"Mommy, are those buildings in China too?"

Oh the alarm went off so early this morning, or yesterday morning, or whenever that was...

I offered Kylie the choice of getting dressed at home, or waiting until we checked in at the airport. I don't blame her for her choice, really, I don't.

 

 Bleary eyed at 4:35 am, but happy to be starting the journey.

Check in went smoothly, and we stopped by Starbucks to get breakfast (thanks to a generous friend who gave us a card!) on the way to the gate.  Before long we were headed down the jetway.  Despite how tired they were, both kiddos pulled their own bag proudly

 

Pulling their own weight down the jetway to Chicago.

I think we were five minutes into the flight when both kids sacked out.  Caleb woke up as I was carrying him off the plane, so he was complaining of being tired.  Lucky for him he has a great sister that looks out for him.

 

Kylie shows what being a kind big sister means.

We did end up with four seats together.  Both kids did amazingly well overall, with only one mild skirmish between them and two "start of meltdowns" with Kylie over wanting to get off the plane, "Right now."  Of course I did too.  Problem was that the first time she said it we had only been flying for about five hours.  Eventually though we finally arrived (with what was the smoothest touchdown I think I've ever experienced.

And as we were still taxiing to the gate, I found myself getting excited to be back here on this foreign yet fascinating soil.  There is just something so unique about the chaos of China. 

We managed to get ourselves to the hotel AND check in, two things that our previous agency totally took care of for us.  Our room is nice, and we stopped by long enough to drop off our bags and refresh a bit before heading out to find something for dinner.  First we walked up to "the Bund" to check out the architecture.  Standing there amidst the buildings it would have been easy to convince myself that we were standing on a European street.  Well, if there were a whole bunch of Chinese tourists...

We actually decided to give a little Cantonese restaurant a try and enjoyed our meal of stir fried broccoli, pan noodles with BBQ lean meat, and Singapore Noodles.  It was delicious!

One final thought before I head to bed (and you could read that as fall asleep on my keyboard), I had forgotten just how conspicuious our family must look to locals.  Believe me we've had our share of stares and we've only been here about five hours now.  I think I'm gonna be taking pictures of lots of folks staring at us...

PS ~ As of right now my regular email account is working just fine.  So if you have something that you need/want me to know, go ahead and email it to me.  I can't promise that I'll get back to you promptly, but I can promise you that I'll be praying if necessary!  And comments from the blog have come too, so please keep them coming!

TWO MORE SLEEPS UNTIL WE MEET DARCY!!!