Thursday, November 24, 2011

Happy Thanksgiving

A busy, yet enjoyable Thanksgiving Day is coming to an end.  We had the pleasure of hosting Grandma Susie and Papa Don this year at our house, and everything came together quite well.  If you need us during the dinner hour over the next week or so you can surely catch us at home eating scrumptious leftovers from today's feast.

The day started off quite early, as both boys were, for some unknown reason, awake prior to the clock striking 6am.  Maybe they got Thanksgiving and Christmas confused, or maybe that's just what happens when they sleep in the same room when we have company stay the night. 

We tuned into the the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade this morning  just in time for Lleyton to be awed by his best superhero friend, Spiderman.


We did our best to put together an extensive menu that featured many staples (turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, green beans), but was also highlighted by a couple new items, not the least of which was Parker and Sara's apple crescent roll dessert that wowed each of us that had room enough left to give it try.  Here is the big man getting his hands dirty a bit while assembling the dish.


How can I resist sharing a picture of our ever-growing little lady...


Today marks the four year anniversary of Sara and I arriving back in the United States after meeting Lleyton for the first time. Much has changed since then.  Tha was our last Thanksgiving as just a couple (Thanksgiving dinner that year was burgers and fries and Friday's in Atlanta's airport, which hit the spot after a week of Russian cuisine), and now we get to celebrate with this cast of characters...



We are looking forward to adding this little guy to the mix before another Thanksgiving Day comes and goes.



To celebrating next year as a family of 6.
Cheers!

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

5 months down...


5 months down...how many more remain?

Another care package on its way...almost


We are relying on the care packages we have put together for Camden to help get him acquainted with who we are, as we have always included pictures the kids and Sara and I that Camden's foster mom is hopefully sharing with him.  To our chagrin, we have yet to see any pictures of our little guy with our care packages, but we have been assured that they have been sent and they are given to him during his every other month visit to the agency's office. 

Along with the package pictured above that is almost ready to make its way from Kentucky to Seoul, we will include the following the pictures...


Just in case Camden's foster mom can't speak English, Sara came up with the grand idea of writing "brother" and "sister" in Korean on each of the kids signs above their names. 

These guys can't wait to have their little brother home...and neither can we.



Sunday, November 6, 2011

Do you believe in miracles?

To say that my recent efforts to teach Parker how to ride a bike weren't going as well as I had hoped would have been an understatement.  With that being true, and having recently resigned myself to the fact that Park just wasn't meant to be on two wheels, you can imagine my amazement when we headed out this morning for another teaching session and this is what transpired...





Signed,
Proud Dad of a bike rider

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Catching up

The frequency with which I have been blogging as of late has certainly decreased.  I guess that's what happens when fatigue catches up me many nights I hit the sack before 9:30, or when Sara is unable relinquish the computer thanks to her new found love for Pinterest (rightfully so, it's a great sight), or there are nights like tonight where Lleyton just refuses to want to go to sleep so as I lay here and type, my little guy is laying next to me counting out loud as he attempts to do what he calls "get his brain to go to sleep." 

My lack of blogging can't be attributed to nothing going on around here, as the days continue to fly by at an unprecedented pace. After all it will be Thanksgiving in a few weeks and we all know that Christmas feels like it is just a day or so after that. 

KID UPDATES

After a much needed season off from sports, Parker is getting back in the swing of things with basketball.  The season starts in the coming weeks, but practice is well underway.  The team name this season is the Pacers, so if any of you NBA lovers out there are in need of some weekend entertainment and can't get it from the real Pacers, Parker's game typically don't sell out.  Although he seems to think he future is in professional sports, I think we disagree, as the big guy continues to wow us with his intellect.  Many nights he comes home and tells us about things he learned in school that day that I have to nod and act like I know exactly what he is talking about, all the while knowing that I will be googling "waxing and waning crescents" or "deciduous and non-deciduous forests" moments after he retires for the night. 

Lleyton is in preschool now at the same school as his big brother.  We weren't quite sure how he was doing in school, as he is already acting like he is in high school and refusing to tell us about his days, but he knocked Sara's socks off the other day when she went into visit his class for the first time.  She had a chance to observe him prior to him realizing she was there and the report I got from her was that he did fantastic.  He was quietly sitting in his seat while listening to the teachers and once he realized his self-proclaimed best friend (his mommy) was there, he still waited until he asked the teacher for permission to give Sara a big hug and sit next to her.  Needless to say, I was thrilled to hear how well he did.  Immediately following his last week of casts, Lleyton began wearing leg braces that help keep him off of his toes.  He has his good days and bad days with the braces, but all-in-all he is doing really well with them.  In conjunction with the braces he sees a physical therapist every other week who is focusing on building some of the muscles that Lleyton really never used because he previously walked solely on his toes.

Onto Addy, she is right on Lleyton's tail when it comes to size.  She is huge...both in size and personality.  She continues to work with\a speech therapist once a week and that work is beginning to pay off.  She is becoming more and more talkative each day.  Last week Sara and her mom escorted the little princess to the Children's Hospital so she could get tubes in her ears.  She handled it like a champ.  We had previously had two hearing tests that found what may be some hearing loss, but the hope is that the tubes will clear up anything that was ailing her hearing and she won't have any longer terms issues. 

Yesterday hopefully marked the day that Camden got two care packages from us.  Our hope is that I as type this he is enjoying some of the toys and warm clothes we sent him, but most importantly we hope that he is getting to look through all of the pictures that we sent. 

Onto a few pictures...

This past weekend, Parker was lucky enough to get to join Grammy and Pop on a trip to South Bend to watch one of my cousins play soccer.  Eric plays for West Virginia and he and his fellow Mountaineer teammates were playing Notre Dame.  Here is Parker and a number of his cousins with the famed Touchdown Jesus in the background.


Everyone, included the  player they were all there to see, was all smiles after the game, as WVU prevailed 2-0.



While Park was living the High Life in northern IN, Lleyton and Addy had their share of fun here as well.  Lleyton got to show Addy the in and outs of how to drive a car.  Needless to say, Sissy (as Lleyton affectionately calls his sidekick) was thrilled to be hanging in the passenger seat with Lleyton behind the wheel.