The Olympics have been exciting

Well, we stayed home and watched the opening ceremonies last night and got up this morning and watched them in English on NBC using the Slingbox. They were really neat, we actually heard the fireworks, but I think they were local ones, because we are pretty far from downtown. The kids made it for a litte while but then went to bed. Today we drove to an area called Lido, I think we will spend alot of time there, it is an expat neighborhood with alot of restaurants (we ate at a great place today called Peter's Tex-Mex Grill and the kids really liked it. They have a bowling alley, shops, and another Western grocery store and is not that far from our house, it is actually pretty close to where the new CAT office will be sometime this Fall. We keep checking the pet store, but so far, no kittens for us to adopt. Then we came home and went swimming, Marshall is doing great, he dives to botton for his toys and can swim really well under water. After we got home, Zach, the 5 year old boy from next door asked the kids to come and play baseball, so they had fun with that. That is what they miss the most, playing outside with neighborhood kids. Lauren met some girls yesterday at the pool and played for a while. One girl is 7 and will go to the same school, but with 6-7 2nd grade classes, we'll have to see if they are in the same one.
They started on our basement floor, chipping away the concrete to get ready to re-tile. However, they did not think to close any doors and since the toy room is right next to it, every toy we own has a layer of dust on it. It was even hard to breathe down there. So I spent most of yesterday and today trying to mop the dust off the floor and soaking the toys in the bathtub. I did get through most of them. I just hope the dusty part is over.
Hope you guys are enjoying the Olympics. We were reading about the American tourist killed at the Drum Tower, we were just there last week,and actually the steps that Marshall is climbing on our post for Houhai is the drum tower. The other picture I posted is a picture of the kids in front of and in the Drum Tower where it happened. That is really sad, but overall we have always felt safe here, hopefully this is just an isolated incident.
I put a funny picture of Lauren and Marshall with their cousins Billy and Tyler on while we were visiting this summer. They were running throught the sprinklers.
Hope all is well in the US. Take care and we miss you all!