November 30

Emily struggles to stay asleep at night. Or, perhaps to put the issue more accurately, Emily fights sleep hard, night and day! Last night she fell asleep after about 20 minutes of crying and fighting to stay awake, sleeping soundly until 2 AM when she let loose a torrent of very loud cries that once again awoke Tom in the adjoining room. The cries continued long enough to awaken Sydney, who is a pretty deep sleeper and who is able to sleep through most of Emily's cries. After Deborah walked Emily back and forth, rocked her, and tried to console her for about two hours, the end result was the Sydney and Emily made their way into Daniel's bed for the night. Well, for the 2 1/2 hours left of the night, anyway! That made us all tired today, and the added stress of a second child has us all pretty worn out. In addition, Deborah has come down with a pretty unpleasant cold - stuffy nose, dry cough, and worn down to a frazzle. So by the time dinner rolled around this evening, Tom took on double duty as schlepper of bags and keeper of Sydney while Deborah tried to catch a little rest in the hotel room.

Today's morning activity was a brief bus tour of parts of Wuhan and a visit to a river-side park on the banks of the Yangtze River (which is called Jiang Chang in Mandarin). Our group of Western parents and Asian babies elicited much starring among the locals visiting the park, and we caused quite a large scene among the older generations - mostly men - as we walked from place to place in the park. The Chinese people we meet on the street and in the hotel are inquisitive and mean no disrespect, but sometimes during our walk through the park, the attention took on all the characteristics of a major mob scene! The highlight of the morning was lunch in a place that I think is called Prince. It's excellent food; Josh, president of CCAI, apparently loves this restaurant very much. Chairman Mao is said to have enjoyed very much the cuisine of Wuhan, and I certainly understand why! We enjoyed a couple different fish dishes, dumplings, lotus root, vegetables, rice, noodles, beef, and other foods too numerous to remember. The meal was excellent and very reasonably priced - definitely a place to consider returning in the future.

We returned to the hotel after lunch. Tom and Daniel needed to return to the Carrefour shopping center, perhaps 1/2 mile away, for diapers for Emily. Deborah decided to stay in the room while the girls napped, but it turned out that Emily had fallen asleep on the bus ride home and would have no sleep afterward. So Sydney slept while Deborah worked to occupy Emily through a couple of bouts of diarrhea, no doubt caused by new and different foods. Tom and Daniel found diapers without a problem, but we also sought cough medicine for Deborah - far more elusive and ultimately, we discovered, impossible to obtain without understanding and reading Mandarin. Nonetheless, we returned from the department store, played, then went to dinner in the hotel while Deborah rested in the room. After baths, we put the girls to sleep and that's where we are right now. Emily cried about 15 minutes, but the current silence tells me that we now have two sleeping girls. That is excellent news! All of us are sacking out early and hoping the Emily will sleep through the night. We believe she should be able to do so, but we have yet to prove that belief!