The team's ready!

There's a whole team of parents, grandparents and a variety of stuffed, soft animals to keep Abigail company. All ready and waiting for our new arrival.

We have managed to locate all of the necessities, worked out how to sterilise stuff, and most importantly got a defective swing working with the help of our friendly local garage mechanic and his soldering iron.

Christmas in Shanghai

We are now coming to the end of our first Christmas in Shanghai.

Our Christmas tree is up, decorated and lit with presents underneath. We even have poinsettias around to make the house a little bit festive.

We started off the holiday feeling with a Christmas Eve service last night at the Hengshan Community Church. There was a massive turnout that left the church so full that they filled the outside gardens where there was a large screen set up to show the service inside...and it was packed! All of this was pretty much as we expected. What we didn't expect is that the entire service was in Mandarin. Somehow we assumed that because we found the service through one of the typical ex-pat websites, it would be in English. Still...the music was lovely and the people gathered were very sincere so it was all very nice.

We followed that attending a Christmas Eve party at the home of some of our new friends. It was a great night with riddles, a game of 'taboo' (which it turns out that we are not great at but are definitely improving) and a very nice meal.

This morning our Christmas morning plans were thrown off by the fact that we instead enjoyed what we joked would be the last Christmas for a VERY long time that we can sleep late. So we did. We slept late and spent most of the day in our pyjamas...opening presents and playing with my new wii mariokart game and steering wheel (wahoo!).

A late lunch/early dinner of southern comfort food with friends, and then back to the sofa for a nap and movies. Except for missing our friends and family at home, it was a very enjoyable Christmas.

We're wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year with love from Shanghai.

Jason and Christy (and a nearly-ready Abigail)

Small Achievements

So this weekend Jason is away and I've been trying to take care of a few little things. Just some small things like finding a dry cleaner to come to the apartment...and replacing the hanging rails that collapsed in the closet...finding a lock-pick to break into the bedroom dresser we lost the key for in transit...and getting the water guy to bring us a replacement water bottle. I mean, how hard can all of this be?

It all sounds SO simple but let me tell you, it is definitely not. So with a little bit of help from the receptionist at work and the lady who cleans our house (and does NOT speak english) we have water and a dry cleaner (who will hopefully return with our sofa covers and most of Jason's shirts).

So off I go to the nearest corner shop and several drawings on scrap paper later i manage to find the pieces to make new closet rails (although between the hardware guy and I they were 10cm too long). He also had a key-cutting machine so i managed to convey enough to get him to come back to the apartment with me, showed him the problem locks and thirty minutes later he shows back up with his friend the lock-pick. Et voila!!

It's going to take a lot of these baby steps...

Growing by the Day

We moved here at 30 weeks into a pregnancy and are now at 37 and counting...

This photo is Christy at 34 weeks and Trouble is clearly growing. According to Dr Louie she's a 'big baby', which is a little worrying for at least one of us.

Her cousin Michael David Wright was born a week ago in San Francisco and is a real cutie, even if he looks a lot like Christy's brother. Frankly, we're just pleased that Dave and Lori will be doing the real experiments...save us some time and 'trouble'.

Moving In

We spent the first month of our time in Shanghai in a serviced apartment, which was a lot like living in a one bedroom hotel room. A great view of the Huangpu River on a clear day (see above) and the constant sound from one of the many construction sites on Shanghai's newest metro line below.

So after as much looking around as our busy travel schedules allowed, we found an apartment. It's actually a very nice apartment, very new and twice the size of our London place. But we hated the furniture, so we negotiated with the landlord to have it taken away and in we moved. Six suitcases and not much else, rattling around our new home.

This was of course well before our container arrived via the 'slow boat to China' (literally), so we took the obligatory trip to Ikea with the primary objective of buying a mattress and bed for the guest bedroom so we could use it before our own bed arrived. No problem.

So we wandered through Ikea, chose a bedframe and a mattress, and talked to the very helpful staff member who said 'no problem'. The bedframe would be waiting for us downstairs...the mattress would be delivered in 7 days. (what!!!??)

So that was clearly not going to work. Trying to sleep during the 8th month of pregnancy is challenging under the best of circumstances. Doing it on the wooden slats of a bedframe was not an option. So we asked him to show us what they had 'in stock' that very minute that we could leave with.

Which is how we came to spend the first week of our new lives sleeping on a 3" mattress pad across the wooden slats of a bedframe.

Alive and well and living in Shanghai

So now that we've been in Shanghai for two months, and had a few false starts, we're finally starting to feel a little bit settled...

we have a place to live;

we have started to unpack our worldly belongings (and are shocked at how much stuff we have);

we found a doctor to delivery the baby (and she is soooo west coast);

we have learned to direct taxi drivers to our new apartment (except unfortunately none of them understand our pronunciation of our road);

we have satellite tv from the Phillipines;

we had bottled water delivered (but haven't quite worked out how to get them to come again);

we met a lady at Ikea who cleans our apartment (long story);

...we even have a Christmas tree.

Yes, we have finally started to get things sorted. But not without a few comedic moments.