I always find myself writing on or around this holiday over the last 3 years. It almost seems to be a state of the union type of posting.

So I guess I’ll start with our Covid outlook. As noted in the pop show blog entry, posted earlier in January, Covid came back through to bother us again. China has a pretty stringent policy about what happens when a location has locally transmitted cases. For us that meant travel was discouraged for a while and there were 3 mandatory city wide tests administered. To this day, they are still offering free tests to anyone who wants one in several locations around town. Which is good, because you need a negative test result within 48 hours if you plan to do anything medical. We ran into this ourselves, we had an appointment for Carter and were turned away because we were at 72 hours since our test had been administered. So we had to reschedule for the next day and run off to get tested.

The cases have slowed down as we approached CNY. Which meant our city’s medium risk level was downgraded and people were more likely to let us into their city.

While all the testing and being turned away from the hospital was happening, we were getting ready in case we went back to online school. We even got to have a practice day to fully prepare. That day was exhausting and I hope to keep that as our only online day this year.

Carter and all the other preschoolers were a different story. All of the schools had to stop their preschool program for two weeks during the height of our little outbreak. Strangely, we were able to put him in a daycare for the time period. We were not entirely in love with that though and hope he gets to go back when we all return from break.

Right now as I am writing, it is the eve before the new year. We headed to our place in Huizhou to enjoy some beach time. Yesterday was sunny and warm in the middle of the day and we played at the beach until it was time for lunch. We had seafood and headed home for a nap. Carter insisted he wasn’t tired but mama was and she fell asleep. Carter and I drew for a bit until he had a meltdown about wanting to watch a show. So I held him and scratched his back until he was ready to lay down. Eventually he fell asleep too. Then last night we went for some wonderful Thai food and discovered the hotel next door has an amazing play area for kids. It was a great find and Carter woke up talking about it this morning.

I woke up for the sunrise this morning. Once everyone else was up and ready we headed to the turtle sanctuary nearby. I love the turtle sanctuary and we go there every visit. I am not sure exactly what will happen for the rest of the break but I can make some predictions. We will go to the play area, we will eat something yummy, and we will go back to Shenzhen tomorrow.

I hope this next Lunar year is filled with good luck and good fortune for you and yours! Happy year of the tiger!