Missing in Action

Hello! Sorry we have been behind on our blogs lately, I came down some some kind of nasty sinus infection that had me in bed if we were not at an appointment. James has been successfully manning the troops while I have been useless. Our guide was able to get me some stronger medicine yesterday morning and this morning I woke up feeling like a new woman! I'm still not back up to normal but I am at least able to get out of bed, hooray.

For some reason I'm not able to pull up our previous blogs so I can't remember where we left off but I'll try to catch you up as best we can. On Monday we had our appointment at the US Consulate, it was very quick and well organized. We went through security when we first got there and they took our cameras to hold until we were done and then we basically just stood and took a citizenship oath on behalf of the boys and then gave them our paperwork so they could process their visas.

Here is a picture as we were leaving:




After the consulate appointment we went to the Guangdong Folk Arts Museum, you can read about it here for details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Clan_Academy

It is tradition in China to have chops made with the kids names, they are stamps. Our guide said this is the place the locals come to have them made so we decided to do the same. We enjoyed walking around the museum while we waited for the chops. Here are some pictures:












After the museum, I went to bed for the rest of the day and James took all of the kids swimming and played in the hotel room the rest of the day.

On Tuesday, we went to the Safari Park because we've heard there were pandas. The Safari Park was really beautiful with kind of a tropical feel with all of the greenery. There was a dinosaur exhibit that the kids enjoyed with life size dinosaurs living in the trees and hills. We also enjoyed the giraffes, monkeys, pandas, koalas and lots of other animals. I didn't take a ton of pictures but here are a few:

















Tuesday was also Xander's 1st Birthday!!! The hotel brought a cake to our room for him so we had a little family celebration.



















And some fun giggling:















Now we are all caught up. Today we are headed out to explore for a bit and then our driver comes to take us to Hong Kong at 6:00pm. And our flight leaves Hong Kong at 12:45am on Thursday and arrives in Korea at 5:15am on Thursday and then we fly from Korea to Dallas!!!!