from this and our CafePress store will be donated to Love Without Boundaries.

If you haven't seen our CafePress store CLICK HERE to check it out.
To visit our new Amazon.com store CLICK HERE.

Observe the dinky table-top tree we had that year for fear that Cam, who was a very busy 8 month old would destroy a full size standing tree. To see Kai's first Christmas Tree Cutting Adventure CLICK HERE!

Thanks to Gwen and Maddy's Mom, Donna, over at the DOUBLE HAPPINESS BLOG for providing us fellow bloggers with content ideas. Be sure to check out her site to see who else is playing this week!

(Note: The WayBack Machine is property of Peabody, and was used without his knowledge or permission.)

I didn't put much stock in the weather reports the other day that were calling for up to a foot of snow here. Our town sits on a little bay off of Puget Sound. Being right at sea level we rarely see more than an inch or two and it never sticks around very long. This is the rule that our county and city public works department use for planning their response to this type of weather. Snowplows? What is Snowplows?

And so we did get that foot of snow, on top of a couple inches of really wet slop. And now that the temperature is hovering in the 20's the roads are one big ice rink out there! They have declared this an official SNOW EMERGENCY! Every school in the county was closed today. I believe Kai's older brother Ben is outside right now doing a snow dance in hopes of it being canceled tomorrow as well. That he will have to make up these days in June does not deter him from hoping for more Snow Days. No school today is worth any future penance which might come due. Yesterday we lost power for about 9 hours as well - so we lived in that semi-dreamstate brought on by the absence of electricity. Today the power has stayed on and we've kept warm and had fun playing in the snow.

Hate making this a weather post, but....

it's 28 degrees out and we've got a foot of snow.

Thought for sure this was the end of the run for Stinky Mouse on NABLOPOMO.

Power went out at 2:00 PM. Came back on briefly at about 9:30 PM and then went out a half hour later. It's 11:00 PM and it's on again so I'm making this post quickly.

Will tell the rest of the story tomorrow -

Check it out! This was the backyard at the Chou-Chou Shu Head Office this morning. The really great thing about it too, is that it covered up all that debris nobody cleaned up after the nasty windstorms last week. To be honest it was pretty icky "snow", and it proceeded to rain off and on all day with the temperature hovering in the lower 30's. They are promising us up to three inches more tonight, but the temp is going to have to drop a few degrees to make it any fun to really play in.
It was really fun seeing Kai's face when Tina opened the curtain in our bedroom this morning. "No!" (snow) he exclaimed. Then he just sat there and looked at it for several minutes. When we came out to get breakfast, Tina dressed him in his snow-suit and he got to go out and walk around in it a bit. Tina is really pleased with this suit as it's virtually brand new and was only $4 at Goodwill. He's wearing his jammies under it in this photo.

It was truly a wonderful Thanksgiving day at the Chou-Chou Shu Head Office!
There was turkey and potatoes and all the requisite dishes that make Thanksgiving dinner the meal it's supposed to be. We got to listen to Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant Thanksgiving Day Masacree (an annual tradition here at The Head Office).
Kai's Aunt Peggy and Uncle Mark made it over the mountains to join us along with Peggy's son Jesse and his girlfriend Allison. Cam and his girlfriend Brittni were here too so that brought the head-count at our table to 10. Tina (not Stinky Tina - see yesterday's post) planned and executed a beautiful feast, and we all had a wonderful day together!
This was the first time in many, many years we didn't spend Thanksgiving with Scott's sister's family in Marysville, and while we missed being with them, it was fun being the hosts this year.
Of course what big family holiday is complete without a little disaster? We had our own little Griswold Family adventure when we discovered the bottom of our hot water heater had gone out sometime around dinner - this has left us with quite a dishwashing job left in the kitchen, but we're coping with that - and really, it was such a great day, not even a minor flood and no hot water could take the shine off of it.
I hope that all of you and your families had an equally enjoyable day.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Who are you?
Where are you?
What are you looking for?

Big existential questions aren’t they?
Yes, but they are also questions we have about you after reviewing some of our sitemeter history.

Sitemeter is one of the coolest little doohickeys people can stick on their blogs. It’s a hit-counter and tells you how many times your site has been viewed, but it also provides interesting statistics and details about your website’s visitors. It can tell you each viewer’s location, operating system, browser type, how long they viewed the site, how many pages they looked at, what website they linked from, and what link they clicked to leave. What’s even more interesting is when the visitor comes from a search engine like Google it gives you the text they were searching on.

Here are some of the recent searches that brought people either here or to Hui-Hui’s World.

Someone in Liverpool was looking for “chinese lantern culture mythology”.

In Cork Ireland someone searched for “prep for children going to hospital”.

Someone in Mountain View CA was Looking for Peter Goodman.
This is the reporter for The Washington Post who wrote the article on baby trafficking in China that I argued with via email over his sensationalized article

Someone in Canada was looking for "i do behold the world".
This is the opening or the Waldorf morning verse.

Someone in Malaysia was looking for “photo of jackie chan wear coveralls on his movie”
It appears as if this person spent a fair bit of time on the site and returned with these searches later; “chan hui hui” and “Hui hui”

Someone forom Pennsylvania was looking for “china adoption pediasure“
We had Kai almost living on this stuff for a while – won’t drink it now.

In Washington D.C. someone searched for “Stinky Tina“ - wrong Tina

From Brookdale, CA we got a hit from someone wanting to know about “”washing stuffed animals stink”.
All I can say is good luck to this person – and DON”T FEBREZE THEM! The ultimate solution of course is to buy multiple’s of your child’s favorite animal (it’s easier if you don’t ever let them have expensive ones) We are actually now operating on Mouse 3.0 with a 4th unit in reserve.

Someone in Bulgaria actually hit us by just googling “stinky”. I really wonder what they were trying to find?

From Bowling Green Kentucky someone was searching for “Going Home Barbie“
And in Massachusetts they wanted “white swan coming home Barbie”
So we’ve got Barbie both “coming” and “going”!

A video Kai loves watching over and over is My Neighbor Totoro. My Neighbour Totoro is a film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki is the Japanese equivalent of Walt Disney. His animation has the distinctive asian styling associated with "anime", but there is a quality to it that transcends most other animation works. All of Totoro is hand drawn, and upon multiple viewings you start to notice how Miyazaki plays with light, shadow and reflection.

But what is the story about? Not a lot really, it's just very beautiful and nice. I think Roger Ebert put it well when he said:
"Here is a children's film made for the world we should live in, rather than the one we occupy. A film with no villains. No fight scenes. No evil adults. No fighting between the two kids. No scary monsters. No darkness before the dawn. A world that is benign. A world where if you meet a strange towering creature in the forest, you curl up on its tummy and have a nap." To read his entire review CLICK HERE.
There are two different versions of this film in the U.S. there is an English dub done by Fox Home Video in 1993. The copyright on this one expired in 2004 and Disney now owns the U.S. rights to the film. They released their own dub last march. I haven't seen the Disney version as our neighbors have long-term loaned us their VHS of the Fox version. There is a pretty strong debate over which version is better (most people prefer the Fox one). All of Miyazaki's films are excellent, but for viewers Kai's age Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service are the most appropriate ones. If you aren't familiar with this excellent children's film we highly recommend checking it out!

We don't do a lot of ladybugs here on ChouChouShu, but when I was googling images to steal borrow for today's post this one came up.
20 is big number for us. It was November 20, two years ago that we discovered Children's House International, the agency we adopted Kai through. Kai's Birthday is on December 20th, and it was January 20th when we received the call from the agency that we were approved to adopt Kai.

Today we drove an hour south to attend a very special birthday party! The birthday girl was Aimee.

We met Aimee and her family in China a year ago last September. We joined Aimee's family in Beijing where we shared a guide and toured Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and the Great Wall together, before traveling on to meeting Kai and Aimee in different provinces, then rejoined them in Guangzhou before returning home.

Our families share a lot in common: Aimee's parents brought her older brother with them to China, as we did with Kai's older brothers, and Kai and Aimee both had the same hand doctor at Children's Hospital in Seattle. In fact, we ran into them at the hand clinic there by chance last December!

We felt very honored to be invited to her party today. It was a big family gathering with lots of food and a huge beautiful cake. Aimee's parents, Matt and Jean, are both really sweet people and it was great seeing them and Aimee again. Kai had a great time playing with all the kids and toys, and even tried some of the cake frosting!

We have a seven-circuit Cretan labyrinth path in our front yard. It's surrounded by cedars and rhododendrons, and two big maple trees. After our recent wind storm, the maples and the cedars are finished shedding their leaves. It's time to start cleaning up after them and find our path again! There are little gnomes that hide about the path, one of them was almost completely buried, but we found him. Kai helped Baba with some of the raking, and in his green hooded fleece he looked a bit like a gnome himself!

This post is our weekly entry in the Double-Happiness "Family FotoFun Friday Challenge". Donna does an amazing job of providing people with great ideas for blogging - and since we're blogging every day this month we sure appreciate the suggestions!

I have written before about the significance of Jackie Chan to Kai and our family. Jackie is a celebrity that Kai recognizes immediately and gets very excited when he sees him. One of Kai's favorite videos in our home library is Mulan. Jackie Chan provides the voice for the character Shang in both the Mandarin and Cantonese versions. in the English version B. D. Wong does Shang's speaking voice and the singing is done by Donny Osmond. Jackie performs both the speaking and singing portions in the Chinese versions. On the DVD is this video of Jackie singing the song "I'll Make a Man Out of You". Kai loves watching this and imitates the martial arts moves...

Wow! It's the 16th of November, and The Chou Chou Shu Blog has been updated everyday this month so far as part of our participation in NOBLOPOMO. What's even more impressive is that we haven't yet resorted to posting about the weather. Well, up until now anyway.

Yes, we are actually posting about the weather! Today is a beautiful fall day, as long as you don't look too closely. Sure the sun is shining, it's not too cold, there's a pleasant breeze, but upon closer examination it's obvious it wasn't this way yesterday. The Chou Chou Shu Head Office lost power around 2:30 yesterday afternoon and it was out till almost noon today. While we huddled in the dark we could hear the turmoil outside of a ferocious wind storm. HERE'S THE LINK to the article in the local paper. We get storms like this every few years, but this one seemed particularly dramatic.
Kai pretty much took it all in stride. He wondered why we didn't have lights or any of the other regular things associated with routine access to electricity. When we told him the power was out he told us to go to the store to get more. The biggest interruption it brought to his schedule was the ability to make oatmeal on demand. We have natural gas for heat (if there's power to run the furnace), hot water, and fireplace, but our stove is electric. So Wednesday night I went to our neighbor's with a kettle of water to boil on their gas range. They were hanging out in their kitchen making beeswax candles to supplement their supply and gladly heated our water for us. HERE'S THEIR WEBSITE. This morning I dug out our camping kettle and heated water in the fireplace for our morning oatmeal and tea.
Power came on again around noon today, and it was quite nice out. This evening as I write this the wind is starting to kick up again, hopefully it won't be a repeat of yesterday!

Also new in the sidebar is the "Stinky-Link Exchange"!
These are blogs that feature our Exclusive Chou Chou Shu Linking Web-Badge:

If you would like to feature this attractive and stylish link on your blog all you have to do is copy and paste the following text into your template...
<a href="http://homepage.mac.com/socheltree/mouse/"><img src="http://homepage.mac.com/socheltree/mouse/images/stinkybadge.png"></a>

If you do, be sure to send us email or leave a comment with the link to your blog so we can add you to our link exchange list!

NOTE: If you already have added a link to us and we haven't listed you,
please let us know so we can update our list.

Today was a BIG day for Brother Ben! He spent the day with his dad at The Department of Licensing. This was round two at the Department of licensing in his effort to pass the driving portion of the licensing exam. We were actually quite surprised he had to retake the test as he is a very good driver. While we were surprised, Ben was furious. Even after hearing from all the other people he knows who had to retake the test (including his dad!), but today he was triumphant! His restless father realized he had his cheapo camera phone with him so here's the rundown on how it went...

And now that he had his license
he came home and went driving with Kai and the...

This is actually Ben and Cam's old Hot Wheels track and cars. I'm amazed how many of their old toys we have that are coming back into use again!
I joked on a forum once that when we were at The White Swan I had asked if we could exchange the "Going Home" Barbie for a "Going Home" Hot Wheels car since we were adopting a boy. I don't believe this is actually an option though and besides, it's nice that Stinky Mouse has a "babe" to hang with. For readers wondering just who this "Going Home Barbie" is you can CLICK HERE to read a very good article about her.

* for a comprehensive list of Barbie's careers see THIS WIKIPEDIA ENTRY
** for an editorial that I feel pretty well sums up the brouhaha regarding Madonna's recent acoption, CLICK HERE to read D.Parvaz's piece in The Seattle P-I.

The Double Happines Family FotoFun Friday Challenge #6 is "Crybabies".
Crybaby? Hey this blog isn't some reality TV show! Our viewers don't tune in here looking for some kid from Nanny 911. This blog is about Kai, the perfect child. Where would we find pictures of him with a sad face? He lives in total indulgence, there are no sad faces around here...

It took until about 11:00 AM Saturday morning. Tina wouldn't let Kai rummage through a drawer in the bathroom while she was drying her hair. I heard him from down the hall and grabbed the camera...

I felt a little mean snapping him with the flash before I scooped him up to comfort him, but it's interesting to see his reaction when he looks at this photo. He's very interested in it, and says, "Kai sad!"

The first few times Kai cried with us were brutal. It just crushed us to see him distressed. We soon discovered he could control his tear ducts like a spigot. Lately though he has started to rely less on crocodile tears and more on just good old whining when he doesn't get his way.

I searched through the 6000+ pictures in the iPhoto collection and was able to find 2 pictures of Kai crying. The one on the left is on the airplane as we took off from Guangzhou on our way home from China. On the right is from our visit to the Northwest Washington State Fair. While Kai has gotten over his fear of dogs, cats and other small animals, he found draft horses to be a bit much!

From time to time we wonder how much Mandarin Kai remembers, from his life in China. He didn't really talk much when he first came to us, and we sort of think he just wasn't very verbal yet, between being a boy and living in an S.W.I. But when he gets a chance to see video in Mandarin he seems to really enjoy it. Today his Aunt Erin emailed us this YouTube link and he really seemed to get a kick out of it!

Regular viewers will recall it was last Friday when we ran pictures of The Beautiful Morgan modeling her Stinky Mouse T-Shirt. This week we are very happy to share these pictures of our friend Marty. Apparently Marty was a male model in a previous life. In the photo on the left he is flashing his patented "Blue Steel" expression! On the right you can see him trying to crowd his daughter Princess Brinley out of the picture.

Everyone here at The ChouChou Shu Head Office is eager to see you wearing your Stinky Mouse Gear here on the blog too! So head over to Our Online Store and check out the new items we've recently added

The NaBloPoMo Challenge Site listed us finally! Now if you go there and carefully scroll through the 2000+ entries you will find Stinky Mouse among them! Wow, we feel just like Nathan R. Johnson when the new phone books came out! To celebrate we've put the NaBloPoMo link badge in the sidebar. We chose the Yoda one as the pointing gun one didn't quite fit our liberal sensitivities or our family values focus. Plus, speaking like Yoda we love!

Kai's parents are funny about media; they let him watch TV, but they are restrictive about what he watches. I haven't figured out exactly what the criteria is, but I can tell it's limited. We're pretty much stuck watching the same stuff over and over again. I would say most of what's on is age appropriate, except this one program his Baba seems to be obsessed with. It's a Nickelodeon show called Avatar. Have you seen this? We don't even get Nickelodeon in the bare-bones cable line-up they subscribe to, but I have seen every single episode of this program. We watch it on Baba's computer. It's like a daily ritual now, Baba comes home and watches an episode with Kai. Apparently this show has been on TV for a year and a half now, but we only discovered it about a month ago. We've watched every single episode in order.

It's set in a fantasy world inspired by a mix of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tibetan, Indian, and even Inuit philosophy, religion, language, and culture. The writers have a "cultural consultant" review scripts for them. They also credit calligrapher Siu-Leung Lee, PhD as a consultant and translator to produce the Classical Chinese calligraphy used in the show. The magical control of the four elements, called "bending", is portrayed as an extension of traditional Chinese martial arts; with each form of bending (earth, air, fire and water) corresponding to a certain real-world martial arts style. Again, the show credits a consultant who oversees this aspect of the production. It is this level of detail that has created a huge following for this show and has gained it fans outside of the 6 to 11 year olds it was originally marketed to. Wikipedia has a great set of pages on the series you can view HERE, and you can see some full episodes of the show for free on Nick Turbo.

Maybe Kai's parents think this program is somehow culturally relevant because of his Chinese heritage. I hope that's not it, because face it people, this is a Nickelodeon cartoon we're talking about. I think this one is just a guilty pleasure on Baba's part, and he's lucky Kai likes watching it too.

Kai has begun eating "solid" foods! Real solid foods. Food you have to bite and chew to swallow. And he's biting and chewing and swallowing it!! Okay, it's not like he ate a Big Mac or something, But he's made some real steps in the last few days. It began last week at preschool, he started taking some bites of crackers. Then on Saturday when we were at the CHI Adoption Gathering he had a little bag of potato chips he carried around and had a few bites of those. Then tonight we had tacos for dinner and he really wanted to snack on tortilla chips with us before we sat down to eat. He was having homemade soup for dinner, so Tina suggested he try some toast with it. He was really pleased with all the attention this was getting him, and while he didn't get much toast into him, he did repeatedly take bites, chew and swallow without gagging. To see him do this is pretty funny, it's almost like watching someone learn to juggle. His little mouth was moving in such a deliberate way.

It's hard to convey just how big these tiny little bites are to us. Kai has been home for over a year now, he'll be four in just about a month, and he still can't eat solid food. This means always preparing special meals for him and struggling to get proper nutrition into him. There are no snack foods we can carry around for when he's hungry and we're on the go. Seeing him actually take these bites is a very big thing!!!

Yay Kai! We are so proud of you!

Click HERE to go to
the Double Happiness blog to see the other
participants in this week's "challenge"!

November is National Adoption Month so on Saturday Kai and his parents took me to a gathering of families from his adoption agency. This was the second Adoption event this month for our family. I spent most of the day laying on a table as Kai was really busy running around with all the other kids. Of course his girlfriend Mimi was there so he was extra busy.

It was a really fun afternoon with lots of food, activities and families in all stages of the adoption process. Kai's parents talked and talked and talked with people, going on and on about what a great kid he is, all the while letting him run around like a crazy man. He had a great time.

Oh, and they asked me to give a plug for the agency on here, from what Kai's parents say, I understand these people are absolutely great to work with so if you're considering international adoption be sure to check out Children's House International.

Our friend Morgan lives clear across the continent but we keep up with her through the magic of the internet. You can check in on her too by visiting her blog. Just CLICK HERE.

And remember if you want your very own Chou-Chou Shu t-shirt you can order one through Our Online Store. Remember, all proceeds from the sale of Chou-Chou Shu products goes to Love Without Boundaries!

...but I'm not a computer mouse, I'm a stuffed mouse. I hate complaining (at least when someone else is doing it), but why is this blogging thing so complicated? Sure, if you just want to type some stuff and throw it on the web, that's no problem, but if you want to change the way things look, or switch hosting-services suddenly you need a degree in rocket science!
For Goodness Sakes! I'm a stuffed mouse! I don't have time to work out all this HTML garbage!
So, apparently in changing the pages around here and restarting the blog, I think our I.T. staff may have broken a couple things. The big one is the RSS feed, which affects Bloglines subscribers. If you subscribe to this blog with bloglines, please "unsubscribe" and then re-subscribe. Isn't that fun? I promise it will be worth it, we've got some great postings coming up, and remember, we've vowed to post every single day this month, so stay tooned, and resubscribe with Bloglines!

Hey, if somebody could let me know if that's working correctly it would be greatly appreciated. Actually, just letting me know you're reading would be greatly appreciated!
Now let's see if I can generate some real blog entries...

Many People have been complaining that I haven't updated this site for quite a while. I guess they think stuffed animals have lots of time on their hands to journal every waking moment of their endlessly exciting lives. While there may be a grain of truth in this belief, the reality is that I have very little access to computers or the internet. I actually think the I.T. department here at the Chou-Chou Shu Head Office is run by a slacker with no care for the mission of our business. If I had the time I would set up some performance reviews to start documenting the extent of this problem. Of course the wages we pay are ridiculous so I probably shouldn't complain.

We have done some minor renovations to the site and plan on more frequent updates (we'll see how that goes). The previous blog entries have been deleted and the comic strips have all been moved to a different page. I'm not sure if I'm happy with this format or not, feedback would be appreciated.

Again, I personally apologize for the lapse in posting, and pledge to do my best at driving better performance on the part of our I.T. staff. To demonstrate my commitment I am going to participate in:


Sincerely,
Chou-Chou Shu
a.k.a. "Stinky Mouse"