Autumn Adventures...

Well, the remainder of October held up the same crazy pace it started with. We rounded out the last weekend with a true whirlwind trip to Washington DC. This was Christopher's first airplane ride since coming home from Korea, and this time he got to have his very own big boy seat! I'll admit he looked a little freaked out at first, but after we were aloft, he excitedly entertained himself with the buttons on the armrests and the air vents and lights above him. Good thing it was only a short plane ride!

In DC Christopher participated in a rally with tens of thousands of people - all of which I am pretty sure he thought were there to clap and cheer for him! He was loving the attention of the excited and joyous crowd, and had lots of pictures taken of him cheering and clapping along.

We rounded out the day with a trip to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, where Christopher discovered the amazing world of Dinosaurs. I think we have a budding scientist in our midst!

The next day we went home to share Christopher's first American Halloween with the grandparents. It was a crazy 6 hours (round trip) in the car after the plane trip the day before, but worth it to see how happy they were to share it with him. He was not a big fan of the pumpkin carving experience. I couldn't even get him to put his hand in it once...he just kept pulling his hands back with a look like "Are you nuts? That looks disgusting!" Oh well, we still enjoyed it! :o)

It was a very cold and windy evening, so we bundled up our little spider tight and set out with Buster (sporting his little devil horns) to hit the neighborhood. I decided to put his winter coat on under his costume so you could see how cute it was, but I think he ended up looking more like a full tick than a little spider! :o) He was a little confused about trick-or-treating at first, but after we showed him how to put the candy in his little bucket he thought it was pretty fun and kept putting his hand out, palm up, for "more". My parent's neighbors obliged several times with a laugh before I had to step in and stop the greedy little bugger! ;o) We tried to visit the homes of old friends who still live on the street, and ended up only going to 5 houses, which was plenty for him. It was pretty neat that I ran into a few childhood friends who had the same idea to bring their own children back to the old neighborhood. What a great testament to how special the neighborhood was (is) that I grew up in. It is the kind of thing that makes me a little sad that Christopher will grow up without lots of neighborhood children to play with.

November started out with lots of winter preparations on the farm that Christopher was happy to help with. I think Sunny thought he was some sort of little bear...she was most curious.

He is just so cute all bundled up in his baby Carhartts.
We recently made a trip to the Children's Museum for a special event just for adopted children and their families. It was such an amazing night full of beautifully blended families! As an added bonus, we got to see some great friends we have made through the blog! We all had a ball! There was so much to do there - Christopher was especially fond of shopping in the little market and I think he would have taken ALL the fruits and veggies if they would have fit in his little cart! :o)

As we come nearer to the holiday season, I am really looking forward to sharing so many special moments with our little man. We have already started baking together, and Christopher is a master at the cookie dough placement (lol). This morning he helped me mash sweet potatoes and stir the jello (he also "helped" by dumping an entire bag of brown sugar on the floor for the dogs - ha)!

Ta da! Just right! :o)

I can't even begin to describe how much happiness and pride I feel watching MY son, my very own child, enjoying this season as much as I do! I think I am more excited about Christmas morning this year than he is, just to see his little face! Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and we truly have so much to be thankful for!

Have a great one everybody!

Crazy October....

It's been a crazy and busy month! Christopher is fast entering the "terrible twos" and keeps me running all day! He is in the process of transitioning to one nap a day which leaves me even less time to breathe, and his new favorite "game" is to up end every bucket or bin, and pull out every dish, pan, toy, or book he can reach as he runs by. I spend most of his nap time putting the house back together. Don't get me wrong though, I wouldn't change it for the world!

He is such a cool little person!

This is a pretty typical day at our house now!

This month started out with the tail end of our vacation to Lexington, Kentucky to see the FEI World Equestrian Games. It was this event that I purchased tickets for the very morning we received our referral last year! It was such a strange feeling to be there with our son when we bought the tickets not expecting to even have been matched by now. It seems crazy that we have had him home for over 10 months! So surreal! Christopher was such a great little traveler; we are so lucky that he likes to ride in the car!

The next weeks included trips to the petting zoo and the pumpkin patch -where we took this picture - my new favorite!

I can't wait for Christopher to carve his first pumpkin (an activity we traditionally save for Halloween day).

Phil and I had a date night out to see the Lord of the Rings live with the GR Symphony and left Christopher with a teenage babysitter for the first time. It was great that it went so well, but I felt pretty old when I was explaining to the babysitter that she had to be careful where she put things on the counter because Christopher has "go-go-gadget arms" and she looked at me like I was nuts...obviously that reference is a little before her time lol!

We took a trip to Wisconsin via the ferry across lake MI to see some dear friends and their children. I am not a huge fan of boats in general as I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness, but with the help of a Thomas the Train DVD (yup, I have become one of those mothers) I was able to stay seated with my head down and made it without vomiting - Yeah! ;o) We went to the children's museum in the morning and spent the evening at Boo at the Zoo in Milwaukee! It was so much fun, and Christopher made the cutest little lion ever!

Can't you almost hear the roar? (ok ok, I know he was yawning, just humor me! )

Yesterday Christopher finally had his hernia surgery (which was previously postponed due to illness). He was such a little trooper and it turned out to be quite large, so I'm glad we were able to have it fixed. Once the surgery was over we were holding him as he was sleeping off the anesthesia and they announced over the loud speaker there was a tornado warning! Yikes! All the nurses hurried to move the kids and their monitors and cribs into the halls and closed all the doors to protect from flying glass just in case. The hospital staff was so great. They kept the little ones busy with games and toys and bubbles - what an amazing person you would have to be to work with sick kids all day! The crazy part was that a total of 5 (yes FIVE) times they came on over the speaker and announced the warning was now over and was back to a watch, only to come back on a short time later to say it was a warning again! The first two times the nurses had already moved most of the kids back to their rooms and they all groaned in disbelief that they had to do it all over again. We were lucky enough to still be waiting to move when the second warning came, so we just stayed in the hall. They obviously couldn't discharge him during a tornado warning, and since they kept changing the status, they just had us hang out most of the day (in the hallway with all the others). I can't complain though...they really took good care of him! I finally have a chance to update the blog since he is still exhausted from the anesthesia.

This is how Christopher passed the time waiting for the surgery to start...good 'ol cozy coupe saves the day!

Have you ever seen such a cute little hospital gown?

If that wasn't enough excitement for one month, we will finish the last weekend of October with an overnight whirlwind trip to Washington then a little trick-or-treating! We can only hope that November will be a bit more relaxing.....but I won't hold my breath! :o)

Wordless Wednesday - World's Most Tolerant Cat

Wordless Wednesday - Kentucky Horse Park

One Year Ago

September 25th, 2009. A day I will ALWAYS remember. I can see it very clearly in fact. Phil was giving a CE course at the University Of Minnesota so we decided to make a get-away weekend out of the trip. It was a rainy Friday. I spent the bulk of the morning in the hotel room scrambling online to buy tickets to the FEI world games in Kentucky for this year. The tickets went on sale at 8am, and I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon in my pj's watching tv - a rare treat! Since it was a crummy day, we decided that once his course was over, Phil would pick me up at the hotel and we would head to the Mall of America for a little shopping fun. Trying to leave down town Minneapolis on a Friday afternoon at 4:30 was not the greatest plan, and we ended up completely stopped in traffic gridlock on the highway. Bummer. At 5pm Phil's phone rang. He answered.... "Oh Hi Ann" (our social worker)......I froze...."you're kidding, that's great news"......my heart stopped. We had been matched...it was a BOY! I had a SON! This was the moment we had been waiting and worrying about for so long. We were finally going to be parents! It should have been the single happiest moment of my life. I remember during the long wait before this moment I envisioned just how the call would come and wondered what I would do: would I scream, would I jump for joy, would I cry?

In reality however, my actual reaction was something I had never anticipated. I did start to cry, but it wasn't the cry I expected, it was a totally panicked "oh no ...they made a mistake .... I'm not ready.... what if we made a mistake" kind of cry. Then I was horrified at my initial reaction which made me cry harder! I was a wreck, and I think my poor husband was in shock because of it! It took about ten minutes for him to calm me down and for me to actually compose my thoughts, but it wasn't until Phil pulled the referral picture up on his phone that I took a really good look at Christopher's face that all the fear went away. When I think about it now, I am ashamed that I ruined that wonderful moment for Phil..... and for myself.

Thankfully, by the time we called our parents to tell them the good news, I was over the moon! We celebrated with a lovely dinner over which we discussed boy names and spent the rest of the evening looking at every boy related toy and outfit in that crazy mall!

When I look at Christopher now, I can't imagine him not in my life. He is my son. I love him more than words could ever describe...even on his worst day! ;o) He is the light of my life, the joy in my heart! It makes me sad to this day, and I still shake my head when I think about how I panicked.

Wordless Wednesday-Daddy hugs make everything better!

Wordless Wednesday - Corn On The Cob!