In October...

Tanner did a lot of this...

and we missed him but tried to enjoy our new city. The kids had a week off of school for Chinese National Holiday so we took the ferry to The Bund with some friends, checked out the Pixar exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art and even found a sketchy amusement park in the middle of the city.

We got a few random firework shows.

This little guy turned 6 months and started on solids!

We headed to Jing'an Temple one Saturday before our traditional Saturday food crawl. The food here has been better than expected. We can get it all!!

Reese loves to help pick up trash around the city. It is actually so much cleaner and well maintained that I thought it would be.

These two had fun watching soccer.

We celebrated Halloween twice with a Church activity on Saturday...

AND a yummy Halloween dinner followed by american style trick or treating thanks to our friends the Stucki's.

Stucki's and Nichol's with the Gustafson kids!

Birthday Boy

Since Tanner was heading to Australia for the week we went out Saturday to celebrate his b-day. We first started with a 70 minute foot massage, it was amazing and only cost $15 usd.

We then headed to our favorite Sushi place Haiku for dinner. We are going to continue to celebrate when he gets home with a Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday. I love this time of year!

Happy Birthday T! We love you!

Ocean One

When we came to Shanghai for our house hunting trip in March we saw some apartments downtown and some houses just outside of the city. We have always wanted to live the "city life" and with our kids being small we figured this was the time to do it. After being here 3 months, we are so glad we chose an apartment down town! We live in an area called Lujiazui and within walking distance we have two malls, grocery stores, wet markets, 2 of the tallest buildings in the world, the river, subway stations and lots of restaurants and massage places. Tanner walks about 15-20 minutes to his office which is so nice. Our apartment is called Ocean One and we have an indoor pool, an outdoor pool, tennis courts, a pirate playground, an indoor playground, 2 work out rooms, and saunas.

This is the front of our apartment, we use the bar area for our computer/office space.

Living room

Dinning room

Kitchen
Hallway down to the bedrooms
Ford's room
Reese's room
Reese's bathroom
We have 4 bathrooms (5 if you count the Ayi's) Beck and Fords look the same.

Beck's room
The Ayi's room (Ayi is what they call the maid/nanny's)
We use it as storage but would you believe that this is where the Ayi lives if you have a live in!

Our room
Our closet
Our bathroom
The square mirror in front of the bath tub is a TV.

The view

Come visit!!

Logan comes to visit

Logan was in China the month of August and was able to make a trip up to see us for the weekend! We LOVED having him visit us in our new city. He had lived about an hour from Shanghai last year so he was able to show us some of his favorites.

Walking down Century Ave aka "Shi ji da dau."

People's Park is known to be the "match making" place. Mom's, Dad's, Grandma's and Grandpa's will sit there all day with picture of their kids or grandkids and their bio's and try to match them up with someone. It is quite the site!

The Museum of Contemporary Art had a Pixar exhibit and flew in this CAR to promote it.

Our 1st walk on The Bund since moving here, despite the rain we had a great day.

We are standing at the front of our complex and this is our view. We have decided to take a picture of the progress each week on what will be "The Shanghai Tower."

Saturdays have been our food crawl days... these dumplings are too die for and for 10 of them it is around $2 US. Logan and Tanner are sitting in front of Krispy Kreme and after the dumplings we ended our lunch with a donut!

Shanghai favorites

See the guy behind us with his shirt rolled up? This is a typical sight around here when the weather is hot. It is one of my favorite things!

Look alikes

1st day of School

The night before School started we had a "special" dinner (China temporary housing style)...Mac & Cheese and oranges.

Reese on her 1st day of Kindergarten or Year 1 as they call it here!

Beck on his 1st day of Preschool or Kindergarten as they call it here.

Before he goes into school everyday he has to wash his hands and get his throat looked at and/or his temperature taken. So far the kids have been healthy so all the disease control preventions at their schools must be working :)