Mother's Day

Today is my first Mother's Day! Laina woke up with a smile and said "mum-mum" to me, but also to the cat, her breakfast, and her daddy...oh well, it's a start. She is doing just great, survived her first vaccinations and is now sleeping through the night. She slept 10 hours straight! Yippee. Even Mommy feels human today, it really helps. Some people have said that they miss the China stories on the blog so I'll tell some more. We certainly have enough pictures. One photo today is of our bus group before we got the babies, I wish we had thought to take an after-shot with the babes but we didn't. Another photo is of a countdown display that they have in Beijing on a large building in Tannamen Square to count the days until the Olympics. The whole city is being re-vamped and beautified. There is construction everywhere, and all kinds of landscaping too. At least there seems to be lots of jobs; our guide said that with a large population like they have, it can be hard to find and to keep your job. There is always someone else who says they can do it better, or who can work longer hours, etc. From our bus window one day, Jimmy snapped a picture of some chefs in-training. The guys with the tallest hats are the head Chefs and the others are trainees. I also snapped a photo of an elderly man pedaling his wife behind him in her wheelchair, we saw all kinds of rigs attached to bikes and scooters, I wish I had done a whole series of just those. We saw a man one day with what looked like a king-sized mattress on a teeny cart behind his bike, and many people with loads so large you couldn't see the bike at all. We saw many people with babies on their backs, pets on the handlebars and groceries on their shoulders. I feel so frivolous with my soccer-mom van!