A morning at the park

Here are some pictures from our recent trip to the Pagoda Park here in town. It was a very nice day on the Saturday of our three day weekend. The entire family had basically just gotten better after a stomach bug, so we were all anxious to get out of the house. The kids have been waking up extremely early (between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m.) because China does not do daylight savings time. As a result, it is bright in the mornings, and the kids get up. Because of these early wakings-up, we headed out at about 8:00 a.m. To the right is a picture taken from when we got back from the park at 1:00 p.m. Everyone went down for a nap, but Dan resisted. I told him that he could go out on the porch and color. He was nice and quiet, and when I got up I found out why. It turns out he could resist no longer, and he finally realized that he did, in fact, need a nap, no matter where.
Pagoda Park has the large pagoda here in town. Here are Dan and Evelyn posing with the pagoda in the background (you can go in the pagoda for a fee, but I do not think you can go up it. Maybe we will do this some other time).

Here is a shot of Evelyn, posing for the camera, as she is keen to do nowadays.

Here is a shot of Etain, staring down a dog that a woman was carrying in her purse.

Etain enjoyed swinging on one of the tree branches that hung pretty low to the ground. Even though she enjoyed it, she was pretty nervous about falling. We had to take many pictures to get one of her enjoying herself; in all of the other pictures she had a face showing concern about falling (I was right there out of camera view to catch her if she did).

Here are all of the kids climbing together on one of the trees that consisted solely of vines. These trees were in a nice secluded part of the park, which meant that we got to play there for a while without having a huge crowd. Taking pictures were Jane and one other guy, who had a professional camera (He took probably 100 pictures or so). We climbed these trees for about 20 minutes until a security guard came over and told us it was not allowed. Dan has really been into climbing trees lately, and he had fun while it lasted.

Another very similar shot on the tree.

As is pretty typical of mornings in the park, many people go there to do their exercises. Here is a shot of Dan watching a guy doing his tai chi in the woods.

Here are the girls taking a stroller ride through the park (the double stroller has been a life-saver in China). Evelyn is really enjoying herself, as always. This picture was probably taken at about 11:00 a.m.; Etain's face shows that she was well overdue for a nap.

Here is a shot of Etain with a sticker on her face. She knew it was there and she would not let anyone take it off. It might just be me, but there are some pictures of Etain when she looks like relatives. I think in this shot she looks like her cousin Kayla, but she also looks like her other cousin Susan sometimes, whom she looks like in the picture at the top of the blog. (I had it in this spot but I accidentally erased it. In the picture, she is showing off the 'jelly' that she received in her Easter basket. Jelly is just like it sounds, a cross between Jello and jelly/jam. It is pretty gross.)

Well, I will add more pictures later (I am sorry for having a picture of a toilet being the first thing you see for so long). As is commonly heard among all of the non-Chinese here: Cheers!