Hey!
We are still alive and kicking, its just been busy for us the last few months.
First of all, I got the job with AWC Communications. Its an authorized telus dealership, dealing mostly with cell phones. It is something I have experience in, and do ok with. It provides good money because I make commissions on top of an hourly wage. I'm working at Park Place mall, so I won't have many Saturday's off, and sometimes will have to work a later shift, but its a good job and location.
Second: We found a really nice apartment in a 4plex on the north side of lethbridge. We moved in the last week of January. We love it! It's a split level, with kitchen, small dinning area, a half bath and living room upstairs, and two bedrooms, a full bathroom, laundry room and a couple of storage spots downstairs. It also has a dishwasher and a balcony! We are very happy with it!
Third: I'm still in the running for the visa officer job with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. I had the second interview/test last week, and though I can't disclose the question or my answer, I think I did well. It was one situational question, and I had 20 minutes answer, including preparation time. It was an interesting test.
These three things have kept us busy, on top of everything else! Baby number 2 is coming in a couple more months, so that will be exciting for us. Chelsey is 32 weeks. We were never able to find out the gender, so this one will be a surprise as to if we need a pink or blue blanket.
Jada is growing well. She is now 18 months, and started going to nursery last week. She is a little shy, but seems to be doing well. We stayed with her for the first hour, then we left and she didn't cry about us leaving. We'll see how she continues to do, but we are glad that she has a spot now in church that she can run around and burn off some energy.
Funny Jada story: A couple of weeks ago while I was making breakfast, she got into the bathroom and closed the door. That is fairly normal, she likes to close doors. But this time she closed the door, and opened the drawer right beside the door, so the door could not open but a crack. We had to pop the door handle off, and use a stick to push the drawer closed so we could open the door. Needless to say, it was a bit scary for all of us that we couldn't get the door open right away!
Funny/Scary Mike story:
While we were driving into Cardston last week, we ended up going in the ditch! I can now say that I have joined the ranks of Canadians who have gotten their car into the ditch ;). Just past the Raymond turn off (going west) the highway splits and goes around a curve (it is sometimes called dead mans curve) before going back into a single 2 lane highway. I must have caught some ice, because I started to fish tail a little bit. I tapped the brake to slow down a little bit (careful of course not to brake too much because that would have been worse). I was still fishtailing around, and almost got it corrected when we started spinning around. We went 360, everything went white and I knew we were in the ditch. Perhaps if there wasn't a truck in the other lane I could have corrected better and not end in the ditch, but who knows. Everyone was fine, just a little shaken. After surveying the car (no damage) we drove in the ditch to the nearby farmer's access road, got back on the highway and had a fun day with our friends.
So that's our life in a nutshell! We'll have to put up some more pictures soon
2011/01/05
Adventures of 2010
We decided this year to do our year end review a little different. My brother in law from Ecuador and his family have a tradition on New years to go around the family and tell stories such as the funniest thing that happened to them that year, the most embarrassing, the scariest, the most exciting, ect. He suggested that at our families New Year's eve party and it was a lot of fun.
The most embarrassing
We were headed home from church one Sunday on the subway with two other families that were going the same direction. The subway came in at the same time that we were going down the stairs to board and it created a wind tunnel up the stairwell. Being Sunday I was wearing a skirt and it was a very full skirt at that. I had a baby in one arm and the wind was so strong that it flung my skirt up around my waist with a lot of force. I only had one arm to hold it down and Mike and one of the ladies we were walking with were helping me hold it down and it was still flying up. Mike said that I turned pretty red. Oh well right. Everyone has legs. Can't let it worry you too much but I never wore that skirt to church again if I knew we would take the subway.
The funniest
One day coming home from church in Beijing we were having a hard time catching a Taxi, they just seemed to be scarce going the direction we wanted to go. Then Jada decided to imitate us and put her arm out to call a taxi. Just then a taxi going the opposite direction flipped an illegal u-turn in the center of the road and picked us up. We like to joke about it and say that Jada is so cute that the Taxi driver could not not stop.
The most frustrating
Two things come to mind that were really frustrating:
In May when we had originally planned to return to Canada we decided to stay another year. We had spent the year before trying to get on our feet and things were finally starting to look up. Having a footing in China, more knowledge about opportunities in Beijing, contacts and some experience we had a lot of confidence that Mike could find a better job with a pay raise to better our situation. We upgraded to a two bedroom apartment (rent prices had increased dramatically) and then all our confidence started to wane. A month later and many promising looking job opportunities evaporated into thin air. Mike decided to get an online teaching certificate so he could get into some of the top schools in Beijing but then he didn't get those jobs either so finally we started to consider the options we despised most, the OTHER English schools. Mike applied for New oriental and got called back that day. We had heard horror stories about having to commute all over the city and having really long hours. These were all questions that Mike addressed in the interview, and found out that this branch of New Oriental had less centers, and teachers stayed mostly in one or two spots. So we thought it would be ok. So Mike started working, and right after he started the director of studies at the first school disappeared, so Mike got no training on how they expected him to use their programs and power points. A couple of weeks later, the acting DOS asked Mike if he had had any training. No. Turns out Mike was not teaching how they wanted him to teach and students were complaining. Students would seem nice in the class, then go file complaints to the center and not want to go to his class anymore. So it was really their fault, but they did not take a lot of responsibility for it. They just told mike to change. He finally got some training and things went a little better, but because students at that center still would either cancel or not show up to his classes (Stupid popularity contests), They shuffled him to a different center that took an almost an hour and a half (two in traffic) to get to. They also never gave him as many hours as they said that they would give. Mike ended up going to two different centers on opposite sides of the city (never on the same day at least) to get by. Mike did really well at the second center (the one he liked better anyway and was a little closer) and the students really liked him there. Turns out there was a lot of deep problems in that first center so they ended up closing it for a time. Of course, just after we decided to come back to Canada, and bought our tickets they offered him full time employment. Go figure, eh?
The second, not really a story, but just something in general: The beggars and people selling socks and other knickknacks outside of the silk market. Both of these groups were VERY pushy, VERY demanding and they only targeted foreigners or Chinese walking with foreigners. Mostly just foreigners. Some of the beggars would go so far as to grab at your clothing and follow you about 50 meters. That or send their kids after you. We like to help where we can, but these are not true people in need. Most of the beggars made more money then Mike did! (he made about 1500 USD a month). The people selling socks would not take no for an answer either. If you did not want socks, they would offer something else like fake Rolex's. They would shove whatever it was in your face and say "Socks!" or "Watches". They would follow you into McDonald's or one of the other restaurants near the silk market and pester you while you ate. The only way to deal with either group was to ignore them.
The coolest
Hands down, the coolest thing in 2010 was being in China during Chinese New Year! I'm sure you remember reading about it earlier in our blog, so we won't say too much. But we had a lot of fun with friends, we ate a lot, we set off a lot of fireworks, and watching the COOLEST firework show you'll ever see. We watched it from the roof of a 30 story building, so some of the fireworks were exploding at eye level. We had a lot of good laughs that evening - many of which came from a party game called "who wants to be famous". You send one person out of the room and everyone decides why that person is famous. The people in the room are the news reporters at the famous persons news conference about being famous. From the questions that the famous person is asked, they have to figure out why they are famous. Some of the best answers were things like "I was just sitting around and it came to me" (He was famous for inventing a human fart powered car) and "I'm just that good" (he was famous for knowing 20 languages, and can simultaneously translate into 5ish languages). Good times with friends!
One of the best times
When we moved to our new apartment, we had a house warming party. We decided to serve smoothies, because some friends had given us some smoothie syrups. We had classic flavours like strawberry, mango and such. Then we decided to have a guess the flavour game. We made a Chocolate Marshmallow Grape flavoured smoothie (Dad Innes' favourite Peters Drive In milkshake flavour). People loved the flavour combination, but no one got close to guessing all three. People were guessing things like Tootsie roll, maraschino cherry, chocolate covered grapes, cherry and grape, Tootsie roll and grape. People thought it was great fun to try to guess this flavour. We didn't have anyone guess all three correctly, so we put the names of everyone who got two right into a hat and drew the name of the winner.
The scariest
The cultural habits and runnings of the government in China is quite different from here. Being from Canada Mike and I have grown to expect that law are pretty set and that most people and especially businesses will follow the processes as required by the government (such as applying for licences, visas and those kind of things) and what you expect to happen will happen. Not so in China, the laws are very bendable and frequently changing. Often you can argue your way out of penalties and if you know the right person you can totally by pass the processes set up by law and get what ever you want done whether you are qualified or not. From what we observed the people seemed to be in a mindset of what can I do to go around the law rather then just follow it, just because it was often both easier and cheaper that way. Very different from what we are used to. I am not putting down Chinese culture, that is just the way it is there and in a lot of the world for that matter. This all leads up to one of our scariest experiences this year. The English school that Mike was working for sent us on a high-speed train up to Shenyang to do some visa work (apparently they were not licenced to hirer foreigners in Beijing so they had us go up there to do it-something we had not been aware of). We get there and someone who works for the school up there met us and took us to first the police station to register us in that city (even though we didn't live there) and then to apply for the visa. We did not like the whole situation and no one had said a thing before that and we had just put a ton of unexpected money into getting these visas including flying back to Canada and waiting two months to get a letter we needed to apply for the visa there and we were needing to use our credit card now to pay for the train tickets and the visas on the china end of it because we were bankrupt. We were always being treated like money grew on trees for us by the Chinese. Not only that but we had one month upon getting back to China to apply for the residence card and the school waited until the last few days to send us so we were really on edge. When we got to there we had just barely enough time before they closed (we had missed our train in Beijing so we were rushed for time). The lady who had took us there wanted us to not say anything and just let them assume we didn't speak Chinese (very suspicious and this made us feel very worried about what was really going on here). She took over. They told here it could not be done because they did not have there licence for the upcoming year yet. We were so scared, absolutely broke in a foreign country and now no visas. After phone calls and deliberating she got in contact with a 'friend' in the government who pulled some strings and got them to grant us the visas anyways with a promise that she would bring in the licence as soon as they got it. She even used Jada to get sympathy saying, don't make this baby come out in the cold again. That is actually a good argument that works with the Chinese culture. The officer in Canada would not even bat an eye at that.
2010 was another roller coaster year and an adventure. We still have the adventure bug, that will probably always be the case but now we are looking to get more settled, not as in find a place to call home and stay there for the rest of our lives but get established in a career that will keep us in connection with China and hopefully have the opportunity to live and work there again. That is our hope and dreams for the future, we will see what happens. It is much better to get a job here and have them send you over (much better benefits and wage) then to find a job, even with a foreign company, while living in China. We plan on being in Canada for the next 5 years or so, we will see what the future brings. 2011 is looking up for probable good year already. We have been in Canada for almost 2 months and on the job hunt but there were not even any calls for interviews until recently, it was really discouraging. But within the first week of January Mike has a promising second interview with Telus, a scheduled second interview with TD Bank, and the government is asking for some information to schedule a phone interview in either January or February for a immigration officer position were his first post would be in Ottawa while he trained and up to 5 years. The immigration officer position would not start until may so mike and I are hoping that he can get the bank job and that way he could be in a career that also has the possibility to take us were we want to go while he goes through the interview and hiring process for the government. The government is his dream job and we have high hopes in that direction. And if he does not get hired for this job increased experience in banking can help him as he continues to apply for the government as well as being a good career itself. These are just our hopes. Nothing is for sure but we feel good about things right now. Thing have not always gone as planned or in the time frame that we wanted but we have always seen blessings along the road. We have faith things will turn out for the best.
The most embarrassing
We were headed home from church one Sunday on the subway with two other families that were going the same direction. The subway came in at the same time that we were going down the stairs to board and it created a wind tunnel up the stairwell. Being Sunday I was wearing a skirt and it was a very full skirt at that. I had a baby in one arm and the wind was so strong that it flung my skirt up around my waist with a lot of force. I only had one arm to hold it down and Mike and one of the ladies we were walking with were helping me hold it down and it was still flying up. Mike said that I turned pretty red. Oh well right. Everyone has legs. Can't let it worry you too much but I never wore that skirt to church again if I knew we would take the subway.
The funniest
One day coming home from church in Beijing we were having a hard time catching a Taxi, they just seemed to be scarce going the direction we wanted to go. Then Jada decided to imitate us and put her arm out to call a taxi. Just then a taxi going the opposite direction flipped an illegal u-turn in the center of the road and picked us up. We like to joke about it and say that Jada is so cute that the Taxi driver could not not stop.
The most frustrating
Two things come to mind that were really frustrating:
In May when we had originally planned to return to Canada we decided to stay another year. We had spent the year before trying to get on our feet and things were finally starting to look up. Having a footing in China, more knowledge about opportunities in Beijing, contacts and some experience we had a lot of confidence that Mike could find a better job with a pay raise to better our situation. We upgraded to a two bedroom apartment (rent prices had increased dramatically) and then all our confidence started to wane. A month later and many promising looking job opportunities evaporated into thin air. Mike decided to get an online teaching certificate so he could get into some of the top schools in Beijing but then he didn't get those jobs either so finally we started to consider the options we despised most, the OTHER English schools. Mike applied for New oriental and got called back that day. We had heard horror stories about having to commute all over the city and having really long hours. These were all questions that Mike addressed in the interview, and found out that this branch of New Oriental had less centers, and teachers stayed mostly in one or two spots. So we thought it would be ok. So Mike started working, and right after he started the director of studies at the first school disappeared, so Mike got no training on how they expected him to use their programs and power points. A couple of weeks later, the acting DOS asked Mike if he had had any training. No. Turns out Mike was not teaching how they wanted him to teach and students were complaining. Students would seem nice in the class, then go file complaints to the center and not want to go to his class anymore. So it was really their fault, but they did not take a lot of responsibility for it. They just told mike to change. He finally got some training and things went a little better, but because students at that center still would either cancel or not show up to his classes (Stupid popularity contests), They shuffled him to a different center that took an almost an hour and a half (two in traffic) to get to. They also never gave him as many hours as they said that they would give. Mike ended up going to two different centers on opposite sides of the city (never on the same day at least) to get by. Mike did really well at the second center (the one he liked better anyway and was a little closer) and the students really liked him there. Turns out there was a lot of deep problems in that first center so they ended up closing it for a time. Of course, just after we decided to come back to Canada, and bought our tickets they offered him full time employment. Go figure, eh?
The second, not really a story, but just something in general: The beggars and people selling socks and other knickknacks outside of the silk market. Both of these groups were VERY pushy, VERY demanding and they only targeted foreigners or Chinese walking with foreigners. Mostly just foreigners. Some of the beggars would go so far as to grab at your clothing and follow you about 50 meters. That or send their kids after you. We like to help where we can, but these are not true people in need. Most of the beggars made more money then Mike did! (he made about 1500 USD a month). The people selling socks would not take no for an answer either. If you did not want socks, they would offer something else like fake Rolex's. They would shove whatever it was in your face and say "Socks!" or "Watches". They would follow you into McDonald's or one of the other restaurants near the silk market and pester you while you ate. The only way to deal with either group was to ignore them.
The coolest
Hands down, the coolest thing in 2010 was being in China during Chinese New Year! I'm sure you remember reading about it earlier in our blog, so we won't say too much. But we had a lot of fun with friends, we ate a lot, we set off a lot of fireworks, and watching the COOLEST firework show you'll ever see. We watched it from the roof of a 30 story building, so some of the fireworks were exploding at eye level. We had a lot of good laughs that evening - many of which came from a party game called "who wants to be famous". You send one person out of the room and everyone decides why that person is famous. The people in the room are the news reporters at the famous persons news conference about being famous. From the questions that the famous person is asked, they have to figure out why they are famous. Some of the best answers were things like "I was just sitting around and it came to me" (He was famous for inventing a human fart powered car) and "I'm just that good" (he was famous for knowing 20 languages, and can simultaneously translate into 5ish languages). Good times with friends!
One of the best times
When we moved to our new apartment, we had a house warming party. We decided to serve smoothies, because some friends had given us some smoothie syrups. We had classic flavours like strawberry, mango and such. Then we decided to have a guess the flavour game. We made a Chocolate Marshmallow Grape flavoured smoothie (Dad Innes' favourite Peters Drive In milkshake flavour). People loved the flavour combination, but no one got close to guessing all three. People were guessing things like Tootsie roll, maraschino cherry, chocolate covered grapes, cherry and grape, Tootsie roll and grape. People thought it was great fun to try to guess this flavour. We didn't have anyone guess all three correctly, so we put the names of everyone who got two right into a hat and drew the name of the winner.
The scariest
The cultural habits and runnings of the government in China is quite different from here. Being from Canada Mike and I have grown to expect that law are pretty set and that most people and especially businesses will follow the processes as required by the government (such as applying for licences, visas and those kind of things) and what you expect to happen will happen. Not so in China, the laws are very bendable and frequently changing. Often you can argue your way out of penalties and if you know the right person you can totally by pass the processes set up by law and get what ever you want done whether you are qualified or not. From what we observed the people seemed to be in a mindset of what can I do to go around the law rather then just follow it, just because it was often both easier and cheaper that way. Very different from what we are used to. I am not putting down Chinese culture, that is just the way it is there and in a lot of the world for that matter. This all leads up to one of our scariest experiences this year. The English school that Mike was working for sent us on a high-speed train up to Shenyang to do some visa work (apparently they were not licenced to hirer foreigners in Beijing so they had us go up there to do it-something we had not been aware of). We get there and someone who works for the school up there met us and took us to first the police station to register us in that city (even though we didn't live there) and then to apply for the visa. We did not like the whole situation and no one had said a thing before that and we had just put a ton of unexpected money into getting these visas including flying back to Canada and waiting two months to get a letter we needed to apply for the visa there and we were needing to use our credit card now to pay for the train tickets and the visas on the china end of it because we were bankrupt. We were always being treated like money grew on trees for us by the Chinese. Not only that but we had one month upon getting back to China to apply for the residence card and the school waited until the last few days to send us so we were really on edge. When we got to there we had just barely enough time before they closed (we had missed our train in Beijing so we were rushed for time). The lady who had took us there wanted us to not say anything and just let them assume we didn't speak Chinese (very suspicious and this made us feel very worried about what was really going on here). She took over. They told here it could not be done because they did not have there licence for the upcoming year yet. We were so scared, absolutely broke in a foreign country and now no visas. After phone calls and deliberating she got in contact with a 'friend' in the government who pulled some strings and got them to grant us the visas anyways with a promise that she would bring in the licence as soon as they got it. She even used Jada to get sympathy saying, don't make this baby come out in the cold again. That is actually a good argument that works with the Chinese culture. The officer in Canada would not even bat an eye at that.
2010 was another roller coaster year and an adventure. We still have the adventure bug, that will probably always be the case but now we are looking to get more settled, not as in find a place to call home and stay there for the rest of our lives but get established in a career that will keep us in connection with China and hopefully have the opportunity to live and work there again. That is our hope and dreams for the future, we will see what happens. It is much better to get a job here and have them send you over (much better benefits and wage) then to find a job, even with a foreign company, while living in China. We plan on being in Canada for the next 5 years or so, we will see what the future brings. 2011 is looking up for probable good year already. We have been in Canada for almost 2 months and on the job hunt but there were not even any calls for interviews until recently, it was really discouraging. But within the first week of January Mike has a promising second interview with Telus, a scheduled second interview with TD Bank, and the government is asking for some information to schedule a phone interview in either January or February for a immigration officer position were his first post would be in Ottawa while he trained and up to 5 years. The immigration officer position would not start until may so mike and I are hoping that he can get the bank job and that way he could be in a career that also has the possibility to take us were we want to go while he goes through the interview and hiring process for the government. The government is his dream job and we have high hopes in that direction. And if he does not get hired for this job increased experience in banking can help him as he continues to apply for the government as well as being a good career itself. These are just our hopes. Nothing is for sure but we feel good about things right now. Thing have not always gone as planned or in the time frame that we wanted but we have always seen blessings along the road. We have faith things will turn out for the best.
Happy New Year!
2010/12/29
The last month in photos
Ok, This picture is not in Canada, but it is something that Jada enjoys doing. She has seen us use the keys to open doors, so she tries to copy. She still does it, and it is funny to watch.
She is not the same baby that we left Beijing with and it has only been about a month and a half. She has learned so much in that time period. She has picked up at least a dozen words and her understanding is amazing. Her favourite word right now is hi, when people come in the door or walk in the room where she is she greets them. We can now ask her to go put her diaper in the garbage and she does it. We have a binky in bed only rule and now instead of just doing it for her we can ask her to leave her binky in her bed and she pulls it out and drops it in her bed. When it is time for dinner we tell her to go get in her booster seat and she climbs up, sit down and trys her best to do up the buckle. If she is climbing on something we don't want her to for safety reasons or she is after something she is not suppose to touch we can tell her "Jada, down please!" and she gets down, most of the time, she definetly understands. Today when I went to get her from her nap she start talking and talking a way, very animated, in baby talk and pointing to her bed like she was telling me something that had happened there and at the end of her long speel she says a word that I understood 'binky'. I didn't even know she knew how to say that word. She has a facsination with shoes, I'm sure every baby does, but she especially likes boots. Some times she trys on ones that are up to her hip and then has a hard time getting out of them. She tries on the shoes of just about every visitor.
Jada sure likes her water! She knew that there was water in there before, and it looked like a bottle, so why not try to drink it? Up until now Jada has been a really good water drinker and a good eater and eats just about anything we feed her. With being back and forth between grandparents homes we have been in vacation mood and some of our parenting methods started to slide a little. We started allowing chocolates and candy and everyone loves to feed babies so she was being given little snacks and treats through out the day by several different people so there wasn't any one person monitoring her diet. Because she was snacking so much we noticed that she started not eating her meals well and developing a sweet taste preference. We were creating a picky eater. As soon as we noticed we realized that we have to get on track so everyone agreed to not give her snacks and we cut out sweets and by the next day she was eating her meals again and not being picky. phew! It was'nt too late. She will have taste preferences, that is for sure because everyone does but at least this way I know what she has eaten in a day and can make sure she is getting the nutrients she needs.
Big Smile showing off her teeth! When we left Beijing she would smile and giggle but just little giggle, never real laughing. Now she has turned into a very smiley, laughing baby. About a week after we got here she discovered the high pitched squeel. Grandpa Innes has hearing aids and her squeel creats feed back, does not sound pleasant, so we have been trying to discourage it, probably a good idea anyways. Yesterday and today she only did it once so we are hoping that means it is dying out. She likes to scrunch up her nose when she giggles. Randomly she will just delve into this big elaborate stories, just jabbering away and every few seconds she just starts laughing and throws her arms up in the air. She was only doing the clapping part of patty cake when we left Beijing but now she claps, rolls her hands in her own way, draws with her finger on her hand and throws her hands up in her hair. I say thank you to her using the sign and she picked that up really quick because it looks like blowing kisses which her Nana taught her how to do. Something she loves to do with Nana (we call Grandma Innes Nana and Grandma Parks Grandma) is ride around on her walker. When ever Nana get up to goes somewhere Jada is right there asking for a ride or just climbing up on the seat without asking.
Up Up! Pick me UP! We are working on teaching her to say "please to ask for things". We started it meaning to teach her to sign it but in just one day she said it. We hope that teaching her early to ask for what she wants rather that demand will help out with the fast approaching toddler years. We believe that it will help to teach and reinforce habits of self-control and obedience. Christmas day we noticed her starting to assert her independence and through a fit. That is when we decided we needed to talk to come to an agreement together of how we were going to parent this new stage. It kind of crept up on us. Time goes fast when you are in a transitionary stage with moving from china and constantly back and forth between the in-laws trying to get set up here in Canada. Teaching her 'please' came out of our discussions. We have almost immediatly seen a change in her attitude. It amazes me so much everytime I see just how fast she can learn. She is a very smart little girl and we are very proud parents.
On Christmas eve Father in Law Vic was playing with the laser pointer, and Jada was really intereseted in it, and was trying to grab the light
Opening her stocking on Christmas day.
She got a hold of a black felt sharpie, and drew on her tounge
Looking in to one of her gifts from Grandpa and Gradma Parks
Whats this? She had fun playing with the packages. It took her a while to get into opening it, but with a little help she figured it out
She even help dad open a present up
Opening a present with grandma. Grandmas is her second mom, whenever we are there she follows her around and asks her to pick her up and loves to sit on her lap and cuddle with her.
These fun pop up animal things. She still remembers the word bird - she said it when the bird popped up. She often sticks her tongue out when she is concentrating.
Of course, she found a box, and had lots of fun in it. Who needs toys when you can have a box!
Just barely fits.... How would you like this to be your gift?
helping Daddy stretch
The other thing she has been trying to do lately is sit on her toy cars for a ride. She has learned that you can ride things with wheels just has not learned yet that size matters.
We had a lot of snow fall today, so we went out and played in it a little bit. She found it quite intresting.
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