Christmas, a Birthday, and no air shipment, oh my!

This past week was challenging to say the least!  Our air shipment should have left the US on December 14th; therefore, putting it in China right before Christmas.  It didn't leave then due to all of the holiday package shipping.  Had we known that this could have been a problem, we wouldn't have packed most of the Christmas presents in there.  We wouldn't have been able to bring everything in our suitcases, but I definitely would have packed differently.  Finding out last weekend that there was no chance of it arriving in time, we made a plan to give the kids a Christmas.  Thank goodness for ToysRUs!  We didn't spend our Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as we would have back in the US but we enjoyed ourselves!   On December 26th, we celebrated Landry's 5th birthday.  He was so great about his day even if wasn't how we normally do things.  Thankfully, I found Cars wrapping paper in Shanghai and plenty of toys at ToysRUs.  He had another pile of presents to open on his birthday and loved it! 

 Santa brought Landry Star Wars Minions figures

 Santa also brought Kinder Surprise Eggs.  For those of you that don't watch much YouTube.  Kinder Eggs are chocolate eggs that have a toy inside.  Can't get them in the US because they are considered a choking hazard but since we live in China now, Santa knew just what to bring them!

Mariella got a whole box of Shopkins baskets.  She loves the mystery ones that are in little plastic bags.  She had 60 mystery Shopkins to open.  She discovered that the Shopkins she opened here were painted differently and had special colors...hmmm!

 Landry tearing into his birthday presents!

China doesn't have much in the way of decorated birthday cakes like we would find at home.  We did find this awesome Christmas cake and it became his birthday treat too!  He's also sporting a cool new haircut.  We were happy to find someone to cut his hair that spoke English and did a great job.  He insisted that Landry have a cool style for his birthday.  Landry told him his hair looked like an Angry Bird's beak!

We can happily report that our air shipment landed in China yesterday!  It won't get to us for at least a week but now we know that it is within reach. 

Our language trainers come tonight for our first Mandarin lesson.  Will let you know how that goes...

We hope everyone had a Merry Christmas!