November 11th- Day 3- Qingxiu Mountain

We finally got a decent night of sleep!  Rick and I woke up at about 6:30 a.m. and Evan and Lena were pretty much waking up at the same time.  We had to wake the girls up and they both woke up happy again! YAY!     After getting ready, we headed to the breakfast buffet. It was another gloomy day, but the rain held off...whew!   We got to talk with the kids as they were getting ready to head to bed.  Landyn seems to be having the most hard time out of all the boys at home. I didn't see that coming. I thought it would be Jayce or Rowan.  Rowan is finally saying mama and dada and smiling at us. He seemed mad at us the first few days.  That kind of stuff is hard- makes you homesick.

We met our guide in the lobby at 9:30 a.m. and headed to Qingxiu Mountain.  What a beautiful place!  So many pretty flowers, trees, and landscaping.  Seriously gorgeous.   We rode on one of those trams you see in this first photo below and stopped at a few places to get out and explore.

Such a good big brother to his little sisters!

The flowers were stunning!  The pink flower below is the flower of Nanning.

Tram ride!

She loves him and he loves her!   She loves to get down and run.

A beautiful scene.

Macie is very good at posing for photos when out in public!

Feeding the koi.  There were so many of them and they went crazy to get that food!

Mama helping Macie.

This is just a small group of them!

Macie and mama.

Lena 

Getting ready to head up to the pagoda.

There was a pagoda just like this one that was destroyed during World War II because it was so tall that they were worried people would find it.   In 1985 they made a new pagoda that looked just like the old one. It was 9 stories high and 97 meters tall.  We did go all the way up to the top.  The girls LOVED going up and down and looking out all of the windows!  It was a good workout too. :)

 View from the top!

We were all running down the hill. I had to get in front of them because I knew it would be a cute picture.

This area was the highlight of our day! It was a ropes course different companies use to promote team building.  We did the whole thing with all our kids. Our guide took a lot of pictures and stood and watched us in amazement.  She said she never had a family do this before.  It was so good for bonding and building trust and we all had a blast!

She LOVES her daddy!

Evan climbing the wall!

She is great on the balance beam.

She cracked me up here.  She first laid down on this board and then went down it like a slide.

They had to go under these ropes. Look at those smiles!

Evan just LOVED this course that had like 15 different obstacles.

Then we went and checked out a bunch of cool statues.

So cute!

She got down and started posing, waiting for me to take this picture. :)

Lena looked like this statue today with her pigtails.

Another cool building.

Potty time!  She almost pulled down her pants in public.  We found a family bathroom with this tiny potty- it was too cute not to take a picture. ;)   She jumped up and started opening the door while poor Lena was trying to pull her pants back up.

These trees were so cool!

Daddy is so in love and happy, as I'm sure you can tell!

After leaving the mountain, we headed to the other side of town to visit a shop that had a few traditional Guangxi items.  We bought each of the girls a tapestry hand bag (tapestries are big in this province) and a xiuqiu or love ball for the future, one for their room, and a few for gifts.  I borrowed this picture and description of them from the internet:  A Xiuqiu is a ball made of colored cloth or silk as big as a fist, with colored flowers and birds embroidered on it, and also connected to several colored strips. Stuffed with chaff or cottonseeds, the ball will generally be less than 0.5kg in weight with some color band and a hank of colorful silk tassel attached. Its shape symbolizes the twelve months in a year: 12 pieces of petal-like cloth are knitted together, showing that happiness and love stay with every month and every year. 

After that we headed back to the room and had lunch in the room and then got the girls down for a nap.  They were exhausted after all that walking, climbing, running, and after that obstacle course adventure!  It was a great start to the day!