Two nights ago, after one of our (Ali's) 2 am wake-ups I put the baby back down to sleep and felt like writing about our experience so far. Two hours later when Ali woke up again I was still typing! It was the longest post in history but was so good for me to have every detail down as it was fresh in my mind. Jimmy got her up, and she crawled into the living room where I was typing put her little fingers on the keys and, as only she can do, erased everything in a split second! Just then the draft autosave activated and it saved her erased version of my two hour journal entry. I couldn't be mad at her. She just loves keyboards. But I did lose motivation to type everything up again. I do want to have it on record so maybe I'll just type a little at a time and hope that I catch all that I wanted to.
It's Monday now and we've been here 5 days. It feels like 5 years. This is such a unique experience! I've never lived in a place where I look different than everyone else. When I served in Czech Republic I still looked like everyone. It wasn't until I opened my mouth that they knew for sure I wasn't from there. Here, everyone just stares. It may not be as bad if we didn't have a baby but they are OBSESSED with Ali! We had a friend tell us about the attention that she would probably get but it's hard to imagine until you've experienced it because there's just nothing like it.
Every day is getting better and better. We are slowly, very slowly adjusting to the time change- a 13 hour difference is hard to explain to a 10 month old but I think she's doing well. I don't have any expectation for when her sleep will be back to awesome so we'll just go with it. She is still wanting to wake up several times in the night but I don't blame her. She thinks she is supposed to be taking naps at that time, not sleeping through the night. So we try to put her back down but if it doesn't look like she wants to, we just bring her into the living room for a couple hours and then she's ready to go back down.
I still haven't learned any Mandarin... I hope I can start picking up on a few words. Jimmy is at a Mandarin class for 3 hours every day so I'm hoping to learn from him. It will be so weird having him gone all day at classes. We'll miss him but I guess it's time to grow up. =)
