Cold Bodies, Warm Hearts

Now that the weather has turned cold we've started to use our standing heaters more, although it's always a dilema how much to use them. Our apartment is concrete and it's not insulated so if we heat up the house, the heat quickly disappears. We've found a compromise between the "Western" way of using our heater and the "Eastern" way of just wearing many, many layers of clothes. The Chinese people do not use their heaters, instead they wear TONS of clothes. We often get a good laugh when we see how many layers people wear. It's quite amazing, but I can't blame them. For example, on Sunday when we were out, I saw a young girl stop to go potty on the street and she pulled down three really thick, padded pairs of long underwear. The babies here wear really thick, quilted clothes. Their babies look like fat, puffy, Mchellin babies, and their arms stick straight out because they're too puffy to put their arms down! So you can understand why people always think Elise is not wearing enough clothes. The other day I finally resorted to pulling up Elise's clothes and showing them every layer - 3 pairs of pants and 5 shirts - just to prove to them that I am a good mother and I do know how to dress my daughter warmly.

However, even though our bodies may be a little cold, our hearts are feeling warm! We're having a special Christmas season with students, classes, friends, family, fellow believers, and our girls. We're having fun receiving packages from home, cooking special Christmas treats like fudge and decorating Christmas cookies. We have our Christmas music playing non-stop and even have two Christmas trees in our home. Sophia has also made some decorations and paper chaines to decorate our home. Each Sunday we've been doing advent readings and lighting our advent candles. And every day we read many of Sophia's Christmas story books to her.

I've had a slow and lazy start to the day, so I better get going now. I have dishes to wash and my lesson to plan. Thankfully, unlike the other Chinese homes, we have hot water in our kitchen sink!!!