Paternity leave

As a result of a national holiday and paternity leave, three weeks off is coming to and end. I've gotten into a real "fatherly" routine and it feels like its been months! Waking Hannah up in the morning to get her ready for kindergarten, dropping her off, going to the new, local, market to pick up fruit, taking Leah downstairs for a "walk", helping Andrea out with work or catching up on reading whilst Leah sleeps, hanging out near Andrea's office the rest of the day (so she can provide the feeding when necessary) and then dashing back to collect Hannah again from kindergarten. It's a weird experience "playing" with a baby that can't really see or hear properly, can't really move around or grip anything, and can't acknowledge anything. Quite different to life with a 2.10 year old who is always talking (and certainly not afraid to tell us what is wrong with her if something is wrong rather than guessing with a baby), always having an opinion and quite demanding to keep satisfied (though also happy doing quite a lot on her own).

In fact we definitely do have a school "run" of sorts. We're always running to get to kindergarten in time since Hannah always needs waking up and then it takes a while to get her past the grumpy stage, address the twice-daily fight to brush her teeth, and then get downstairs. The plus side is that the kindergarten is literally a very short run away. Out the gate, and then a 100m dash to the kindergarten. In fact when we pick Hannah up (we're normally the ones doing the running to make sure we are there in time), and Hannah comes out with her best friend, they promptly and unprompted, begin running back home heading through the gate to the playground. So much for being exhausted from kindergarten!

Anyway, she's settled in fine; obviously having her best friend in the same class helps. I'm sure she's a bit behind as she's one of the youngest in the class and her Chinese is not quite as good as the others (presumably) but then we did just save 40 pounds on not needing to buy an English CD set that all the other kids are buying to use at home! She still gets an English lesson at kindergarten I believe (they have one foreign teacher) but I'm not sure what it covers. I'm sure it will be tough when she has to move to the new kindergarten next year.

Leah's also doing fine - we only have one other child to compare with, but as expected the first few weeks are easy with her mostly sleeping and feeding at 2-3 hr intervals. I forgot how much they defecate - though when she does it is much more pleasant than when Hannah does! She continues to get daily conversations/arguments going with the locals over us taking her outside before she's a month old. Thankfully they all just accept its a "cultural difference" and i don't bother with any actual reasoning (i.e. "maybe historically if you lived in an unsanitary and hold/cold environment, it made sense to keep a vulnerable baby and mother inside for a while, but in a well-off modern society with clean showers, clean clothes, heating (or a/c), vaccinations and concrete rather than mud outside, I don't believe you need to do that any more"). Andrea would go crazy if she couldn't shower for a month (and to be honest most of my Chinese friends don't stick to that cultural norm despite pressure from their grandparents).

We strongly believe kids need air (and its actually been quite fresh in the last week), sunshine (it's a nice 20 degrees in the daytime at the moment and lovely in the autumn sun), and exposure to nature (though Leah's eyes and ears still aren't really aware of much she is so young). For those outside China you really have no idea how much of an issue this is. We literally have had gangs of disproving elderly surrounding Leah telling her she needs to go inside and even trying to force more clothes on her (she was already way too hot). Funny that feelings run so high on that yet most of the time they'll happily smoke at home and few people in China have worked out what a chlid-seat is in a car yet, let alone think of actually having two hands on a steering wheel rather than one on a mobile phone. We've seen signs, thankfully, that those safety considerations are beginning to enter young people's understandings of Chinese culture more and more even if not the elderly.

So, two more weeks of work at BSR and then a new job in a new city.  More excitement, but i can leave you with the thought of how lucky we are that because we wanted a couple weeks alone with the kids we gave our nanny a couple weeks off (she returns on monday once i go back to work) and so last week was the first time I've had to mop the floor in about six years. The benefit of having a small one-bedroom apartment is that it doesn't take long :)