Ayi Math

This analysis was actually put together by a friend of ours, but we figure it is worth sharing:

Couple of assumptions

1. the population of the Chaoyang District (our district in Beijing) is 2289796 (2000 census)
2. Most families don’t move to the other side of the world from each other so it’s not unreasonable to assume that you would have many generations of the same family living close by (and you said they both lived near by so I didn’t bother with the population of Beijing just your district)
3. So let say a woman has two children, one boy and one girl (the one child policy is pretty new so this is totally reasonable). Each of them has two children, one boy and one girl. When the granddaughters are of working age you would have 4 women in the family who might be in the field (since you said the second girl was a niece I had to assume her mother or father had a sister or I would have only counted 3)
4. Not that odd for a career to follow a family so it wouldn’t be odd that they all were in the same vocation.
   

So that’s 4 out of 2,289,769 or 1 out of 572,499... given the best set of circumstances that sounds right.

As a follow up: it turns out that the niece was not interested in part time work, so we will not be employing multiple members of the same family.

Yahoo is back!

Whatever unmentionable transgression that Yahoo may have made, it has apparently been forgiven and is once again accessible here in China.

Just to give you a sense of the confusedness of such occurrences:
While most of Yahoo became blocked on Wednesday, Flickr was actually blocked 2 weeks ago and Wikipedia, which I haven't been able to look at since I arrived in Beijing, is accessible. Hmmm... still can't view blogger - we can post, but not view.

Flickr was blocked because of some pictures of Tiananmen square that someone uploaded 2 weeks ago. It is possible that Flickr's disgrace is what affected the rest of Yahoo, but it is hard to tell. However, Flickr is also accessible once again... unless you actually want to see pictures, in which case you are out of luck. Right now I can go to their web page and do searches, but all that comes up are boxes with names in them and the actual images won't load.

Interesting solution

Yahoo blocked - Arghhhh!

China has apparently decided that everything Yahoo is incredibly dangerous so www.yahoo.com as well as yahoo mail is blocked. Flickr, which yahoo owns, is also totally off limits. Well, the sign-in page is still available, but all the content past that page has vanished.

I've kind of gotten use to general useful search engines being blocked, but my mail? Come on! That is just not nice. And to add insult to injury, the anonymous proxies can't even be used to check mail because you have to sign in as an individual which the proxies don't allow. So, if you want to get a hold of me, it would be best to email Michael who uses gmail or send my emails to my same username but to gmail.

Hopefully Yahoo will get back on China's good side again soon and then all will be right in my world, or at least my email world. Until then, we are sorry for this interruption in our services.

Ayi Juxposition

The MBA class I am taking has 10 hour days Thursday - Sunday. Right now this is not much of a problem (other than being particularly exhausting) but once our forthcoming bundle of joy shows up, those 2 weekdays are going to get a little tricky. Last fall you may have remembered that we hired our first ayi. Now we are looking to hire someone new to watch little moose for the two days I am in class and Michael is at work.

Tonight we interviewed a woman who sounded great; She lives near us, cooks Indian food, and was described as 'cheerful'. One small snag - it turned out that she is the niece of our current ayi. In fact, she has actually been to our apartment with her aunt.

We are rather surprised that out of the entire pool of ayis, the two we have interviewed are related. What are the odds?

Spicy food and baby sex

This past weekend I learned that craving spicy food means I will have a little boy according to Chinese customs. Of course, I am also craving sweets and pretty much anything that can be eaten quickly with little preparation work on my part so this particular indicator was not quite definitive.

Class

My latest MBA class started today - Corporate Finance. There is A LOT packed into this course, especially since I have never had accounting. To help prepare for class, last night Moose decided, for the very first time, to wake me up at 2 and keep me up until 3:30am. It was very thoughtful of her to make sure we got to spend some quality time together.

Today was a long day.

The bright side is that it will probably seem like a walk in the park compared to how much she will keep us awake once she is actually born.

Kittiy games

Its been a while since we have given updated kitty pictures, so today is a kitty-fix day. These first 2 are of one of their favorite games to pass the time. (Their very favorite is sleeping but those pictures getting boring pretty quickly.) The game seems to be called Cyrano ambushing Roxanne though they both play it quite a bit.

Another version of this game involved elaborate hiding tactics. Here is Roxanne employing the sofa slip cover as a masking device. I'm not sure how she managed to get the whole thing to lay down so smoothly after getting underneath it, but she definitely has the trick to it down.

Chinese Pregger Customs - Don't let the cold in

There is a lot of Chinese customs for pregnant women and I get to learn more and more of them each day.
During my last MBA class I was told that I should not eat hawthorn berries. This is probably part of the larger issues that 'cold' things are bad for preggies (though really there are a whole set of specific food requirements that I don't understand or even know about). What are cold things? Well, these are not only physically cold things like cold air but also items that fall into the 'cold' category like watermelon. The whole idea is that because women's joints loosen as the pregnancy progresses and especially right after the baby is born, that the woman's body is more susceptible to things. The one big issue to look out for is cold getting into the joints which will cause arthritis later in life. Chinese people would prefer that I don't even drink anything cold - which considering it was 32°C (90°F) is quite a bit to ask for.
Check out this article for more information regarding Chinese food culture.

Mangosteen season!

Yay! Mangosteens are back!
We have actually been able to find them around for a few months, but now they are cheap and oh so good. Both Laura and Brianne got to try these lovely fruits while visiting and became instant converts.

Gotta love those summer fruits!

Its a....

A few astute readers have asked about Moose's sex. So far we have just been responding to emails, but since someone actually went ahead and posted the question on the blog I guess we can give everyone an answer.

When we had the 5 month ultrasound we were told that it is 80% likely our little Moose is a girl. There is still a 20% chance that Moose was just being sort of shy for the pictures and that he will surprise us when he shows up in which case he will be wearing a lot of pink for his first year of life. (FYI - it is not that we believe that pink is at all required for little girls. We actually like blue, purple, green, fuchsia and really any color other than pink. But we have been given some cute pink outfits and we have been lent a lot of clothes from friends who happen to have a lot of pink... so pink it has been so far.)

There will probably be another ultrasound sometime in the next 2 months and it may confirm the sex, but for now it is ShamrockJewBabyGirl (aka Moose).