I love a holiday where I don’t have to travel. We just stay home and the cool kids came to visit us. Today, Liz, Andrea and Val came over since they were in town. M behaved herself quite nicely and proved she could managed to be in the same room with a small baby and not cause any mortal damage. It is awesome when you can meet semi-strangers and spend a few hours hanging out with no awkwardness at all. Too bad they live so far away!
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I have had a few questions about where I stand on the adoptive breastfeeding thing. I am not doing anything right now. I am not taking any meds until we get our referral. Once we are matched, the plan is to start back up on the Newman Goldfarb protocol. I am thinking I won’t start the pumping until we get home from China. I will see how it goes.
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When we came back from Cambodia, I considered joining the Peace Corps. Things were going well between Mr. A and I so I decided to stay with him in San Francisco instead. The only agreement was that we would spend a year overseas at some point.
China is the obvious choice because Mr. A speaks some Chinese, it would be great for M and the HFC and I like China. In my imagination, Mr. A would take a leave of absence for a year and we would go teach English at some college. It would be a big sacrifice. Basically we would be able to earn enough to get by in China if we homeschooled the kids (i.e. no private school tuition), but before we left we would have to earn and enough money to pay all our commitments here (Mortgage, school loans, etc.).
In the past few weeks, we heard there is a possibility that Mr. A’s job may have a new project in China. Mr. A thinks there is about a 40% chance it could happen. If his company does the project, there is about a 60% chance they could ask A to go to Beijing and spend some time there.
When we first started talking about it, I was adament that I wouldn’t go for more than 1 or 2 years. The more we talked about it, I decided we could commit to go to China for as long as 3 years, if we would be back by the time M is in Jr. High (6 or 7 grade). We would also need to be home with the HFC for at least a year to make sure that there aren’t any health or developmental problems that need to be resolved here before we left. This situation would be far preferable because A would continue to be paid his current salary, which would go a lot farther in China (Yay, full-time cleaning person!). We could also afford to send our kids to an international school and do quite a bit more traveling in a much more comfortable fashion (Thailand! Mongolia! Vietnam! Japan! INDIA!)
It isn’t anything that I am going to get too excited about right now, because the likelihood of it all working out is small. I wanted to record the recent discussions though, just in case it becomes more possible in the next 6 months.
Dude
I keep on hoping that Boyd’s company will hvae some opportunity like that as well. Or that we could parlay our desire to spend about a year in China with him teaching something like International Corporate Law somewhere in China that we would like to stay. Hmm, maybe I need to bring this up again as an idea.
What an amazing opportunity! We lived in Europe for 4 years and would head back overseas in a heartbeat……we still keep hope alive that my husband will get an assignment- we’d live Japan but feel the same way as you……new baby needs to be home a year first…….we’ll see…..just promise, no matter where you go you’ll keep blogging…..love the way you make me think.
i want to live abroad at some point, too. i keep hoping we can do it through some sort of job transfer thing so we don’t have to live without anything while living abroad. i hope it happens for you!
What a great opportunity.
Calder and I were just re-visiting our pre-kids commitment to spend a semester abroad on sabbatical. We’d want to do it sooner rather than later, but the money is a problem for us, too, because we wouldn’t want/be able to get someone to rent the house for such a short time.
It’s an exciting idea! Good luck!
Hey, we totally had a blast. M. was an excellent hostess and those brownies were damn tasty!
Hi – My husband and I have been living in China for a year and a half as expats – first in Shanghai and now in Beijing. We would be happy to share our experiences if you are seriously considering this. I DO NOT recommend the english teacher route. It is heavily populated with very odd people, and it is peppered with some really scary experiences. Also, do get a job before you come as it is really hard for expats to find one (non-english teaching ones) once they are here. My husband has a blog that you might find interesting (www.beuk.tv) and we’d be happy to chat over email or have dinner if you are ever in Beijing. Good luck!