Why is that whenever I have a pile of grading sitting in front of me, I have this desire to push it aside and write an update? It certainly never takes me that long once I hunker down and do it, but starting something is always the hardest part.

Bowen has suddenly become a vocabulary sponge and learns at least 1 or 2 new words each day. He then gets bored with the "old ones" and refuses to say them again, with the exception of his favs including, huo che (train) and hua (flower). He's only learned one new English word tho, Baby, despite the fact that I play Sesame Street for him several times a week in addition to his daily exposure to my English (and that of my friends). The good news is he seems to enjoy the word Baby nearly as much as hua (flower), so there's some hope there.
He's also become a daredevil furniture climber, looking for every opportunity to give his mother and grandmother heart attacks.

When we're not worrying over Bowen's acrobatics or enjoying his rapidly growing language capacity, Tristin and I play soccer with friends and friends of friends. Just yesterday, we had our first match against another rebel group of coworkers. The difference was, however, our group is this mishmash of people from all over the place, with very few of us actually working at the same place. Whereas the other team consisted of teachers and administrators who all work at this international school together. What does this have to do with the quality of our play? Well, they actually had pre-determined positions, strategy and specifically planned plays where we were still working out where to place each player 3/4 of the way through the game. That said, we really didn't do too badly and only lost by 3 points. It was a high scoring game on both sides with the end result at 5 to 7 (our loss). Playing soccer again has been a lot of fun, more than I had expected. It's good exercise and I've discovered that I haven't lost all of my ability, which is nice to know. I also think I enjoy it because all the guys that I play with are overly sweet and always encourage me with compliments. I think they're just being nice, but it does make me feel a little better that I can hold my own against a group of men, most of whom are twice my size. I certainly can't push them around as much as I shoved my opponents in high school (that was the last time I played soccer regularly). Anyway, I hope we're able to continue playing, but with winter setting in, it might be harder and harder to convince people to keep coming. We'll see.

Halloween was pretty fun; although I was really sad that we didn't have a cute costume for Bowen and there was no place to take him trick or treating (I think he's actually old enough now that he would've liked it). I have asked my uncle and mom to pick up a costume on clearance in prep for next year. I found out that some of the expatriate housing areas do organize trick or treating for their kids, so I was kinda hoping that I could sneak Bowen in next year.
As for Tristin and I, we went to our first ever murder mystery dinner. For those of you who don't know what this is (I didn't really know beforehand), it's a bit like a real life Clue game where each person acts out a specific character and has a script with clues which are revealed at different stages of the meal. At the end, you guess who the murderer is. Because we got our story for free from the internet, the murderer was relatively obvious and some of the clues were revealed either too early or too late, making it a bit more confusing. Apparently, you can buy these "games" for as much as $50 for a high quality one that includes a tape, some props and a detailed description of what food to cook. In these higher quality mysteries, you may be the murderer and not even know it until the very end, whereas this one told you in the beginning if you were innocent or not. Every character does have a motive, but there's apparently one that is most likely to be the murderer based on the intensity of the motive and the personality of the character. The best part of this dinner was Tristin, whose character was a 21 year old, Californian aspiring actress. (yes, actRESS) He wore an electric blue, long curly wig of hair, miniskirt, nylons, implants (made of bread), a tight pink sweater and sunglasses. Don't get too excited to see pictures tho, as I think I've been banned from sharing them with anyone. As soon as Tristin downloaded the pictures onto our computer at home he was adamant about NOT sharing his picture with anyone. In fact, his exact words were, "If you saw a girl who looked like me on the street, you'd throw up." I told him it was a good thing that he didn't make a pretty girl. The other great thing about this dinner was the fact that Colleen made lasagna and her daughter, Jill, made her famous chocolate cheesecake!!! It was sooooooooo good!!!

Ok, it's now almost 5:30pm and I must go home and see my baby!
Hope your Halloweens were great!