Well, not quite, but we are 10 weeks out from being back in America for 6 whole months. that may not seem like a very short amount of time. i mean, that is somewhere around 70 days give or take, but when you break it down to 10 weeks that fly by all too quickly and you think of all the cleaning, organizing, packing, and closing up your home for 6 months, that's a REALLY short time! ahhh!
so, save the date....we leave July 30 and will be in Dallas (at least when we aren't traveling) till the beginning of February. we hope to see all you at least once during that time if you are closeby or in an area where we are speaking. we will be posting where we are here on the blog and on Facebook in hopes that we can connect with as many fun people as possible!
Sunday, May 24, 2009
for the grandparents :)
these are just a few cute pics of Eliana. I'm so sorry, but i have nothing witty or exciting to go with them. so, there you go!:)
to eat it or wear it...that is the question!
So, i tried Spagetti with Elly Bean recently. here's what happened.
"what is this mommy?? (very thankful that i decided to take her clothes off for this meal!)
"i'm just going to put my feet up and relax while everyone waits on me hand and foot!"
"How many different places on my body can i smear this red stuff??"
"you didn't really think you could get away with feeding me this stuff without a mess, did you, mommy?" 
mess or no mess...i love to see this face!
"what is this mommy?? (very thankful that i decided to take her clothes off for this meal!)
"i'm just going to put my feet up and relax while everyone waits on me hand and foot!"
"How many different places on my body can i smear this red stuff??"
"you didn't really think you could get away with feeding me this stuff without a mess, did you, mommy?" 
mess or no mess...i love to see this face!
Saturday, May 23, 2009
some of our daily life
this is just a few pics to give you an idea of what daily life out and about is like here.
here's our little mall coffee shop. everyone always leans in to see what is going on with the "little foreign doll" (that's a pretty literal translation of what they call her)
this little "jie jie" (big sister...one of Eliana's favorite words right now) slowed down to walk with us and even stopped a few times to make friends with Eliana. this is also a common occurence. Thankfully, Eliana is starting to really love being with kids.
our big park has the ultimate daddy daughter bonding activity. remote control cars for your kids to RIDE in! 
Daddy even let mommy have a go at it, but i was more comfortable holding the camera!
you better believe that Daddy will be doing this a lot when he has free time with Eliana!
of course, we often play with our friends. they are getting to be quite the threesome the older they get. 
and, as you might have guessed from some of the other pictures, we have quite the following wherever we go...especially when we stop. this is our seamstress friend, who has a little shop/stall in a local market called "fashion city" and has made several things for our house. this time, we went to get Eliana's curtains lined with blackout fabric (the best invention in the world possibly!). she wanted to climb all over the fabric, so we took the shoes off and let her go for it. this, of course, made even more the scene! this mob...errr, crowd....is small in comparison to some of the places we go.
this was a trip to our "mall". I was looking for shoes for Eiana and finally settled on the ones she's wearing the picture. while we were there, we talked with the shop owner and a little boy who came by the shop. he was eating a banana, which is Eliana's favorite thing in the world, which made her quite jealous of his banana and excited to eat one herself. when the shop owner saw her intense desire for the banana, she opened up a drawer and gave her one! so, for about 7 dollars (pretty expensive for kids shoes over here...but they were all i could find in her size and without silly english words or cartoon characters on them...i guess i'm kind of picky) we walked out with a pair of shoes and a free banana! it doesn't get much better than that! we took the picture at our little coffee shop that opened up on the bottom floor of the mall....a very exciting edition to our little town, even if the coffee isn't starbucks.
here's Eliana's first modeling gig. we went to our Carrefour (French Walmart) for groceries and play time (they have a new indoor play area there), and she happened to be wearing an outfit that i had bought at one of the shops there. when the owners noticed the little foreign doll in their clothes, they insisted on some "model" shots. maybe the next time i go by, i will see my sweet Elly Bean's face up in their store. you never know! 
here, they are tempting her with toys and other goodies to play with if she will only choose to come to them. this makes it ever so fun to get the items back to the owner, but they think it's entertaining and so does Eliana...at least till she has to give it up!
here's our little mall coffee shop. everyone always leans in to see what is going on with the "little foreign doll" (that's a pretty literal translation of what they call her)
this little "jie jie" (big sister...one of Eliana's favorite words right now) slowed down to walk with us and even stopped a few times to make friends with Eliana. this is also a common occurence. Thankfully, Eliana is starting to really love being with kids.
our big park has the ultimate daddy daughter bonding activity. remote control cars for your kids to RIDE in! 
Daddy even let mommy have a go at it, but i was more comfortable holding the camera!
you better believe that Daddy will be doing this a lot when he has free time with Eliana!
of course, we often play with our friends. they are getting to be quite the threesome the older they get. 
and, as you might have guessed from some of the other pictures, we have quite the following wherever we go...especially when we stop. this is our seamstress friend, who has a little shop/stall in a local market called "fashion city" and has made several things for our house. this time, we went to get Eliana's curtains lined with blackout fabric (the best invention in the world possibly!). she wanted to climb all over the fabric, so we took the shoes off and let her go for it. this, of course, made even more the scene! this mob...errr, crowd....is small in comparison to some of the places we go.
this was a trip to our "mall". I was looking for shoes for Eiana and finally settled on the ones she's wearing the picture. while we were there, we talked with the shop owner and a little boy who came by the shop. he was eating a banana, which is Eliana's favorite thing in the world, which made her quite jealous of his banana and excited to eat one herself. when the shop owner saw her intense desire for the banana, she opened up a drawer and gave her one! so, for about 7 dollars (pretty expensive for kids shoes over here...but they were all i could find in her size and without silly english words or cartoon characters on them...i guess i'm kind of picky) we walked out with a pair of shoes and a free banana! it doesn't get much better than that! we took the picture at our little coffee shop that opened up on the bottom floor of the mall....a very exciting edition to our little town, even if the coffee isn't starbucks.
here's Eliana's first modeling gig. we went to our Carrefour (French Walmart) for groceries and play time (they have a new indoor play area there), and she happened to be wearing an outfit that i had bought at one of the shops there. when the owners noticed the little foreign doll in their clothes, they insisted on some "model" shots. maybe the next time i go by, i will see my sweet Elly Bean's face up in their store. you never know! 
here, they are tempting her with toys and other goodies to play with if she will only choose to come to them. this makes it ever so fun to get the items back to the owner, but they think it's entertaining and so does Eliana...at least till she has to give it up!
Monday, May 11, 2009
Eliana's first steps!
we were very fortunate to have a friend's video camera available when Eliana decided to walk for the first time. this was her second set of steps!
Untitled from Carrie Vipperman on Vimeo.
Daddy Daughter Weekend!
I mentioned in a previous post that Vip watched Eliana about two weeks ago when i went out of town for a girls' weekend. the weekend was, of course, dubbed "Daddy Daughter Weekend" by the Dads and was pretty fun, although tiring too. Here's some pics of the time!
eliana's friend, Abigail, and her Daddy came over and spent the weekend with Vip and Eliana since her mommy was with me. the girls really have a good time together, so it was good for the Daddy's to be able to tagteam while we were gone. They also had fun with t-shirts and sharpies, as you can see by our sweet little angels clothing! the shirts have the answers to all of the most FAQ's we get here. they had some fun sporthing these around town and got a lot of funny reactions from the locals too. Here's the translation:
I'm an American
I'm 1 year old
I'm a girl
I'm not cold, i have enough clothes on
If you want to take a picture, it will be 10 kuai for 1
Please look, do not touch!!
They got to do all the special stuff like eat at KFC and ride these fun rides in the mall..
get piled into buckets of balls...
and laugh at their daddies getting stuck in the ball pit while trying to entertain them! 
Our house helper came over on one of the days to clean and was there to offer a helping hand as well. Eliana loves Li Jie!
and, finally, here's a video of the two cuties. Abigail is a very attentive big sister, as you can see!
eliana's friend, Abigail, and her Daddy came over and spent the weekend with Vip and Eliana since her mommy was with me. the girls really have a good time together, so it was good for the Daddy's to be able to tagteam while we were gone. They also had fun with t-shirts and sharpies, as you can see by our sweet little angels clothing! the shirts have the answers to all of the most FAQ's we get here. they had some fun sporthing these around town and got a lot of funny reactions from the locals too. Here's the translation:
I'm an American
I'm 1 year old
I'm a girl
I'm not cold, i have enough clothes on
If you want to take a picture, it will be 10 kuai for 1
Please look, do not touch!!
They got to do all the special stuff like eat at KFC and ride these fun rides in the mall..
get piled into buckets of balls...
and laugh at their daddies getting stuck in the ball pit while trying to entertain them! 
Our house helper came over on one of the days to clean and was there to offer a helping hand as well. Eliana loves Li Jie!Daddy Daughter Weekend from Carrie Vipperman on Vimeo.
and, finally, here's a video of the two cuties. Abigail is a very attentive big sister, as you can see!
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Apartment Tour, part 1: Eliana's Room
So, I've been promising you pictures of the house for quite some time now. It's actually very embarrassing to think of just how long i have been promising these pictures, so we will just skip over that part. Anyways, a friend's blog has been touring her house room by room, so i figured that might be a little more doable for me and my crazy life. So, here's the first room! I picked Eliana's for a few reasons. 1. it's finished. (decorating is about a year process for me at a minimum! i'm always finding something new to move, change, get ric of, recreate, or spruce up...i guess it's a weakness...or maybe a strength...don't really know but it is what it is!) 2. it's one of my favorites in the house. there's just something fun about decorating for kids....you get to go a little crazy and have lots of fun. 3. it was also clean at the present moment!
here's what you see when you enter. the diaper changing area is courtesy of our land lady's tv cabinet. we used it for our TV/electronic area for a while and then decided it did not quite suit our need for the living room, so we got creative and created this area, which is just pure awesomeness.
to the right of the door, you have her closet. i guess you can't really call it a closet, but that's what it's function is. it's really a bookshelf from ikea with towel rods screwed underneat the shelves to hang clothes from and curtains hung from the outside.
here's her curtains. we're going for a fun barnyard/countryside theme with the cowprint, denim, clothesline on the wall, gingham, and the other fabric has little cherries, apples, and strawberries on it.
to the left of the door. the quilt hanging on the clothesline is courtesy of my Aunt Tina. since Eliana doesn't sleep with blankets yet, we had to find some way to display this beaituful quilt since it would be an absolute crime to fold up and hide such an amazing quilt! the border at the top of the ceiling are some fun alphabet stickers my mom brought over on her last trip. I used them to write pryrs from the Word that I have been lifting up over my sweet Eliana since she was born.
i'm hoping to eventually spruce up the little clothes on the clothesline as well with some more fabrics and trims, but we really needed to come to a stopping point, so they will just have to wait! 
So, what do you think of my room?
here's what you see when you enter. the diaper changing area is courtesy of our land lady's tv cabinet. we used it for our TV/electronic area for a while and then decided it did not quite suit our need for the living room, so we got creative and created this area, which is just pure awesomeness.
to the right of the door, you have her closet. i guess you can't really call it a closet, but that's what it's function is. it's really a bookshelf from ikea with towel rods screwed underneat the shelves to hang clothes from and curtains hung from the outside.
here's her curtains. we're going for a fun barnyard/countryside theme with the cowprint, denim, clothesline on the wall, gingham, and the other fabric has little cherries, apples, and strawberries on it.
to the left of the door. the quilt hanging on the clothesline is courtesy of my Aunt Tina. since Eliana doesn't sleep with blankets yet, we had to find some way to display this beaituful quilt since it would be an absolute crime to fold up and hide such an amazing quilt! the border at the top of the ceiling are some fun alphabet stickers my mom brought over on her last trip. I used them to write pryrs from the Word that I have been lifting up over my sweet Eliana since she was born. 
i'm hoping to eventually spruce up the little clothes on the clothesline as well with some more fabrics and trims, but we really needed to come to a stopping point, so they will just have to wait! 
So, what do you think of my room?
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Eliana Hope is 1!!!
It's hard to believe it, but my little girl turned 1 last week on April 27! And, since you only turn 1 once, we, of course, took a lot of pictures. i tried to condense it some for the blog, but, what can i say? i'm a very proud mommy!
I had the privilege of getting away for the weekend before Eliana's bday to have a special girls' weekend with some friends while Vip watched eliana here (more on that later!), so we took it easy on her actual bday and just spent some time together as a family and with some good friends.
her first present of the day was her peek-a-boo bear! she rolled around on the ground with it for a while. so cute!
we took a walk around our complex and eventually made it to the playground. and, yes, she is walking these days! craziness!
making friends with "jie jie" (big sister)
ooh la la, don't i look stylish mommy?
big steps!
she has discovered slides, and she LOVES them! 
i think the only thing she loves more is flying with Daddy
the next present of the day was her walker (we spaced them out so as not to overwhelm her). her favorite part about this....the small cell phone attached to it. she likes the rest of it okay, but just give her the cell phone (which we found sold seperately for about 50 cents) and she's happy as can be.
for lunch, we went to KFC with our good friends, Francis and Enid. Eliana loves to eat the chicken we pull off the bone for her and, of course, the slide there.
higher, Daddy, higher!
like my birthday tutu? such a shame we have to mess it up with all the extra layers still!
i LOVE huggin on my Elly Bean!!
then, on Wednesday, we had her little friends and their parents over for a birthday party! here's thedecorations! we went a little baloon crazy i think.
i made scrapbook pages of some of my favorite pictures of the year, hung them up on the rod where the quilt usually is, and then put them in her scrapbook when we were done.
Eliana had a heart shaped cake for her friends and then her very own cake on the special red plate that Lao Lao and Grandpa sent her. We, of course, stripped her down to her bloomers so she could enjoy the sweet goodness without messing up the birthday tutu.
first bite...just a sprinkle and a ittle bit of icing maybe. very cautious little girl....
after a minute or two of just a few sprinkles, i decided to help her out and cut into the cake....
ohhh, that's good mama!
here, Daddy, you try...
and, mommy, too....
then came the ice cream....a little cold, but she really did like it despite the look of shock and bewilderment!
so, can i have birthday cake every night now that I'm a big girl?
it even got down to her toes!
so, then we went and took a bath...
and put our tutu back on for presents! like my guitar?? i'm going to be a rock star someday!
once the presents came out, the girls had fun to say the least
and then as we were about to put eliana down, we realized we hadn't taken a family pic yet! ahhh! so, although the tutu and the cute pigtails were gone, it was still necessary to have a family pic on the bday party day, so here you go. Vip and I feel so blessed to now be a family of three. we love you, eliana hope!!
I had the privilege of getting away for the weekend before Eliana's bday to have a special girls' weekend with some friends while Vip watched eliana here (more on that later!), so we took it easy on her actual bday and just spent some time together as a family and with some good friends.
her first present of the day was her peek-a-boo bear! she rolled around on the ground with it for a while. so cute!
we took a walk around our complex and eventually made it to the playground. and, yes, she is walking these days! craziness!
making friends with "jie jie" (big sister)
ooh la la, don't i look stylish mommy?
big steps!
she has discovered slides, and she LOVES them! 
i think the only thing she loves more is flying with Daddy
the next present of the day was her walker (we spaced them out so as not to overwhelm her). her favorite part about this....the small cell phone attached to it. she likes the rest of it okay, but just give her the cell phone (which we found sold seperately for about 50 cents) and she's happy as can be.
for lunch, we went to KFC with our good friends, Francis and Enid. Eliana loves to eat the chicken we pull off the bone for her and, of course, the slide there.
higher, Daddy, higher!
like my birthday tutu? such a shame we have to mess it up with all the extra layers still!
i LOVE huggin on my Elly Bean!!
then, on Wednesday, we had her little friends and their parents over for a birthday party! here's thedecorations! we went a little baloon crazy i think.
i made scrapbook pages of some of my favorite pictures of the year, hung them up on the rod where the quilt usually is, and then put them in her scrapbook when we were done.
Eliana had a heart shaped cake for her friends and then her very own cake on the special red plate that Lao Lao and Grandpa sent her. We, of course, stripped her down to her bloomers so she could enjoy the sweet goodness without messing up the birthday tutu.
first bite...just a sprinkle and a ittle bit of icing maybe. very cautious little girl....
after a minute or two of just a few sprinkles, i decided to help her out and cut into the cake....
ohhh, that's good mama!
here, Daddy, you try...
and, mommy, too....
then came the ice cream....a little cold, but she really did like it despite the look of shock and bewilderment!
so, can i have birthday cake every night now that I'm a big girl?
it even got down to her toes!
so, then we went and took a bath...
and put our tutu back on for presents! like my guitar?? i'm going to be a rock star someday!
once the presents came out, the girls had fun to say the least
and then as we were about to put eliana down, we realized we hadn't taken a family pic yet! ahhh! so, although the tutu and the cute pigtails were gone, it was still necessary to have a family pic on the bday party day, so here you go. Vip and I feel so blessed to now be a family of three. we love you, eliana hope!!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)