Day 5 Update from Jeff

I will post day 6 pictures later tonight.

The boys are getting some great pictures and I thank them for that. Most of you know how much I love pictures... so I am really excited when I see all of the pictures they send me.

On to Jeff's update... this would go with the pictures in the most recent post.

I'm not sure what time Ty usually woke up before us, but I'm sure it isn't as early as he is waking up now. I get up one hour later every day (which is good - 3:30 just isn't right) so once I get back on track the updates will get shorter.

We ate breakfast at 7:30 and were on the bus by 8:15 to go back to the Civil Affairs office where we met Ty 24 hours ago. Ty wasn't too thrilled about being there - I could sense he was stressed about it. He didn't cry, but he was hanging on pretty tight. I had to go into a room and make our promises to a government official and sign and sign and sign again. All documents were in Chinese and I was a bit worried walking out of there that they now owned my house or something.

Then we took a bus ride over to the police station so Ty could have his passport pictures taken. He fell asleep on the way over. We came back to the hotel and walked down to the local KFC for lunch. One cannot assume ANYTHING here. (Like that milk is served cold) They saw us coming and broke out the fast-food-by-pictures card so we could point at our selections. After we ate, we saw they had a (tiny) play area with a slide. Ty got a big kick out of that and we got video of him laughing going down the slide. The manager saw me helping him up a steep part and quickly came over to inform me that I was too tall to be in the play area. Right.

Then we walked over to the big super market that is 4 floors tall. Very bright and (confusing) exciting place. We bought a lot of water and a few toys and art supplies for Leonardo Tyvinci here. He will sit there and draw with a pen or pencil for an hour. He loves it. I was thinking about listing his first work on eBay. We named it "Chicken Feed in the Wind".

We had another funny episode about a broken glass. One of our bathroom tumblers came up cracked - we did it. At about 4pm a girl knocked at the door and showed me a hand-written invoice for one small glass. I knew right away what it was all about so I told her fine, I'll pay for it. $8 Yuan. I was digging in my pocket and the manager came up to talk about it. Then another girl was standing there and I gave them a $10 and told them to keep the change. They wanted to talk about the fact that there was a broken glass and we needed to cover all furnishings that we break or whatever. I told them I was sorry and to keep the change. 30 min later there was a knock at the door with one of the girls holding out $2. $8 Yuan = US $1.12.

We had a nice dinner in the hotel restaurant and then met with Sherri at 7pm to go over more papers.

Gave Ty his second bath in one day before bed, and we were all asleep by 9:30.