Language Learning

Elijah's words- xie xie (thank you), bye bye, zai jian (good bye), zhe ge, potty, elmo, mama, baba (dad) ee (ev), lao lao (my mom), nai nai (todd's mom) dewdaddy, buddy (my grandpa) grnma, ayi , football, play baseball, basketball, ball, clif clif (clifford), cook cook (cookie) crack ka (cracker), cranber (cranberries), food, more, all done, juice, down, ruff ruff (his dog), no, please, yeah, xi zao (bath), kan dian shi (watch tv), chu qu (go out), da xiang (elephant), Manny (Handy Manny), shoes, xiezi(shoes), da (horse- in T), bowl, gou (dog), ba ma (zebra), ba, jiu, shi (8,9,10),

Ev has a pretty large Chinese vocabulary. Or I guess for a 3 year old. She knows to speak Chinese to our babysitter, but she also will speak Chinese to me through the day.

Me, on the other hand. I am trying to retain all the vocabulary I am getting. For me to remember a word I have to remember the word, remember the tones(usually more than one tone for a word), and remember the character for the word.

Here is an example: the word for band aid =chuangketie chuang(1st tone)ke(3rdtone)tie(3rdtone) there are 3 characters 创可贴
if you say one tone wrong it means another word. not so fun!

Elijah's Baseball Videos

Here is our little guy hitting the ball, runing the bases and sliding! Check him out. :)

He has been eating his dinner really fast and saying "all done, play baseball". We tell him his has to wait on us and he just says, "play baseball".

Holiday Pictures

We were not our selves on Christmas Eve and Christmas. So we didn't take any pictures. Sad... but we were just not in the mood. We did let the kids open some presents the few days before Christmas so here they are opening our gifts to them.

Picture #1- Kids with a few of their gifts. (Notice Elijah would rather hold his balls)

Picture #2-Elijah seriously drools no stop. We thought teething was the reason, nope, he is this wet 24/7!

Picture #3- Dad helping Elijah open his present.

Picture #4- Ev blow drying her hair with her new blow dryer and pretend make up and set.

Do you like the picture of Todd and I that Ev took? Not bad, Aunt Kara watch out!

Hubby is taking another trip

Todd is taking a short trip from tomorrow afternoon until Saturday early evening. Since our home study Ev has reverted back to her days as a 2 yr old and even worse we are sad to say. We are hoping this is some kind of a stage, hopefully a QUICK one. Dealing with her behavior has really worn us out this week. At 3am this morning she woke up and tried to get into our bed with us. So I took her back to her room and tried to get her to stay there but she was unwilling to do that. (For some reason she has decided to only want her way and not accept anything but that. So when we don't give into her way she gives us much grief.) SO much that we have taken everything away from her in her room. At one point all she had was her bed and her dresser and bookshelf and everything else (toys, extra pillows, her house,doll stroller, etc. was gone) We took them away not only because of her behavior but since she had thrown everything in her room we didn't want her to break anything.

She was getting pretty upset and due to the fact that I was up at 3 something in the morning and I was worried her loud voice would wake her brother I kept firm to what I wanted her to do. She ended up taking her pillow and blanket and sleeping on the couch in the living room. Then at 4am she decided she couldn't go back to sleep and right as I was finally falling back to sleep she came in and asked to watch TV. That was a definite no. So again I got up and this time I just tucked her into the area she had made in the living room. I didn't want to deal with this since I knew I had to get up in a couple of hours and go to class for 2.5 hours. IT is hard enough to focus that long in another language, being sleep deprived doesn't help!

At both nap time and bed times she is giving us unusual grief. Not to mention other times in the day. But it seems like at sleeping times it is worse. So tonight I thought I made it out of her room with her being fine but I had to go in again and get her settled.

So I say this all to ask for your prayers while Todd is gone Thursday, Friday and part of Saturday. As Todd and I were watching TV after the kids were in bed I told him that I may go crazy while he is gone. Todd has been gone a lot lately on day trips or short trips. It is always hard on us at home due to the nature of what he is doing. So we appreciate your thoughts and that Ev will snap out of her funk.

And because Todd is taking the computer and Mp3 player with him I am left without Internet access, email and music. :( Thankfully a family is coming this way next week and are bringing us our new computer. We bought a Dell Mini to have as a second computer. With the work Todd is doing for the next year he takes over the computer and I usually don't get it until after 10pm. We need another one so I can get some work done during the day too. Adoption stuff, other life stuff, studying, etc. I am so excited for that to arrive.


We did take some pictures yesterday of our family in our living room for our adoption family life pictures. After maybe 10 takes i think we got a winner. We may even use it as our family Christmas picture for the year. Ev got into taking a few pictures too, so i let her take one of Todd and I by the Christmas tree. It didn't turn out bad at all. So check back on Saturday- hopefully i can post those pics for you. i also have some great video of Elijah playing baseball. He's great-he lifts up his leg when he pitches, he taps the end of the bat on the ground before he swings the bat and he has a pretty good slide for a 1 1/2 year old.

Thinking through the holidays

Todd and I have started a conversation that I wished we would have thought out way before now. We started celebrating Advent when we were first married. We have continued to do it each year and as we have added children to our family it has looked different each year. Last year I made an Advent calendar to help give Ev a better understanding of what we are doing. This year Elijah is more into it, last year he was a sweet little 7 month old who just sat in his high chair (since we did our Advent time around the dinner table). This year I hung the Advent calendar beside one of our couches near our large bookshelf so the wreath, kids nativity scene and the calendar are in the living room. Ev loves the routine every night - we pull something out of the calendar and each day share more of birth story of Jesus. We use a picture book as Todd tells the story and we add characters to the kids nativity scene. We end up with singing "Oh Come Let Us Adore Him". Ev can sing that with us since the chorus is easy and we decided to sing the same song over and over this year. Last year we would do more but it was just Todd and I singing. It is much more kid friendly now! Then Ev picks a picture of a people group that we have hung on our Christmas tree and we pray for them to know Jesus.

So after a whole month of focusing on Jesus we do what... open presents on Christmas day? Presents are not bad at all we are thankful that our families love us and want to shower us with wonderful things. I just want our kids to be able to give to others and more importantly give to Jesus. How did we stray from Jesus' birth story of the wise men giving Him gifts to getting gifts ourselves?

I think as we are in the process of adopting a child our hearts are heavy to give to the orphans and people in need around the world. We started way too late but I think next year I want to do as much as I can with our kids to give to others. We have a few orphanages in our city, I need to check if they will let foreigners in them. But I was thinking of doing something for the kids here locally. Hopefully we will have our new addition by Christmas and I want Ev and Elijah to be able to understand what they can of that process.

Next year we will be here for some of the month and then we will hopefully be going back to America. I hope to do some things here locally and then also when we get back to America. I think it would be meaningful for Ev to pick out items for a girl her age and Elijah to pick out items for a boy his age. Maybe as the years go by we can dig deeper into demonstrating God's love to others. I know they can only understand so much right now so maybe next year Ev will really comprehend more.

Adoption update

Well our short time with our social worker was indeed short. We are thankful that things have changed so that she could do all of her interviews with us in one visit. That made it very convenient for us! She is our age and has a son Elijah's age so she got along with the kids great. Things went smoothly and the kids acted really great during the time she was in our home. We asked her a lot of questions too and Todd kept her laughing most of the time.

We are now waiting on our Texas and Oklahoma child abuse reports to be returned to our agency so our social worker can finish her home study write up. She is working hard this week writing it so it will be finished this week. We just have to wait for the reports so she can add that to the home study.

We are waiting for our home study to be notarized and filed. That is the most important thing is our filing date. Since we are coming into the holidays both in the states (Christmas and New Years and then here with the C New year) we may be on hold for a while. Yikes. Would you be asking along with us that our Texas and Oklahoma child abuse reports would make it to our agency BEFORE Christmas. That will be asking a lot for Texas.... but we are thinking positively. Then depending on how long our agency has off for the holidays they have to notarize the home study to file it. This country has to approve our home study and translate it and log it in. So that could take some time. This country practically shuts down the WHOLE MONTH OF JANUARY for their C New Year, meaning our paperwork could get caught up until Feb.

We are traveling at the beginning of February ( 2nd) out of the country for about two weeks and on our way we will go through the city where an American Consulate is. We are HOPING that we will be able to get our fingerprints done either on the front end or more realistically the back end of our trip since we will already be traveling through this city. BUT we have to wait for them to tell us we can get our fingerprints. And we have to get some documents notarized the US way (meaning we will take them to this Consulate to do it because we can't get it done any other place). Most likely we will have to make another trip to the Consulate but we are really asking that things would work out to only do one.

So in the meantime our adoption grant paperwork is also put on home until the homestudy is official completed. Oh Texas please speed up your processing time!!!

So that is the latest... thanks for thinking about us through this time!

Home Study is TODAY

SO we Skyped with my family, had a full house of 3 yr olds and under, had lunch, watched a little TV (so I could get some last minute things put together) and naps (kids are still asleep -yes!), waiting for Todd to come back from his baseball game and hopefully our Social worker won't beat him here.

Whether or not we are ready :) our Home study is today and part of tomorrow morning. We've been really busy this week ( I had to do something(s) every day this week in addition to class) that it really didn't hit me that today is our home study. I started to panic last night as I went to our expat ladies Christmas night. The other moms adopting where there so I got some last minute tips from them.

I made sure I had plugs for our sockets that are exposed, Todd put up our fire alarms, I put some corner protector things and we have been making sure our house is clean. Elijah thinks it is funny to go around and take off or out the safety features I've put up.

Today we ran out of water (we use water jugs for our drinking water) so we called and they took forever to get here. So that meant we didn't have any water or juice to give the kids today for snack. Crazy... I couldn't find things today, of course and well I am trying to listen to some music to settle myself.

I am hoping that things are natural and comfortable with our Social worker as she asks us tons of questions. :)

Christmas projects

This year we are making gifts for the other families in our group. Our group is larger than last year so I am trying to decide what to spend my time on. I have made some crayon rolls for Ev's friends to give them. All I have to do is buys some crayons to put inside and then Ev and I are going to make some ornaments out of applesauce and cinnamon.

A few weeks ago I went to an expat clothing swap. (I love these things!) I found some cute shoes for myself and a couple of sweaters that I plan on making things out of. I used one of them (it originally was a turtleneck) and transformed it into a sweater dress for Ev. I cut it apart and sewed it back together. She gets hot easily so I didn't add sleeves to it but I think it turned out cute. I dressed her and Elijah up and had them sit in front of the tree. The only way I could get Elijah to stay there was if I gave him his baseball bat and ball.

I also made Ev an pillowcase dress out of the same fabric that I made our new Christmas tree skirt out of. I also made some coaster out of this fabric too.

I've sewed a few quilt cards to give as gifts and now I need to get out and buy some more things so I can keep working on our gifts. Once I can find the cord to download our pictures from our camera to the computer I will post some pictures.

News

I'm going to post like crazy today since it may be another week until I can post again. :) We I mean (Todd) is very busy these days and it is stressing him out, which usually DOESN'T happen. All of this week I have been sick so I haven't been able to do anything and he is working hard doing work related stuff, other projects, class, adoption stuff and the list goes on.

Adoption news:

We are scanning in all of our documents to send to a few people in our agency. We are awaiting some very important documents in a care package and will have to scan those once we get them and update the information. Meanwhile we are faxing and still waiting on our TX, OK and KS child abuse forms. Please pray that it will take LESS time than what they tell us. Once we have these forms in hand we will have EVERYTHING for our agency, the country, and for our dossier. Well except getting photos printed and finger prints (to be done at the Embassy later.) We will leave the country at the beginning of February to meet Todd's family for vacation in another country. We will go through the city where a US Consulate is and are hoping that we can get our fingerprints and documents notarized done there. PRAY that the timing works out to do this.

Our Social Worker is scheduled to come next FRIDAY! Praise Father that another family in town who have adopted a little girl need to get their 1 year follow up done so our Social worker is coming for our home study and to do their meeting. Meaning WE GET TO SPLIT the cost of flying her here to visit us. YEAH! We are so thankful for this blessing. (Our SW does live in this country but it is still expensive to fly her here since we live on the other side of the country.)

Since I have been out of commission this week I haven't made it to class yet. Hopefully I can go tomorrow.

Today when I couldn't do much of anything else I wrapped Christmas presents. I am so glad I did my shopping over a month ago. Todd may have thought I was crazy but I am so glad now! See it pays to start early.

Elijah has been wanting to watch the movie The Sandlot every day. He carries his bat over his shoulder and holds his ball most of the day. When he isn't doing that he is running in circles (he is running the bases) and he is falling down on the ground (his way of sliding into home) it is the cutest thing I have ever seen. Who knew 1 1/2 year olds could do this. When we talked to Todd's parents on Skype this week they said that Todd use to do the same thing when he was little and also Dew Daddy did that too when he was little. I guess it does run in the family. :) I wish I could have seen Todd when he was this age

Decorating for Christmas

As I was downloading our new pictures from decorating the Christmas tree I thought about 3 years ago when Ev was just a couple of months old. I wore her in a carrier and she slept through helping me decorate the tree. The following year we were over here and all of us had gotten a very bad virus. Todd's mom and sister and our friend Ashley put up the tree for us since we were so sick. Last year I don't think anything big happened. Ev put stickers all over the tree. This year Ev did more to help us and it is Elijah we have to train not to touch or pull off the ornaments. She was more interesting in her tree and the nativity scene than helping with the big tree.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am closing out or Thanksgiving day by watching the Today show and then the Macy's Thanksgiving parade on our sling box. Hopefully I can make it through to 2am. :)

Things around here went well. I got up and started cleaning my bird. I named him Frank. I was a little grossed out to have to pull his head out and all the other fun things. It took me almost an hour to clean and then cut out and remove the backbone. It wasn't as easy as it looked in Martha's magazine. I guess I should have picked up on the phrase, "or if you want you can ask your butcher to butterfly the turkey for you..." I put some major muscle into it and was hoping it would work. I did have to cut off the legs and put them in the second oven separately but with removing the backbone and trying to lay the turkey out as flat as I could I made it just barely fit in my oven. Needless to say using a turkey bag and taking flattening it out, it wasn't hard to cook once it was in the oven. It smelled good and it looked and ended up tasting just fine. Yeah!

People started showing up a little before 12pm and everyone stayed until after 7pm. We had imported turkey, sweet potatoes, broccoli cheese casserole, rolls, jello salad, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, chocolate tort, dutch apple pie and decorated sugar cookies. The men loved watching football the whole time. The ladies enjoyed talking and the kids played. Elijah started running and throwing himself on the ground like he was getting tackled. It gave everyone a laugh as they realized he was copying what he was seeing on the TV. The Todd in him came out as he realized we saw him and then would grab the football and go down to the ground.

Elijah grazed all day. I had veggies dip, apples and candy corn to munch on pre meal time. When I came out of the kitchen I found him standing on a chair with his hand in the bowl of candy corn just shoveling them in. No one realized what he was doing. He ate almost the whole bowl.

This is our 3rd Thanksgiving here. I would say that this one felt the most like a Thanksgiving at home.

I hope you all have a great Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving Eve

Thanks to Mom and my grandparents we have great decorations and food for Thanksgiving. I wanted them to see how things turned out. I am so excited about plastic silverware, the pumpkin pie candle, the Ritz crackers for my grandma's broccoli cheese casserole and the name cards. (I really love everything else I didn't mention too!) Todd thinks he is funny and already switched up the name cards and is calling me the Thanksgiving nazi for making everyone have a signed seat.

Okay so maybe we do have a few glitches

I think it is funny after I posted a few days ago about how things are going really well for our adoption paperwork that today I am not saying that. :)

We are trying to get our paperwork plus our online hours done so our social worker came make it here before she takes off for the holidays. Meaning we have about 2 weeks worth of a window for that to happen.

Todd had sent an email with several questions to our SW and she told him that our criminal history/child abuse stuff from the States didn't have to be done yet. But yesterday I went ahead and sent her the states we have lived in since we were 18. Come to find out these things are needed to be returned BEFORE she can file our home study. So if i hadn't sent the email yesterday we would be in a mess. Thanks to Father for prompting me to send the email. It looks like Kansas is easy breezy. They sent in the info for me yesterday with no problems or extra things involved. But unfortunatley Texas and Oklahoma are very difficult. Go figure!

For Texas we have to fill out a form and get it notarized and send it back (which would mean to express mail it from here to America in who knows who long) and then wait 4 WEEKS for it to process. So we can't just get things notarized here, the US will not accept the C way of notarizing. We are begging our Social worker to allow our Power of Attorney to do this for us. After all, isn't that why we have a POA? If we cannot and are forced to get this paper notarized that would mean we would have to fly to another city to go to the US Embassy and get it done. The funny thing is that this city is not far but amazingly WAY expensive to fly to. Or one of us could do the 26 hour overnight train for not that much cheaper than flying.

For Oklahoma and I wouldn't expect this from this state but we are suppose to have a court order to get our criminal history/child abuse checks. What in the world? Isn't not like we can just fly back to America to get this. Who knows what we will have to do for this. A friend of mine living in another country is adoption from another country so I asked her what they did. Hopefully she will give me some good suggestions.

And of course at the moment we are busy with other things in life. In other areas some things have changed and are putting unnecessary junk on our shoulders. It is really frustrating so we have this to deal with and class and life and just being over here. I am ready for a vacation. Too bad we have to wait 3 months to actually get one.

I bet this never happened to you before...

So yesterday Todd went and picked up our turkey from the Import Store. I wasn't the one that picked the size so I guess I hadn't really coverted kilograms into pounds to know how big of a turkey we would have. So I was a little shocked to read the label and get a 13.5 lb bird.

I put it next to my oven and laughed. Since we are hosting Thanksgiving this year I am cooking the turkey (and for the first time ever!) but my little oven is overwhelmed by the bird. I bet you never had this happen to you. My turkey won't fit. So... I am going to try a couple of things. First I am going to try to butterfly the turkey like my Thanksgiving issue of Martha Stewart says. Hopefully I can get it to lay semi flat and cook faster that way. Second I think I am going to have to cut the turkey in half and cook each part separately. I think if I do both of these things then maybe it will work. Haha! A friend gave me a turkey bag to cook my turkey in so I guess I will use it for one part and then the other part will just be cooked without it. Another friend is bringing over her smaller oven for me to use on Thanksgiving so I can cook both turkeys at the same time. At least I can cook the other dishes I am making ahead of time. If I only had a normal size oven this would all be easier. :) Makes for some good laughs though!

Another thing to check off the list

Today we went and got of physicals done for our adoption paperwork. It was pretty painless. We went to the place where we get our physicals done for school every year. They were very cooperative and the results were ready today at 4:30pm. We thought that it was going to be easier to do it this way rather than try to go to the hospital and see a foreign doctor. It would have been pretty crazy with several steps involved so we are thankful that going to a local doctor worked out for us. My tutor went with us just in case we needed her help and she told us that for foreigners the process is very fast. She had to get a physical done last spring and had to come back 3 times because they claimed that the right doctor wasn't there.

It seems like getting the paperwork hasn't been too hard. What is hard for us right now is our online 10 hours of Hague training. It seems like the Hague site has some problems so we get kicked off all the time and it takes forever for the videos to load. That just means what is suppose to take 10 hours may actually take us 20 hours. :(

Early Christmas Present

Thanks to my grandparents and mom I now have a brand new Singer sewing machine WITH the cord that works in Asia. YEAH! My old sewing is not working so I am just going to have to take that back to America when we go back next and get it fixed. But in the meantime I have a wonderful new machine that I can just plug into the wall and not worry about a converter. My tutor helped me buy it off the local ebay and it was delivered yesterday morning. Perfect for me to use during the kids nap time. :) You can't see the big smile on my face but it is there.

It also came in perfect timing as Todd will be gone from Thursday until Saturday night and will take the computer with him.

I'll post pictures of some of my projects soon. I have made several hair clips for Ev and I have taken in seams of some stretched out shirts of mine.

SNOW Day!

We woke up to a lot of snow on Thursday morning. Usually if it does snow it doesn't stick but not this week. I cancelled class on Thursday and Todd had to cancel going out since the roads were so bad. We bundled up the kids and ourselves and went outside to play in the snow.

Elijah wasn't a fan of the snow sticking to his boots. He didn't like to walk it was pretty funny. Ev didn't like the snow on her boots either it was really funny to watch them. We took the slide to our indoor play area and transformed it into a sled. Todd pulled them in the sled, we took pictures in the snow and built a snow man.

Busy busy busy....

We are well into the paper work trail for our adoption. So on top of our already full schedules we have split the work up between the two of us. We are currently getting our birth certificates and marriage license from America. I guess we have all of them except Todd's birth certificate. I guess Texas is so big it takes forever to get anything from them. (j/k!)

Yesterday Todd went to our local police station to get a letter of criminal history for both of us. That went amazingly smooth. My tutor was kind to help me translate all the information and they did it exactly how we needed it done. See, we have friends here in town who went to get the same thing done and they refused to do it correctly. So they had to go through some other hoops and they just sent theirs in and will have to wait and see if the adoption agency will accept it. I feel bad for them they have had a long hard journey.

It is crazy how many questions you can come up with. I have been emailing questions and trying to find someone in town who can do our health exams. The form is in English so we are looking for an English speaking doctor to fill them out. Or we may have to take the English form in and have the entire thing translated. Which would mean we would need to bring along a friend to do. The paper has to be notarized so we are not sure if an local notary would notarize an English document! Possibly we may translate the whole document and then have a local doctor fill it out and get it notarized because all of our paperwork will be sent back to the States and ironically it will all be translated back into Chinese anyway! We will see.:)

So we are hoping over this week and next we can get all the paperwork we need so we can have our Home study done.

Our Adoption journey

I have been excited to post about this topic but at the same time I haven't quite known the words I want to express. In the past months as Todd and I have begun this part of our lives we have talked and shared with a few people about adoption. We have been able to ask two families in our city specific questions and hear their stories and in turn have them ask us questions. I think through those conversations and others I have been formulating my own response. I think Father has been growing the idea of adoption in me for a while as we have experienced various things and situations in life to get us to this point. It is wonderful to see how individually Father confirmed adoption in our hearts.

For me I can pinpoint some things that have left impressions on my heart. One of those came last year when my friend aborted her child. One thing I never shared on the blog was that another friend who had originally talked her out of abortion had been asking me if I knew of families that would adopt the baby. We were not at the place we are now and even if we were you can't just pick a child and adopt them in this country.

I have also heard a few stories of what goes on at the hospital where I had my prenatal care done at. We are fortunate to have a foreigner as an OBGYN and she is faced with some very sad and horrifying situations. Just in the few that I have heard it has given me a greater desire to do something.

One thing that I love about being a mom is that I get to love my children. And as I began researching about adoption the more I learned that there are so many children just needing someone to love them. As I became more educated I came across a website of a church back home who have a ministry to educate, encourage and support adoption. One of the sermons I listened to the pastor asking the people how do they fit in to Father's plan for the orphaned.

As our hearts grew towards adoption Father has been faithful to bring along people who understand adoption. We have 2 families in town who have/are using the same agency as we are so we can ask them tons of questions as we go through the process. It is such wonderful thing to have people who have been and are going through the process right here in our city. Another friend of mine who just moved here a couple of months ago adopted her daughter who is a couple of months younger than Ev. So in our immediate community we have a wealth of understanding.

As I write these things something else came to mind. Way back in college Todd and I were part of a small group of people who trained the students younger in getting ready for a trip over this way. The weekend's purpose was to put them in as close as cultural experiences as they could. One of those was through taking them through some physical situations and simulations. My role was to play an orphan. The end of the night they group would find me and we used the picture to portray how Father adopts us into His family.

So these things don't fully explain our hearts. I do believe it has been a journey to get here and it will only continue as our story develops.

Now we do have some challenges, but what adoptive parents don't? We believe that Father closed doors and pretty much opened the door for adopting from the country we currently live in. That it itself is its own story but as the doors were shut and this one opened we have been excited about adopting from here. We are also wanting to adopt a special needs boy. We love girls, don't get us wrong but we feel we want a boy. And there are so many special needs kids that get overlooked because of their conditions. It breaks my heart that they were abandoned in the first place but to also have a special need seems like another strike against them.

We are currently in the paperwork process and awaiting to hear when we can have a home study done. Since we are adopting a special needs child our timeline is completely different than the process of adopting a healthy child.

So that is our news and we are excited.

I have been trying to grow out my hair for about 5 months now. I am really getting tired of it. I know it is just the growing out stage but I really don't like it right now and usually just put it up somehow. Should I hang in there and stick with it or should I just cut it all off? I have to talk myself out of cutting it every week. I figure it will take another 5 months or so to get it this long again and that is the only thing keeping me from cutting it right now. So do I hate it for another several months or just cut it? What do you think? IF it does get longer I want to style it differently but now with longer hair I have to spend time blow drying it (hardly ever did when it was short) I have to actually fix it (didn't really have to do that when it was short) I have to use conditioner (never had to up until kids and with my hair longer it takes longer to shampoo and condition.) So it was so much more convenient to have short hair. Do I keep up this junk or not?

More Birthday Pictures

I love the pictures of Ev and Todd on her birthday. I see a lot of him in her. It is fun that when I took pictures of Ev opening her presents from our family that the tv and computer screen where in there and you can see them watching her over skype. Too fun. Ev loves to layer dress up clothes so she is showing off her 3 Disney dresses and the doll and her princess dress all at once.