Aimee Blogs!!

Written Friday morning Hello everyone! It's about time for me to join this blogging adventure! Everytime that Ryan has been on the computer before, I have been sleeping--no joke. The time change has been difficult for me. We get back to the hotel from house-hunting and I just want to sleep the rest of the night. Fortunately for Ryan, I have done that only once so the rest of the evenings have been filled with heading out to explore the city and some of it's restaurants. Overall, this has been a wonderful trip. I am very relieved with what we have found of the medical world in Shanghai. Although it would still be hard to deliver here because of lack of our family and friends, I think the experience would be quite similar to US hospitals and even more personal. The appt. yesterday ended up just being another tour of their facility--both the clinic where I would have my prenatal care and the birthing facility. It would have cost us 500 RMB (about $60) just to meet with him and ask some questions so we decided to just have a look around. While touring the birthing center, we did meet one of the other doctors and a midwife. It sounds like every birth has 4 people helping--the doctor, a midwife, a nurse and a pediatrician.

Sunday morning: Since my last writing, we have picked out a house as Ryan wrote--I liked this house best because it had an American stove (in normal style Chinese housing, the oven is very small and very different than American style. Our tour guide explained that most Chinese women do not cook-- they go to the store and purchase everything premade and just heat it in thier homes. The other practical difference is it has an American washing machine and dryer (A Chinese washing machine is much smaller and is a washer and dryer in one machine so you can only do one at a time--very difficult with a famliy of 4 and eventually 5. All of the homes that we looked at were absolutely beautiful but I think I will feel the most at home in this one and hopefully will have more time for the swimming pool with kids and getting together with others. The house is not finished yet. We will have to live in another housing unit for about a month until this house is finished. Like Ryan said we were able to pick out whether we wanted carpet or not. We also were able to pick all of the window treatments, the funiture, and where we wanted American plugs and internet at. It was crazy picking out everything. They had maybe 20 curtain samples, 2-3 choices for each type of funiture, 30 samples of sofa fabric, and 4 types of wood choices so we were able to choose it all. I think that it should look nice together. All of the choices were very neutral so I will have to bring in color and more of my style in the pillows and pictures and things. We toured 3 expatriot birthing centers and clinics and all 3 are very similar--only 1 has a clinic by our future home so I think that will be the one I will use and then there will only be the actual giving birth that will have to be downtown. Yesterday was the first day that Ryan and I were on our own. We went to two very popular downtown tourist attractions which was very fun. We had our first opportunity to barter with the local vendors. I think that we got some good deals and probably some not so good but we learned a lot. Thank you all for your prayers and support. We love you all so much. I will try to get a couple of my favorite pictures in for you.