The stickers have managed to survive. They’re all over the couch and the coffee table, some times they “star” for a day or two on tv, and doing a “sticker check” of my daily outfits has become a habit. Thankfully, though, Nico has also managed to get past the initial sticker addiction in which he was whining every half hour for another sticker hit. Consider it all a sticker truce.

This is perhaps part of why when Nico bounded up to the door proudly waving around one of his sand toys that cradled the corpse of a dead goldfish, I may have shrieked and jumped a little more than necessary. Well, that and we don’t even have a goldfish.

Or rather, we didn’t have a goldfish until we left the house this morning.

One of the troubles with living as a foreigner in China is people like to give your child things. Especially if your child is Nico. This has become a particular headache in the past two weeks when I began the “culling” phase of our move and Nico proceeded onto the “let’s collect goldfish” phase.

The first two fish Nico acquired were from one of the compound fountains. Apparently, it had to be cleaned out and Nico being cute and charming and in adoration of all things “fish” managed to weasle the apartment managers out of a pair of goldfish. I dealt with the situation by convincing him the goldfish would be happier in a different fountain.

The second pair of fish were a gift from Ayi and her husband when they  greeted Nico with what I like to call a “fish death ball” as we dropped him off for an overnight at their place. Basically, this contraption is a little ball on a key ring that some enterprising person fills with water, gravel, and fish. These are then given to children who run around with them as children will, shaking them all up until I presume the fish die. Nico’s guppies survived the night and so I rewarded them with a transfer into a proper fish bowl for the time being.

Today, however, somehow brought yet another pair of goldfish. I’m not too sure how Nico acquired them as I was busy being horrified by the story of how he had killed the dead one (the second one remains alive for the time being and is hanging out with the guppies). Apparently the fish-killer reached into the bowl and squeezed it to death. Ayi related this story to me with the same mildly giddy excitement that she tells me about all of Nico’s morning escapades, leading me to believe that she didn’t find the goldfish corpse nearly as traumatizing as I did. Indeed as far as I can tell, after Nico killed the fish, she proceeded to fish it out of the bowl and placed it in the sand toy which Nico was gleefully carting around when he greeted me at the door at noon.

As the last murder Nico committed involved impaling a fly on the edge of a coin, I wasn’t sure what to do with the remains of the present kill. Both Gaudi and 狐猴 the cat were tossing carnal glances at the body, but I just couldn’t handle the prospect of little golden fish guts around the apartment. So I opted for the preferred fish burial of my youth.

“Come, Nico. We need to bury the fish,” I said as I picked up the body and walked off to the bathroom, Nico trailing along, insistently pointing back at the fish bowl where presumably he thought the fish would begin swimming once again if I just dropped it in.

“No, no, Nico. The fish is dead. We need to let it go.” And let it go I did. As its body glided down the toilet, Nico finally realized the seriousness of the situation.

You see, things that go down the toilet never come back up.

Three hours later, the boy was still tearfully pointing at the bathroom calling out, “Fish! Fish!”

And if I never get him potty-trained, this will be why.

It’s been a whirlwind of activity since then. Movers had to be found. The dog had to be made EU import-ready. Apartment and car hunts needed to be launched. A new language learned (well it’s not new for Christian). Furniture bought. Jobs given notice. Ayi given notice. Adoption agency and home study guy given notice. Things given away. Friends bid farewell…

As of now, we’re in the final stretch with one month left in China (our stuff leaves on the slow boat in two weeks). As we get closer to the day of departure, loose ends actually are getting tied up and what once seemed like a Herculean effort is proving doable by mere mortals.

As part of our move, this website is also going to be changing with the hopes that without any silly things like real jobs to distract me, I’ll be better about updating it.

Next stop, Dornbirn, Austria!

I learned my lesson about being too optimistic, though, when I received a “desperate” call, asking me to MC the whole thing. By the time they finished stroking my ego, I found myself committed to far more than I wanted to be. Christian wasn’t exactly thrilled either when he found out our nice little family evening (we’d been planning on bailing early, when Nico got tired) had turned into me spending the evening working for no reimbursement yet again.

Things only went downhill from there when the party got overbooked and turned from a family affair into two separate parties: one for adults and one for children with the children only paraded briefly around the adult party like peacocks. As things grew further, the speeches from sponsors and magazine-related peeps grew and grew until the program started to resemble a press conference more than an actual party.

Christian and Nico still came with me, but after the dress I was forced to wear freaked Nico out to the point that he wanted nothing to do with me, they both headed home to a take out dinner and some movies, leaving me behind with the ruins of my own doing. I sucked it up and played it out.

Dinner was actually served early for once and I managed to get the entire thing wrapped up forty minutes before planned, which I felt was a pretty awesome feat (on paper, the party was intended to be FOUR hours long, which is a really long time, especially if the majority of the people you’re throwing the party for bail directly after dinner, which they, of course, did).

Yet when it was all done, I wasn’t exhilarated nor even relieved. I was just tired. Too tired to relay the events of the evening in a suitably scintillating manner, or so it seemed, as Christian’s attention couldn’t be kept for more than ten minutes before he started complaining about wanting to go to sleep.

Such was Saturday night.

A few days after 2nd anniversary issue of the magazine came out, people started coming up to me to ask if I’d really quit. I was impressed that my intentions to quit had remained intact. Then I got an email from one of the assistants at the magazine, telling me when my next article was due for the next issue and… Wait. Next article? No, no, no. That wasn’t right. And so I had to quit again. But they’ve finally gotten the message and apparently flew right out that week and replaced me with a new advice columnist. That stung a little as I like to think of myself as irreplaceable, but there you have it. I probably deserve much worse.

TV-wise, everything’s hunky-dory, though often dull. I’m still working every other week for the big TV station downtown, anchoring their English language news and editing Chinglish. It’s turned into a job in that I no longer find it all quirky and entertaining. My little local tv station is still postponing the start of the new program (it’s now supposed to start in January) and I’ve been assured that I will be anchoring that as well. The new format involves copying what the big tv station is doing, so I can expect to spend twice as much time doing half-as-interesting things, with the promise that all this work isn’t going to lead anywhere.

The whole not leading anywhere thing is getting to me. I like knowing that what I’m doing has the potential to grow and thrive and turn into something bigger and better than it currently is. I don’t like to sit around and stagnate, and usually I quit jobs once I realize they’re not actually going anywhere. Since our time in China is limited, and I’m likely going to have to quit my jobs once we welcome the new addition to our family, I’m not terribly concerned with the lack of upward momentum this time around. However, I’ve been itching to start working on some skills and qualifications for something I can likely continue to nurse no matter where we end up next (cause once the kids are in kindergarten, this gal ain’t stickin’ around the house, nosirree). I want to do something that will help people, that will help me to grow as a person, and doesn’t rely on the color of my skin or the emblem on my passport.

I’ve been practicing yoga for years, since my freshman year of college. It allowed me to retain some semblance of sanity during break ups, weird relationships, and my pregnancy with Nico. But it didn’t occur to me that I might feasibly do anything with it until recently when friends and gym acquaintances started coming up to me and suggesting I start a class. I’ve been pointing out that there are yoga teacher around here, but still, it got me thinking…

So for my next project, I’m going to get my yoga teacher certification and see what I can do with it.

“Have you uploaded the puppy pictures yet?”

You see, life was not challenging enough. I’m on a forced vacation for an indefinite period of time because the fate of the English language tv show I host is in limbo. Actually, this is sort of convenient, since it means I’m presently unemployed which in turn means I don’t need proof of employment and also have loads of time to track down Chinese police clearances and make sure the cat’s up to date on his vaccines. It also means even after tracking down those police clearances, running the cat to the vet, and tackling the usual grocery shopping, I have still been able to get home early every day this week to take Nico outside so Ayi could do some extra special things like wash our huge windows with a toothbrush. What’s more, all this free time–when I’m not double and triple checking lists of documents I didn’t even really know existed once upon a time or organizing said documents so that they’re easily retrievable at a moment’s notice or rearranging the piles of things Ayi’s not supposed to touch so that we don’t look like complete slobby packrats–allows me the leisure to run our new golden retriever puppy, Gaudi, outside every fifteen minutes just in case she has to go.

Because nothing says “upright, responsible parents” like buying a two month old puppy a week before your adoption homestudy…

…And if I ever get a free moment, you won’t believe how cute these puppy pictures are…

When I was finally paid, they tried to cut my salary down by a quarter. And that was the tv station’s version of being nice. I was able to argue my way into full pay, whereas both the cameraman and the English translator, tired of being professionally abused, decided to quit. They were the last original remnants of this show.

Then the tv station, knowing full well that I’m on a spousal visa and not a working permit (and thus technically not allowed to work for money) sent me down to the headquarters of the Exit-Entry Bureau (the guys in charge of visas and who gets to stay and who has to go) to interview some vey important and very friendly PSB officer who was all too happy to point out that what I’m doing is illegal and needs to be remedied, leading to the admittedly minor possibility that I could get kicked out of China. Then he cheerfully rewrote our entire news story just to add insult to injury and suck out what little life it had left.

That was a bad month.

What drove the matter home for us ultimately was a period of two weeks wherein our usual system for getting Nico settled down during middle-of-the-night wake ups broke down (we suspected he would sleep better if someone was able to lay down next to him for a few minutes until he calmed down). Plus we now had a local Ikea at which we’d been very, very good about not spending money. Thus 14 month old Nico has been awarded with his very own “big boy” bed.

The bed itself is a toddler mattress tossed on the tatami platform in Nico’s room. Christian blocked off most of the platform with a board so Nico can’t accidentally roll off the platform while asleep or groggy (normally Nico has amazing spatial awareness, especially when it concerns steps and drop offs) then he built a step at the far end of the platform so that Nico could easily get down (the platform is just a tad too high for the little guy). Since Nico like to move around and wedge himself into corners during the night, we’ve padded the walls with stuffed animals.

In general, Nico is sleeping much better in his new bed than he ever did in his crib (or during the first few months when he co-slept with us). I think a lot of it has to do with the new mattress being considerably more comfortable than the pitiful excuse that was the pad that belonged to the crib. Having more freedom may play into it, too, though. For naps, his bedroom door stays shut, but during the night, we leave all doors open, so that the little monster can come padding into our room in the morning.

In the past week, Christian has only threatened to go back to using the crib twice (during a 6:00am and 6:30am wake up respectively), so I’m think the new bed is a general success.