the Ambrose family has visitors!

At the beginning of this month, our friends Amanda, Rod and little Mae came through Shanghai on the last leg of their very ambitious global tour which saw them in London, Copenhagen, Madrid, and Shanghai, in no particular order. We all had a great time! We haven't seen each other since Rod and a pregnant Amanda moved home to Australia from London, just before Jason and I got married. So it was a fantastic catch-up.



Mae is nineteen months old now and was great fun. She and Abi definitely enjoyed each other. We even treated Mae to a trip to the 5-storey Shanghai Barbie super-store...so much pink and so little time!

We also managed to work in some good time at the Shanghai world Expo. Something I haven't really been interested in but was completely bowled over by. A lot of the pavilions were AMAZING and the whole experience was definitely not to be missed. These are some photos of the UK pavilion which was definitely the most impressive of all.

The outside is very cool. It looks like a dandelion or spore of some kind. Which is of course what it's meant to be because the whole thing is based on the millenium seed bank that the UK has been building up in Kew Gardens.

This is a shot from inside the pavillion. The spines are poured acrylic and each go from outside straight through the facade to let in light. It's very dramatic.

and at the base of each spine is a seed or cluster of seeds, from each of the species represented in the seed bank back in the UK. It really is amazing.

So...we went through a few of the pavillions, or at least as many that would let us to the front of the line with the kids (hehehe). It made such a difference, i'm tempted to rent out Abi to expo visitors. :)

Here are the 'family portraits' in front of the China pavillion.

As you can imagine, despite Mae's seeming lack of interest, these two girls were very very popular with the chinese visitors. They were photographed by countless people and will probably feature in thousands of holiday picture albums. As you can see by this picture, people weren't shy about getting in for a shot!

And despite the two very tired babies and four tired adults, a good time was had by all!

Ambrose Family in Haikou

Thanks to a Saturday government presentation that Jason needed to give in Haikou, the Ambrose family finally had a weekend out of Shanghai (yes, the irony is not lost on us). So we piled out to the airport and flew to an island called Hainan at the southern tip of China.

Three hours of wrestling a squealing, bouncing Abigail and we were stepping into the tropics of Haikou. We stayed in a nice enough Sheraton beachfront hotel with lovely pools and great gardens and we spent the weekend there without leaving it (except for Jason of course).




We have discovered that Abi loves to swim and splashing around in the swimming pool, and she's not afraid to go underwater with us. She's also didn't mind napping poolside, particularly since she had some company.

So it all went very well until we needed to get home. Due to a number of incidents, we managed to miss our flight by five minutes. Thankfully we had flexible tickets so we could get onto the next one out...five hours later. It wasn't long enough to go back to the hotel and we didn't know anywhere else we could really go, so we settled into the waiting area to wait.

Over the course of five hours, Abi required two naps and two bottles and all but one of the diapers we had with us.



The one positive side of this is that I have been training Abi since birth for 'urban napping' so she wasn't entirely out of sorts with napping on the fly. As long as she has 'jelly piggy' with her, she's pretty much happy to sleep anywhere. Even on a pair of cafe chairs!




Eventually, many hours later, we arrive in Shanghai with Abi's fan club in tow (otherwise known as the other airline passengers). She managed to charm everyone on the flight, despite the ear-splitting squealing stage she is currently going through. As I got up with her to change her in the toilet, no less than twenty people across the plane started waving her arms to get her attention...and Princess Abi gave her loyal subjects some smiles.