Last Week on the Homefront

This past week offered a mixed bag of happenings in the Allen household beginning with the arrival of our friends, Todd and Shandy Bolton and their two girls. We met up at church on Sunday and went out to dinner and for ice cream. Todd and Shandy were in Shanghai to choose a home and firm up plans for their daughters' schools. These fellow Michigan friends have been living in Germany for close to four years and will now relocate to Shanghai in July. We are very excited to have them here and to continue our friendship in person!

Rich and I celebrated our 24th wedding anniversary on Monday the 12th. We went out to celebrate with a steak dinner at one of the local restaurants. We continue to be amazed at how blessed we are in our marriage and give thanks to God for the gift. We are still in love and loving it!

Last week at school was spirit week and one of the days was Wacky Day. Here Lance and Elise are making the most of the day. Other days included, 'dress like your teacher day,' favorite cartoon character day and quadruplets day. The high school even had a cross dressing day. Some of the kids (not mine) went all out with the makeup and female body parts. Who authorized that one?!!!
Wade was home with mom again and would much rather have been in school. He occupied himself with building K'Nex creations and mostly launching them down the stairs. He also was a big help around the house helping me at the store, washing vegetables, doing the trash, grating cheese and cutting vegetables. I tried to find things to help him occupy his time as our ayi has been out on medical leave and we are doing things around the house the old fashioned way. I also had him doing some math fact sheets which he is quite good at. On Friday, we visited his new school, Yew Chung International School to finalize his acceptance and take a tour. We filled his lunch card and got his new uniform. He is very excited and will start next Friday, April 23rd.

On Thursday, we said goodbye to our driver and friend, Ding. Ding has been our driver for over two years. It was a sad parting on both of our parts. He really took very good care of our family and was a good and safe driver. We will miss him. We ordered a new transit van to accomodate our growing family (9 passenger) and the company that leases the vans is a different company than leased our S-max. Hence, we had to be assigned a new driver with the new company. We currently have a 12 passenger van until our new van arrives in a couple of weeks. Mr. Tsai is our new driver and speaks very good English. We are happy with him so far.

Lucas flew off to Seoul on Wednesday with his varsity soccer team (he is not in the above picture) to play in the Asia Pacific soccer tournament at Seoul Foreign School. Neither Rich nor I were able to attend this time but wished we could have been there to cheer them on. Unfortunately they lost some hard battles against some big, tough schools. They did however, earn the highly respected sportsmanship award and we are very proud of the Concordia boys.

Stacia was in the Shanghai neighborhood at Shanghai American School from Thursday through Saturday running in the Asia Pacific track meet. She ran two races a day and placed high enough in the 400M, 200M, and 100M races to go to the finals for each of the races. She did well and came away with a bronze medal in the 200M final. Stacia earned the only medal for Concordia's track team in the meet. Great job, Stacia!