Fish and seaweed and eel - OH, my.

We had a fantastic field trip at Cheekwood in Nashville Wednesday at the homeschool day.

We played in a waterfall, toured the former home, visited the art gallery, played in the awesome playground castle, learned about snakes, saw the most beautiful flowers, and ate hotdogs picnic style on the green grass with friends we ran into - what a surprise!!! :-).

After Cheekwood, we decided to go to the Asian market to help Joy have a taste of China and to pick you up a few staples to have around the house. Joy was LOVING this trip.

She picked seaweed chips, rice crackers, rice cookies, bamboo, canned sugar cane, noodles, corn puffs (and they really taste just like corn.. I had those in China and was surprised at the taste), longyan fruit, more seaweed chips (tastes like rotting fish to me, YUCK), pocky sticks, haw hamburger (this name kills me. It's a fruit cookie) and more and more. We then headed over to the FISH.

We wanted to get you a start on some canned fish.
We heard you like the fish and anything spicy, so of course we bought the spicy fish!

Meilin and Samantha told us eel would be popular, so we bought some of that, too.

GULP.

Joy would literally squeal when she saw something she had eaten before in China. She was a happy girl!
We Loved the fresh produce and now that I know this produce is safe, we will mainly go for it next time!

The seafood and fresh fish were a hit with the kids!

Thank goodness Joy didn't choose the preserved duck eggs, whole octopus or the instant jellyfish.
We are trying out VERY best to help Joy be surrounded by Chinese adoptees and to bring some comforts from her former homeland to help in this transition. We will do the very same for you. The other kids love learning about where their sisters came from. We are gearing up for Mid-Autumn moon festival soon. Hoping to go celebrate with other Chinese- Americans in Nashville, but it will be close to our travel date, so we will have to see how much we can get done before then. Our head is swirling with things to do before you get here.
We just want to drop everything and leave yesterday... Ha! we have decided to leave 4 weeks and three days from today! We are so excited and counting down the days- 37 to be exact until you're in our arms! We leave in 31 days!!! EEEEK!

We are ALMOST there,
Mama