Our family had the opportunity to go to the USA this summer for 3 weeks to visit our families, it was a WONDERFUL trip.  If you’d like to see some photos from that trip, you can go over to my (slightly more active) Flickr site ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/webel ).  If you are not logged into Flickr, you’ll just see a small handful of photos, however, if you are logged in and I have you marked as ‘friend’ or ‘family’, you’ll get to see several dozen of my favorite photos from our trip to the US.

This is a photo of the family on Easter!  It is next to impossible to get everyone looking at the camera at the same time… especially when you have spectators!

I’ll probably try and post on here a few times this up-coming week as Erica and Elizabeth will be traveling to HK and I’ll be at home with Anna and Nate!

Everyone performed, I mean everyone!  Even the school’s staff did the opening act with some kind of swan dance or something.  And then the piano performances started.  Don’t get me wrong, these kids were amazing, some of them only 3 or 4 years old, playing really difficult songs.  The thing was, there were over 75 of them!  That is why the event took almost 4 hours!  (Sorry to our house helper who was babysitting Nate and had to stay late!)

The girls did have their part too.  We had to sit through 4 hours of other stuff to get this, you get to go right to the good stuff!  Enjoy!

I wanted to take the girls somewhere fun that would be special for them since they love HK so much and were sad that Mom and Nate got to go and they didn’t, so we headed out to the Golden Osprey Tower.  The weather wasn’t the best, but that didn’t slow the girls down one bit!

They found a ‘stage’ so they had to do a dance show…

After we were done at the tower, we headed to McDonald’s for lunch… I know, McDonalds’s in China on the weekend!!  It was crazy busy and we ate our lunch with no less than a dozen spectators / commentators at any given moment.  Thankfully the girls are China savvy and they just roll with that sort of invasion of privacy with very little annoyance.

After lunch, was the ‘real’ reason we went to McDonald’s – the playground!

First, it was calling for rain, then it changed to thunderstorms, then it was just calling for high winds (probably due to the typhoon hitting China to our north) and now it’s calling for sun and rain.

I’ll post a picture or two to my Flickr account and I’m sure Erica will blog about it in a day or two.  This I do know, rain or shine, there are going to be some pretty happy little kiddos tomorrow!

This trip is a combination of vacation, medical, and logistics.

Logistics – Elizabeth’s and my passports expire soon, so we need to go to the consulate and get new ones!  Medical – a whole bunch of routine checkups are on the schedule as well as a dentist appt for me that I’m not thrilled about.  Vacation – there will be Western food, grandparents and Disneyland involved…

Maybe I’ll even post a blog post or two while I’m there!

The girls have been preparing for this for weeks and it was so much fun for the actual performance to happen!  The video is a bit long, 14 minutes or so, but if you watch it, I promise it will make you smile a time or two!  :-)

Happy Mother’s Day Erica!  You are a GREAT mom and we all appreciate how hard you work every day to take care of us, your family!

We love you!  Elizabeth, Anna, Nate (and Dad)