China Time

Monday, June 17, 2024

Shuya is flying to Singapore

 Shuya is flying to Singapore. They will spend a couple of weeks with my wife's nephew's family. Their daughter adores Shuya. Shuya is traveling alone for the first time! I think it will increase their self-confidence greatly! They will fly to China and we will meet them there. Shuya will be immersed in Chinese for a couple of months. They really want to learn Chinese. 


Shuya has completed their freshman year at the University of Denver with straight A's! We get a significant discount on tuition because my wife has worked there for so many years - around 20 years. Shuya is living in the dorms this year and had a great roommate, and we will try visit their roommate in Naples, Florida around Christmas time. 



Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Shuya turns 10

Shuya just turned 10 recently and we had a nice little birthday party for her at the Rec Center. We hired an Art Teacher who provided all the kids with instruction on how to make Christmas Cards with some unique materials. It was really great. We ordered Marco's Pizza delivered and everybody made 3 or 4 Christmas cards to bring home and to send to friends and family.

Shuya attended Broomfield Academy for Kindergarten because we could not get her into a public school due to her birth date. She received an excellent education there from an incredible teacher.   She was identified as gifted and talented with an IQ score of 136 by her school district in 2011.  She has been enrolled at one of the best elementary schools in Colorado since Kindergarten (she repeated Kindergarten there but was quickly advanced to First Grade).

She is an excellent pianist and has been studying since she was 4. She has been taking lessons from a very good teacher for a couple of years now and is really excelling.  Her piano teacher thinks she is musically gifted.  Her mom makes sure she practices at least an hour a day which is one of the reasons she is so good - but her natural ability to learn, and her love of music, and natural musical talent are also real assets. She has had several recitals and has been competing. She competed recently at the Colorado Rising Stars Festival, Schmitt Music Competition and tried out for a spot in the Boulder Bach Festival. She is preparing a concerto piece (Sonatina by Clementi Op 36) to compete for an opportunity to play with the Denver Orchestra in May, 2016.  Here's a link to a piece she worked on a more recently (circa September 2015):

She also likes to sing and is taking voice lessons and sings at recitals at the Rocky Mountain Center for Music and Arts in Lafayette, CO.  She loves to perform on stage!  She does not have any fear of performing in public! 

Blanket of Kindness
She takes art lessons and her art tutor has also said that she thinks she is very creative and has commented that Shuya often tries to depict 3-Dimensional scenes or use 3-D techniques. Karen is an excellent teacher and can work with all kinds of media so Shuya is learning a lot of different art forms.  In March, 2015, Shuya won a Gold medal from the National PTA Reflections Art Program for her artwork “A Blanket of Kindness” at the Colorado State level. 












She is very athletic as well as intelligent. She is on the Broomfield CUDA swim team where she competes in numerous competitions. She also takes Chinese Kung Fu and is a favorite of the Shifu. She likes swimming, riding a bike or scooter, roller skating, baseball, basketball and soccer. I just took her skiing for the first time and she loved it. We are preparing to get her ski lessons soon.


Shuya has traveled quite a bit. She has been to China several times to visit family. She has also been to New York City where she got to see "Spiderman" on Broadway. She went to Washington DC one Fourth of July and got to see the fire works over the National Mall from our hotel window in the JW Marriott. She went to the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon. She visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the Natural History Museum, and one of the Art museums. She's also been to Virginia, Minnesota, Ohio, Vancouver, Canada, and Cape Cod. The Cape is one of her favorite destinations where she gets to play with her cousins on the beach and swim in the ocean.


She has also been to southern California near LA (where her father works) a few times where she has gone to many local attractions like Disneyland,  The LA Zoo, Legoland, Knott’s Berry Farm, San Diego Zoo, the San Diego Wild Animal Park, the Southern California Science Museum (where she saw the Space Shuttle), and Universal Studios.

Shuya is doing very well academically. She is good at math and science and she wants to learn more about space and computer programming this year.  She finished 5th grade intensive practice from Singapore Math this summer. She is working on the 6th grade Singapore Math. She is a voracious reader - she can't put a book down. And she loves all kinds of electronic games - Minecraft is her current favorite.Her goal is to reach 1000 reading counts points this year. She also has passion for writing. She keeps a private diary. She is also writing a poem and a story. She wishes she could publish her own best-selling book one day.

Shuya has a great personality. She is usually irrepressible. She is almost always very happy but when things don’t go her way she cries. She can become frustrated while playing the piano if she hears anything that sounds like criticism and she will shut down and sometimes start crying.  She is very outgoing and often tries to make new friends but although she has many friends at school and in her neighborhood, she has very few close friends and complains that she is having trouble making friends at school.  She has bonded very closely with her parents but seems to have trouble forming close bonds with kids at school.  Maybe due to her younger age, she is being picked on by some older kids in her classes. We worked with the school psychologist last year to help her to cope with social, emotional and behavioral issues. We will continue supporting her and will seek help from the school when needed.





Sunset over the Rockies from our house.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Shuya plays Piano for You


Family Portrait  from Fall of 2012


Recent piano by Shuya 


Links to Shuya's videos on Youtube: 

Preparing for our summer vacations - 2013

Shuya is 7-1/2 years old now. We are planning our summer vacations. Shuya and Wenguo will go to China for 2 weeks early in June and I will follow along about a week later and we will all come back together. We will spend time with Wenguo's family and do some shopping - for custom curtains for the house primarily. Not a lot of things are cheap in China anymore.

Then at the end of June we will go to upstate NY (it's like Canada) and visit my family. We will go to Glass Lake to see my mom and dad, and Aunt Alice and Aunt Grace, Sacandaga Reservoir to see my brother Donnie's camp, Scroon Lake to visit my brother Jon, and Lake Desolation for the family dinner on the 4th. We are flying into NYC and are trying to pick a Broadway show to go to. I think we might go to see Annie. How ironic!

Shuya is doing great. She had an operation on her wandering eye that has corrected the sideways wander but not the vertical wander and she might need another operation for that someday. She is on the swim team in the developmental group, and is able to swim freestyle, breast stroke and back stroke well. She just learned to dive from the edge well but can't dive from the stanchions yet. She plays piano very well and really seems to like it. I think both swimming and piano help her with her concentration. She is often easily distracted so it's good to have some things (other than the TV) that can hold her attention. Of course, nothing holds her attention like a book! She loves to read - she is a voracious reader.

She also does 1 our of Kung Fu every Saturday morning in Boulder and takes a 2 hour Mandarin Chinese class every Sunday during the school year. She gets an occasional art lesson from a nice gentleman and will start lessons with a voice coach soon. She has a couple of friends in the neighborhood but  Audrey is her favorite. Audrey is one year younger but just as tall and they love to play together.

She is in a Gifted and Talented program at what is probably the best local public school and we have her do a lot of extra work - mostly math, in the evenings. She presented Density at her school's science fair this year, and I think she kind of understands what it is. Anyway she had fun doing the experiments, and my wife said she did a great job explaining the experiment. I wish I could have attended the event but I had to work.

She is a wonderful child and we are very lucky to have her in our lives.

Dan

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Family vacation on Cape Cod

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We went to Cape Cod for one week for a family vacation! Much of my family was there and Shuya had a blast playing with her cousins. We had a great time playing on the beach, playing in the ocean, and walking on the beach. We went to the harbor one morning when it was foggy and teh fish hatchery were Shuya fed the fish. We went out for seafood a couple of times and Wenguo cooked tons of food for the whole family! They loved it! (You might say they just ate it up! ;)





Here is Shuya sitting in front of the cute little cottage we rented.



Wenguo posted a bunch of these pictures on Flckr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danwenguo/

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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Shuya smelling the purple sage!

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My wife is becoming a real good photographer! I love this photo...





Dan


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Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Shuya in the playroom at the White Swan

I found this clip from when we adopted Shuya and wanted to show everybody how much she's changed! This is taken in the playroom for the adopted children in the White Swan hotel in Guangzhou.

She's growing up fast...