First Week of School (Last Week) :)

The first week of school went better than expected. Piper did great! In fact, she is always ready to get up and go in the morning. I think she was excited about getting to go with the big kids. Her teacher really bragged on her color by number artwork (so of course I included a picture!). I was going to post a picture of her "first day" at school, but that Kodak moment went a little crazy. I'm not the one who drops the kids off at school in the morning, so I thought I'd snap a picture at pick up time. Now I don't know if she is just completely sick and tired of posing for pictures or if she was just monkeying around but she decided to do a backbend in the middle of the sidewalk at dismissal. Of course, she bonked her noggin on the sidewalk and ended up with a big goose egg on the back of her head! So much for the Kodak moment. We ended up rushing back over to my office for an icepack and off to the store for some children's ibuprofen. :) Never a dull moment. Anyway, the "dressed for school" pose was taken at home (safer) before school the second (oh well) day of school! Emmanuel had their spring program last Fri.; Piper's first week of school. We weren't sure if she was ready for this but sure enough she came through with flying colors. She stood right up there with the rest of the group and even tried to join in at times. She is so funny. She's learning new words every day. Important things like "don't touch me" and "cool it", "stop it Hayden", etc. She popped into breakfast yesterday morning on her own and took one look at the pancakes Kevin had made and said, "Chocolate chips?! Thank you!" Never a dull moment.

Blog On; More Pics, of Course!

Blog On

A lot has happened since the time I last posted. Let me start by apologizing and telling you that it was not my intention to cut the blog so short. Unfortunately, I left my camera on the plane when we landed in San Francisco April 3rd. I have called the "lost items" hotline many, many times but it is sadly just a pre-recorded answering machine type service. It grimly states that if you haven't heard from them (United Airlines) in ten days, assume your item lost and contact your insurance company. I'm pretty sure that at this point, I'm not going to see that camera again. The bad thing is that it had all of my digital media in it with my pictures on it! Drat! The good thing is that since I decided to do this blog, I had uploaded most of my pictures to my computer and still have them. Whew! I also had the good fortune of traveling with Robyn Kimberlin who is a camera officianado (?sp.)! Anyway, she made a cd for me of the pictures she had taken of our family with around 250 some odd pictures which are absolutely beautiful. Thank you Robyn. By the way, I've got another camera now. :)

I'm going to "try" to keep this short. I've not posted in a couple of weeks, so there are many things I'd like to share but will just shoot for the overview and try to catch you up as the weeks go by. First of all, the two weeks since we've been home have flown by! Piper is doing really well considering all of the changes and adjustments she's had to endure. She was not a happy camper when Sydney went back to school. She asked for her about every hour on the hour the first day. She did seem to understand what was going on though and finally settled into a routine. Sydney celebrated her birthday last weekend. Piper was a little overwhelmed with the large crowd in our home, but did enjoy the little ones. She was also more than happy to help Sydney open up presents! :) This week alone we have visited her classroom, visited the health dept. for her first round of immunizations (ouch!), visited the dentist for the first time, and traveled to Shawnee for H.S. State Vocal competition (way to go Harley!). She has really been a trooper.

She rode the horses for the first time yesterday with Sydney, of course! We got a trail-a-bike for her so she can ride along. She loves it! She and Sydney are jumping on the trampoline right now as I'm posting. She really is a little daredevil; fits right in doesn't she? My goal is to post a time or two each week. If you've been used to checking daily, you may want to go with weekly now. I did decide this was a much better alternative for me than scrapbooking or journaling; just not my thing. It will also keep me motivated to continue taking pictures. Hope you enjoy! We always enjoy hearing from each of you whether in person or by your comments that you're following the blog. Thank you all for all of your continued love, support, and prayers. It means so much. I hope you like the new title. It just seemed to fit.

Swearing at the Consulate

Okay, it's not what it sounds like. For those of you who've been here and done that you know what I mean. For those that haven't, part of the adoption process is the appointment at the American Consulate here in Guangzhou. All of the parents from the group go to the consulate at the same time and receive their child's visa stamp for the passport and swear an oath as a group that the information that has been provided is correct. We all stand up and raise our right hand and do the "swearing in" at the same time. It was pretty cool. The drive to the consulate took longer than the actual swearing in itself. Note the food delivery "vehicle" parked by our bus just outside the consulate; picture of Paul, Avery, Kevin, Sydney & Piper after the swearing in; picture of our little ham showing off her "magnet earrings". Thanks to Robyn for the pictures. :) After we returned, Robyn, her mom, and Sydney and I decided to take a taxi into town to try to find another Olympic store. We did manage to get a cab and get to the shopping area where the store was supposed to be?. However, we did not find the store. Anyway, not quite what we had in mind. There was a teeny, tiny little store with a few coins and such. Definately the smallest we've seen. What we did find was that we do not communicate well in Chinese, even with our miming. Also, there were few Chinese people we found that could speak even some broken English. All in all it was an interesting adventure, but not very successful. We are packing up tonight and leaving EARLY tomorrow morning at 5:15am. Our luggage has to be outside of our room at 4:30am. That is ridiculous! Oh well, looks like we'll have lot's of time to sleep on the loooooong plane ride home and I did pack along the Benadryl! :) See you all soon. We arrive in OKC @ 7:00pm Thursday evening.

Dinner at Lucy's; again I know

We had dinner at Lucy's again tonight. I've got a shot of Sydney with our lemon iced teas. They are so good! I've started ordering one everytime we go. Robyn's aunt Kathy got me hooked. It's the largest drink I've been able to get my hands on over here. There are no fountain drinks here; at least we've not found any. So, in other words, no refills. The drinks are brought in a can or very small glass. Not nearly enough to drink for me, so when we discovered the tea we were thrilled. They bring a tiny little pitcher of what we think is honey or something similar to a Karo syrup to sweeten the tea; yummy! Kevin, Harley & Paul all ordered an extra order of fries tonight at dinner; oink, oink (sounds like the Oreo story from yesterday doesn't it?). That was okay though because Piper loves fries so she and Sydney were happy to help them eat some of those extra fries. Come to think of it, Piper loves anything that you can dip in ketchup. She'll even clean up the extra ketchup with her spoon, fingers, whatever. You get the idea. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped in to see how our stone carvings were going. I've got a picture of the artist actually working on Sydney & Piper's carving. Amazing! I have to tell you what Piper told the woman in this same shop last night. She said, "Tell my mom that I don't like eggs." I've been putting scrambled eggs on her breakfast plate every morning hoping she might try them. No eggs this morning! :) She is too smart.

Guide to American Consulate

We were grounded to our room for a few hours this morning while our guide went to the consulate on our behalf. She wanted us to stay near the phone in case there were any questions. It turned out to be a good time to just hang out and have a good old fashioned family dog pile! Piper also did some body surfing on Kevin. She's really warming up to him. He'll tease and chase her and she screams and then comes back to ask for more. :) Not too sure what she and Hayden were up to. Maybe just monkeying around?! Megan, I threw in the picture of the local pharmacy for you; thought you'd enjoy it. :)