Moving, Asia Style

Friday night has arrived again. Where did the week go?! Finally, here are some pictures of our move, three weeks ago today. We've already been here three weeks! We're feeling really settled; we even have pictures hung on the walls! I'm so thankful; we're ready to be done working on the apartment and get on to more important things. We hope to invite over some of our neighbors over in the next week or two and make some new friends.

Here's one of our last pics in our old house. You can see some stuff piled up next to the chair in those plaid bags. In America, you might move by collecting cardboard boxes, but here in Asia, we just used a lot of what we call "rice"bags. They are durable and handy for non-breakable items. They're also really cheap and so when we ended up buying more three different times, it didn't break the bank. (How did we ever accumulate so much stuff?!)

More stuff!
The last picture of the girls in our old house. Our friend Amy watched them that day while all the transitioning was happening, which was a huge help! So this was in the morning just before I took them to her house. John was in the midst of disassembling the crib, where Clara Anne had slept for her whole life! We had never moved her to a big girl bed because her room was too small to accomodate one. Chole, until we moved here, had slept her whole life in a pack-n-play, so our move to this house really was exciting for the girls--big girl beds at last!

Here we are! John is in our kitchen, doing a little work above the range. Notice the sink that I was raving about in my last post! (I didn't mention there what you can see here, that looking out of my window is looking into about 200 other apartments. But looking down out of my window is the lovely nature scene previously described. That also means that my neighbors can look in at me as well! One morning, to my suprise, as I was standing at my kitchen sink holding Christin, a woman across the way in a 5th or 6th floor apartment was looking seemingly directly at me and I was just wondering if she could see me as clearly as I could see her, when she waved at me! I didn't know whether to wave back or quickly leave the room!) First meal in the new place--KFC. You can see our comfy couches and MANY trunks in the background.
The pile of rice bags made it safely! Here they're piled in Christin's room with the happy green walls.
The inaugural bath! Clara Anne and Chloe really love the new tub! (Mommy does too!) They still would rather stand up and play instead of sit down and actually bathe, however. And Chloe hollers whenever I have to wash her hair. But the idea of a bath is still fun to Chloe. Why wouldn't it be, with all those fun toys?One thing that hasn't changed--story time with Daddy in the evening.

And a final picture to share: my first cooking project in the new kitchen, which Clara Anne helped me with--granola.

Hope you enjoyed a brief glimpse of our new place! I'll post a few more pictures as I take them. Picture taking hasn't been high on the priority list as we've been getting organized, but now that we're more settled I'll do a bit more. It's starting to really feel like home. The girls have already made some new friends, playing out at the sandpit and at the playground. I think living here will be great for their language skills, and mine too! Until next time . . .