You can read along!
After all that work, and because it’s a great book, I put my English, the 汉字 and the pīnyīn together into a PDF cheatsheet and uploaded shots of each page into a photo gallery so other language students can test their reading comprehension. On the gallery page you can click through the pages and if you get stuck, either reference the PDF cheatsheet or glance at the captions under each photo, which also contain all the text for that page in English, 汉字，and pīnyīn (the captions are ugly; go with the PDF!).

Of course, if you like it you should buy it. Checking out author Doreen Cronin’s homepage might be nice, too.

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

You can read along!
After all that work, and because it’s a great book, I put my English, the 汉字 and the pīnyīn together into a PDF cheatsheet and uploaded shots of each page into a photo gallery so other language students can test their reading comprehension. On the gallery page you can click through the pages and if you get stuck, either reference the PDF cheatsheet or glance at the captions under each photo, which also contain all the text for that page in English, 汉字，and pīnyīn (the captions are ugly; go with the PDF!).

Of course, if you like it you should buy it. Checking out author Doreen Cronin’s homepage might be nice, too.

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

Problem: you have someone’s grandbaby, niece, nephew and/or great-grandbaby, and you live on the other side of the globe. Aside from mom and dad, all the people who love him or her the most are far, far away. This really, really sucks!

We were in Canada for the first four months of Lilia’s life (she spent her first month outside her mommy in the NICU). During that time our Facebook accounts were filled with baby photos and videos as well as daily comments from family and friends all around the globe. And that was when we were still living with family in our own country; we hadn’t even left yet.

In China, Facebook is was the ultimate tool for sharing baby photos and videos with far away family members (and, thanks to the privacy options, not the entire sleaze-saturated, creep-infested, pervert-enabling internet). Everyone from my grandparents to their great-grandkids are on Facebook, and it just kills to not get to share our daughter with them. We also miss the weekly and often daily FB interaction revolving around our nieces and nephews and whatever other family adventures are going on (most recently: the 2010 Olympic Games in our hometown!). Obviously it’s not as good as being within driving distance of your relatives, but FB was a big help and it’s sorely missed.

Some Options

So, 怎么办？ Here’s the three options we’ve come across for making the physical distance from family members a little less painful. If you have other ideas, please let us know in the comments!

1) Get a VPN
We haven’t bothered to used a paid service to unrestrict our internet in China. When it comes to the internet less can be more, I’m really cheap, and I assume those VPN services will be blocked eventually anyway. But for $60 bucks a year (wow, I really am cheap…) you can get great services like the one we just won for free! The good folks at ChengduLiving.com had a free giveaway and just yesterday we won six months of free VPN service! We tried it this morning and it’s working great; click here to see the details — you can get a discount code from ChengduLiving.com. (Thanks tons, guys!) Our original strategy didn’t involve VPNs, so I don’t know if we’ll keep using it or not once our free six months are up.

2) Get/Make a Facebook substitute
I’m really cheap, Facebook was already sucking up too much of my time, and I wanted a baby-photo-sharing backup that would work even if/when China blocked every proxy and VPN in the world. So we set up a private, password-protected, family-only WordPress blog. Since we already pay for our own domain name and hosting, this didn’t cost us anything extra. It’s not as slick as Facebook, of course, but we can still share photo galleries and upload video clips that our family can download, and everyone can leave comments and share their own stories and photos. It’s also nice to have some family-members-only space on the internet. Our families can see photos and video the same day we take them.

There’s no guarantee that our domain name/hosting server won’t go the way of Facebook, YouTube, and a growing list of proxies and VPNs; personal sites get blocked, too. But we try to play nice by staying away from topics and words that the gov. deems sensitive. Plus sites like ours aren’t as high priority for censors or as high profile as proxies anyway.

3) Use Skype
You don’t need a top-of-the-line computer or video camera (we have older stuff) to pull off great Skype video calls. And it’s free! And if your grandparents are too computer-illiterate to handle Skype, you can just Skype their phones for pennies a minute at the most ($0.02/minute to Canada and the USA). When international video calls or phone calls are this easy, it’d be tragic not to take advantage of the opportunity.

Any other ideas? How do you stay connected with family and friends back home?

Related:

• A Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 1 – is this our future?

Other foreign baby in China essentials:

• Foreign baby in China essentials: IMPORTED BABY FORMULA
• Foreign baby in China essentials: FRIENDLY STRANGER FINGER SHIELD
• Foreign baby in China essentials: AIR PURIFIER

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

Problem: you have someone’s grandbaby, niece, nephew and/or great-grandbaby, and you live on the other side of the globe. Aside from mom and dad, all the people who love him or her the most are far, far away. This really, really sucks!

We were in Canada for the first four months of Lilia’s life (she spent her first month outside her mommy in the NICU). During that time our Facebook accounts were filled with baby photos and videos as well as daily comments from family and friends all around the globe. And that was when we were still living with family in our own country; we hadn’t even left yet.

In China, Facebook is was the ultimate tool for sharing baby photos and videos with far away family members (and, thanks to the privacy options, not the entire sleaze-saturated, creep-infested, pervert-enabling internet). Everyone from my grandparents to their great-grandkids are on Facebook, and it just kills to not get to share our daughter with them. We also miss the weekly and often daily FB interaction revolving around our nieces and nephews and whatever other family adventures are going on (most recently: the 2010 Olympic Games in our hometown!). Obviously it’s not as good as being within driving distance of your relatives, but FB was a big help and it’s sorely missed.

Some Options

So, 怎么办？ Here’s the three options we’ve come across for making the physical distance from family members a little less painful. If you have other ideas, please let us know in the comments!

1) Get a VPN
We haven’t bothered to used a paid service to unrestrict our internet in China. When it comes to the internet less can be more, I’m really cheap, and I assume those VPN services will be blocked eventually anyway. But for $60 bucks a year (wow, I really am cheap…) you can get great services like the one we just won for free! The good folks at ChengduLiving.com had a free giveaway and just yesterday we won six months of free VPN service! We tried it this morning and it’s working great; click here to see the details — you can get a discount code from ChengduLiving.com. (Thanks tons, guys!) Our original strategy didn’t involve VPNs, so I don’t know if we’ll keep using it or not once our free six months are up.

2) Get/Make a Facebook substitute
I’m really cheap, Facebook was already sucking up too much of my time, and I wanted a baby-photo-sharing backup that would work even if/when China blocked every proxy and VPN in the world. So we set up a private, password-protected, family-only WordPress blog. Since we already pay for our own domain name and hosting, this didn’t cost us anything extra. It’s not as slick as Facebook, of course, but we can still share photo galleries and upload video clips that our family can download, and everyone can leave comments and share their own stories and photos. It’s also nice to have some family-members-only space on the internet. Our families can see photos and video the same day we take them.

There’s no guarantee that our domain name/hosting server won’t go the way of Facebook, YouTube, and a growing list of proxies and VPNs; personal sites get blocked, too. But we try to play nice by staying away from topics and words that the gov. deems sensitive. Plus sites like ours aren’t as high priority for censors or as high profile as proxies anyway.

3) Use Skype
You don’t need a top-of-the-line computer or video camera (we have older stuff) to pull off great Skype video calls. And it’s free! And if your grandparents are too computer-illiterate to handle Skype, you can just Skype their phones for pennies a minute at the most ($0.02/minute to Canada and the USA). When international video calls or phone calls are this easy, it’d be tragic not to take advantage of the opportunity.

Any other ideas? How do you stay connected with family and friends back home?

Related:

• A Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 1 – is this our future?

Other foreign baby in China essentials:

• Foreign baby in China essentials: IMPORTED BABY FORMULA
• Foreign baby in China essentials: FRIENDLY STRANGER FINGER SHIELD
• Foreign baby in China essentials: AIR PURIFIER

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

But sometimes the friendly little crowds that occasionally form around her can be too much. Especially when total strangers try to stick their fingers in our daughter’s mouth to make her smile! When I come home from work on the subway I always wash my hands before I play with her; there’s no way we’re letting random dàjiěs fresh out of the càishichǎng stick their fingers right in her mouth!

And that’s where this post’s foreign-baby-in-China essential comes in: āyí finger-blockers.

We have an Erogobaby baby backpack (they really ought to pay me for this!), and it has this very convenient lǎotàitàis-who-want-to-stick-their-fingers-in-foreign-babys’-mouths -finger-blocking device. It’s not in any of these photos because in winter the snowsuit does almost as good a job, but this baby carrier has a panel of fabric that you can button over the baby’s head when she’s sleeping. She doesn’t get distracted and people can’t get at her.

These photos are from today at Tianjin’s 古文化街。Lilia would not stop drawing friendly crowds! It was fun and she was smiling at everyone, but I was glad for the big snowsuit hood that she could hide behind and sleep behind when she needed to.

Related stuff:

• Our friends the rock stars
• A Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 1 – is this our future?

Other foreign baby in China essentials:

• Foreign baby in China essentials: IMPORTED BABY FORMULA
• Foreign baby in China essentials: FACEBOOK SUBSTITUTE (or VPN) & SKYPE
• Foreign baby in China essentials: AIR PURIFIER

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

But sometimes the friendly little crowds that occasionally form around her can be too much. Especially when total strangers try to stick their fingers in our daughter’s mouth to make her smile! When I come home from work on the subway I always wash my hands before I play with her; there’s no way we’re letting random dàjiěs fresh out of the càishichǎng stick their fingers right in her mouth!

And that’s where this post’s foreign-baby-in-China essential comes in: āyí finger-blockers.

We have an Erogobaby baby backpack (they really ought to pay me for this!), and it has this very convenient lǎotàitàis-who-want-to-stick-their-fingers-in-foreign-babys’-mouths -finger-blocking device. It’s not in any of these photos because in winter the snowsuit does almost as good a job, but this baby carrier has a panel of fabric that you can button over the baby’s head when she’s sleeping. She doesn’t get distracted and people can’t get at her.

These photos are from today at Tianjin’s 古文化街。Lilia would not stop drawing friendly crowds! It was fun and she was smiling at everyone, but I was glad for the big snowsuit hood that she could hide behind and sleep behind when she needed to.

Related stuff:

• Our friends the rock stars
• A Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 1 – is this our future?

Other foreign baby in China essentials:

• Foreign baby in China essentials: IMPORTED BABY FORMULA
• Foreign baby in China essentials: FACEBOOK SUBSTITUTE (or VPN) & SKYPE
• Foreign baby in China essentials: AIR PURIFIER

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.