A great reunion

Well it was another busy week for us (are there any other kinds).

Tuesday was a regular doctor's appointment. Sophie is now 161/2 lbs (she's gained about 2lbs since August). She's still quite small but you can see her cheeks and legs getting chubbier. She also has another tooth, which makes 5 now (4 since we came home in August). She continues to eat and sleep well and is as rambunctious and energetic as ever.

On Wednesday, Stephanie's class had an outing at the pumpkin patch (see below) and Caroline and Sophie went along. It was quite nice but muddy (after many days of rain). Sophie and the schoolkids had fun and Sophie seem to enjoy (or at least she took it all in stride).




Saturday morning started out grey and miserable but got nicer as the day progressed. By mid-afternoon we had nice sunshine and we had finished raking the leaves. Stephanie and the neighbour's boys took turns diving into the pile. Sophie wasn't too keen on the leaves (i don't think she liked the texture or the sound). Later that afternoon we headed over to Amy & Dave's for a reunion of the three families that travelled to China together. What a fantastic evening we had. We reminisced about our trip experiences while the girls played together. It's hard to tell whether they recognized each other, they didn't interact all that much at the beginning, but later in the evening they were playing together quite nicely. On the left are three pictures from the evening (in the middle one, the girls and Dave are under the stairs in a little cubby that Dave made - what a fantastic job he did on the basement playroom.

It sure was nice to see everyone again (for the firs time since August 13th to be exact). It made us realize how much we miss China and how fortunate we were to have travelled with such great people. We were truly lucky to have such a wonderful travel group and we can't wait to meet many of the other families in Toronto in November.

It was quite a late evening so everyone slept in the next morning (at least until 8 am- wow). On Sunday morning, we took advantage of the brief sunlight and bagged on the leaves in the front yard. Later we had a quick lunch and Stephanie invited one of her friends to come out with us to the Children's Museum (its in the Museum of Civilization in Hull). There was a special demonstration on music which was very interesting. The kids got to go into a room filled with objects some of which you'd see around the house (pipe, metal bowls, paper filled plastic bags, etc..). With these objects, the 2 musicians made about a 10 minute symphony that sounded at times like the rainforest and at other times like a haunted house. Afterwords, the kids all got a chance to play an instrument at the direction of the musicians and their group effort was taped and played back with some audio enhancements like echoing, pitch changes, etc.. It was really neat and the girls had a great time. After that it was back home to some pizza and a movie. The bad news is that we had some wet snow today - uggh! Winter is coming :)

Well that's about it for this week.

Chris, Caroline, Stephanie and Sophie.