With the 4th of July approaching, everything is all Americana right now.  In that spirit I took the sample citizenship test on MSNBC.  Here’s my results

You answered 65% of questions correctly. Here’s your rating: 65-80%: Hey, you may make a good citizen yet! Look at your wrong answers and a little revision should do the trick.

Think you can do better? (most likely, I suck at history!) The test is here.

She arrives August 2nd!  Hopefully we will have as much fun with her as we did with Ray.  Although I think German and Chinese girls might be a little different! :)  We learned to cook some great Chinese food with Ray hopefully Jes can teach us some yummy German recipes.  Anyone know an online site to get some (in English)?

As you may have seen in the previous post, our lovely Chinese exchange student returned home to Chengdu on the 6th. Before she left, she was treated to 3 separate going away parties. The first party was thrown by her friends from school, the second from her grandparents, and the last from us. Click the photo to see all of them.

The next day we attended the wedding of a friend who is also the sister to my daughter’s godparents. It was HOT. The temperature in Georgia hovered around 100 degrees, and went over it at some points. It was an outside wedding so we’re still recovering. My girl is getting to be a pro at this flower girl thing. She looked beautiful as always and had a great time!

Her plane should be taking off just now. Because of the security measures instituted after Sept 11 we weren’t even able to take her to the gate to stay with her until she left. We had to hug and cry at security. I’m gonna miss her so much. She’s going to be on the plane for over 16 hours, we stocked her up with movies and goodies to make the ride a little more bearable. I know she’s excited to be going home. With all that’s happened in Chengdu, she needs to see her family and friends for herself and make sure they are all ok. Her mother and father are even part of the rebuilding. Her mother is an architect and is surveying the buildings to determine which ones need to be rebuilt and her father is a construction engineer and he is rebuilding houses for those who lost everything. He is going to be taking her to show her some of the sites that were worst hit.  When we got back in the car after leaving the airport; I asked my husband are you glad we did it?  He was crying but said he was.  All four of us were so sad to see her go, but wouldn’t have traded the experience of having her live with us for anything.  She was a joy to host.  If you’ve never had an exchange student, you should.  It will change your life in ways you never thought.

I can’t believe she would say that thousands of innocent people dying is just karma!  See the video below (her bit is in English, the rest is Chinese)

Monday is Memorial Day so we are throwing common sense to the wind and going out of town.  Gas prices are now $3.85 here.  My dilemma is I NEED to get away from the everyday.  I’m about to crack!  Plus this weekend is my family reunion in North Carolina.  So we are going to drive there (and spend loads on gas I’m sure) and camp to make up for the cost of gas.  If we couldn’t camp we probably wouldn’t be going.  Even the cheap hotels are still $200 for the weekend.  Most of my family isn’t going this year for one reason or another, so that was another consideration.  Each year we cleanup and put flowers on the graves of my mother’s family that is buried up there (there is probably 35-40 total graves).  Someone needs to do this, and I won’t let it go undone.  Hopefully it will be the chance to relax that we all need and a chance to spend some quality time with my family.  Also it’s our last trip with Ray before she goes home June 6th.

I took Spanish for 3 years, I hear Spanish all day at work (everyone except me is Hispanic), and my husband’s g-grandparents were from Spain and Cuba (though that doesn’t help). With all the Spanish around me you would think I would be fluent by now. Trouble is I am really shy about speaking Spanish, I prefer to write it and listen to it. I’m always afraid of mispronouncing something or saying the wrong thing, so I don’t try. My 4 year old daughter is taking Spanish at school and last night asked me how to say sweet dreams in Spanish. I remembered dreams sueño, but couldn’t think of sweet. My mind kept going to dulce but I thought that’s Italian not Spanish (I kept thinking of dulce de leche ice cream, mmmm). So I told her how to ask her Spanish teacher today how to say it. Cómo se dice sweet dreams en español. It’s probably not correct grammar but it would get the point across. Anyway I consulted the handy babelfish this morning and it told me that sweet dreams is sueños dulces! I was on the right track after all

These past few weeks I’ve been in a downward spiral of anxiety and depression.  I’m constantly worried about money, keeping my family happy, keeping my boss happy, and just being a good mom/wife/friend.  To say the least, that is very stressing.  So I’ve basically been running on autopilot.  I’m slowly coming out of the fog, things are still the same, they just aren’t weighing on me as much as they were.

Our sweet exchange student is from Chengdu. We have all been worried sick all day. Her parents live in a high rise downtown and her family lives in the more rural areas. We’re on the way home now to try and call them. She hasn’t been able to get in touch with them yet, and didn’t realize this morning how bad it was. Hopefully since it’s like almost 4 in the morning there we will be able to get through.

–UPDATE–

She’s finally spoken with her friends and family.  Everyone is ok, her family evacuated to her grandma’s house.  We tried to get her to relax a little last night.  She watched Edison Chen movies and ate peanut butter chocolate chip cookies.  Our thoughts are still with all the other many families that have suffered.