Bye-bye high chair

It is a wonderful day when you can rid your kitchen/eating area of that obnoxious high chair. We have officially relocated the high chair to the basement. Though a high chair is a nice contraption to keep a baby tied down while you are trying to get a meal ready or leave the room for just a second and know your child is safe, it is also really big and bulky. Our house needs all the extra walking room we can get, so we are very excited to have the high chair gone. Of course we know we may need to bring this apparatus back when our baby comes home, for the time being we will enjoy not having it around. Here are some pics of F in his big boy chair and using a fork. He also learned "no" within the past 24hrs, so it was interesting to come home from work last night and see this newly opinionated child!

We are taking the kids to an Easter Egg hunt this morning, so that should be fun. Hopefully I will remember to take some pictures. Then we are going to spend some time on the plaza looking at all the Easter bunnies. Should be a fun day if the rain stops!

We got Susie's birth certificate yesterday and it was already certified by the Secretary of State. Now we can send all our documents to the Chinese Consulate for authentication and send off our I-600A to CIS. Once all that is back, our dossier will be complete and can be sent off to China!! This process is like a marathon and we can finally see the end (thoug it is still about 7-8 miles away!).

Mowing

It is a definate sign that spring has arrived when it is time to start mowing the lawn. Though I absolutely hate mowing, it does give me an odd sense of satisfaction when it is complete. I also love the smell of a freshly cut lawn. It drums up memories of cookouts and evening walks. This is the best time of year!! The boys absolutely love it when I mow. I am not really sure what they get out of it. C literally follows my every step the entire time. He was a little thrown off today when I put on a different pair of "mowing shoes." My other ones had gotten way to gross and were falling apart so I switched to another older pair of shoes. That just about threw C over the edge. After some brief therapy and reassurance that the lawn could be cut properly in any pair of shoes, we were off. That boy likes his routines! A likes running around in the area that has already been cut. He does not like to be around loud noises, so getting too close to the mower can sometimes freak him out, but tonight he did okay. Here are the after cut pictures.


We started using this five step lawn fertilizer system last year and though I was a non-believer, it really paid off. I have never had a lawn this green before. Susie is the green thumb around these parts, so all the credit goes to her, especially since she is the one applying the fertilizer.



Adoption update: Yesterday Fintan and I made our way down to the Missour Secretary of State's office to have some of our adoption documents certified. (If you aren't aware, you have to have just about every document proving you exist in this world notarized, certified by the Secretary of State and then authenticated by the Chinese Consulate) I should have know that nothing at a government office happens quickly, but when the lady said this will take 20 minutes I thought, "not too bad." Well, an hour and a half later we had the papers and all they all got certified correctly, so I couldn't complain too much. Fintan did great and made friends with many of the passers-by as we waited. What is it about a toddler that makes people want to ask them questions? But he was a good sport and was handing out smiles and "hi you's" to everyone that crossed his path. So anyway, our next adoption step is to get our I-600A (petition to adopt an overseas orphan) sent off and send the rest of our certified documents off to the Chicago Chinese Consulate. We are getting very close to being done with this paper chase. Only a few more steps!!



I will leave you tonight with a very tired Aidan and Cian. Good night!

New Rug

Today we got a new rug for our living room. It is always difficult when ordering something from a catalog to really know what it will look like in your home. The colors etc. never quite turn out the way you expected. We think this new one turned out pretty well. It is slightly more orangey-red than we were expecting, but we like it. Of course Susie now thinks we need to run out and buy new accessories to match the exact colors in the rug. Just what a husband wants to hear after spending all this money on the rug itself! Oh well. I have a friend from work who was able to get us a deal on this rug, so I guess if we get some extra stuff we will still not be as bad off as if we had bought it for full price. Anyway, above you can see the "old" rug. The picture makes it look much cleanerthan it really was. We got it at a salvage carpet store when we first moved in. It was a piece of left over carpet they had from another house the company had carpeted. Unfortunately it was white and that is never a good thing with three little boys under four on a rug. But, again it was a good deal so I took it. It has served it purpose and lasted us almost two years, so that is pretty good. To the right you can see the "new" rug. It definately seems to dress up the room. Susie thinks it makes the room pop. Regardless of what it looks like, it is super soft to walk on! As you can see from the picture, Cian loves it already. Let me know what you think.

Forget Regret

The title of this blog refers to my favorite show of all time, RENT. If you have been lucky enough to see RENT on stage you know that it is an amazing experience. Regardless of what you may think of the characters' personal lives, the shows message is about living each day to its fullest. Most of the characters in RENT have something in their past that they are ashamed of or something that is preventing them from living in the present. One song that replays throughout the show is called "No Day But Today." This is such a great song and really talks about living life in the present. One of the lines in the song is "forget regret, or life is yours to miss. No other road, no other way, No day but today." I think this is a great motto for life and therefore a perfect title for this blog.

The Kiddos

This is A. He is five years old. He is our oldest and just a great all around kiddo. He will be starting Kindergarten in the fall and we are so excited for him to move into this next phase. He goes to a Catholic school and will continue at this same school next year. This is great because A is a bit shy at times and he is already very comfortable at this school. It should be an easy transition for him. A is our sensitive child. A stern look in his direction when he is doing something wrong can melt him into tears. He is a very easy child to parent (so far!). He is very smart and very enjoyable to be around. A loves to laugh! He has been speaking in almost full sentences since around 15mo old, so A is a constant sponge for information. His favorite things in life are going to Texas to visit his grandma/grandpa and going to Mimi and Papa's (other grandparents) lakehouse.


This is C. He is three years old and is our middle son. C made his debut into this world 7 weeks premature and has been keeping us on our toes ever since. We never really know what he is going to do next. As opposed to A, C can be difficult to parent because he does not seem to get too upset if he does anything wrong. This can be frustrating as he is throwing his hotwheel car across the room for the fifth time in a day. On the other hand, C is the most affectionate child we have. He is very loving and constantly coming up to us for hugs and kisses. He is always up for snuggling and is just a cute as can be. He has a smile that can light up a room. C is very shy around new people and it is fun to see people get him out of his shell.

This is F. He is 18mo old and our youngest son. He is still declaring his personality in our house, but has proven so far to be a very easily going spirit. He is very happy. He is learning to talk right now and has a lot to say (wouldn't you with two older brothers!). So far most of his speak is uncomprehensible, but we can catch his drift most of the time. Words he does say are bottle, hot, light, no, mama (though everyone from mom, dad, mimi, grandma, grandpa and papa represent "mama"), Leo (our dog), outside, bye-bye and night-night. He probably says more, but that is what I can think of at this time. F loves to be around his brothers and it is really fun to see him interact with them. He is in that exploring phase where every thing is new to him and it is really amazing to watch a child see all of their "firsts" in life.

So that is a very brief synopsis of our kids. As everyone with children knows, you cannot even begin to explain your children's personalities in one little paragraph, but that gives you an idea of each of them. I will be talking about them a great deal on this site, so I wanted you all to know who they are!

This week

We have had a really nice week. The weather has been very nice. It was rainy this week, but warm so we are not complaining. A had a swim party on Thursday and we were really worried that he would not do well. Ever since his first swim lesson where the jerk teacher took him out in the deep end and dunked him, he has never like water much since. Anyway, he loved it and was actually putting his head under water!! It is our miracle of the day. Susie decided to stay at the party for fear that A would freak out and not allow her to leave. Though he did great, it turned out a good thing that he stayed. I guess there were about eleven 4-5 y/o kids at the party and only one other mom stayed. Susie said it was a bit chaotic keeping track of all the kids and the mom of the child having the party had to jump/dive it twice after kids who were sinking. Very scary. At the end of the day, the mom of the boy having the party hugged Susie and told her how much she appreciated the fact that Susie stayed and helped. Maybe because A is our oldest and we are still not used to all this stuff yet, but we find it so weird that parents will just leave their young kids at these birthday parties with other parents that they may not know. At A's 5th birthday party almost all the parents left and we had never met over half of them before. I guess they are just more trusting than us.

We got our home study in the mail today and now need to get it authenticated. We also ordered the correct version of Susie's birth certificate from Indiana, so that should be coming soon. The good news with that is that I think it will arrive to us already notarized AND certified by the secretary of state. This would save us one annoying little step, so it would be a welcomed surprise. I don't know that for sure, but that is how they made it sound when we ordered it. We will see.

We had our neighbors over on Thursday night to finish off the left over hotdogs and beverages we had from our pre-St. Patrick's Day parade party. It was a really nice time sitting down with them. The kids were all kind of at each other's throats all night though, so that was a bit annoying. We feel we have the best neighbors and they have become our closest friends. We always wanted this type of neighborhood, but it just took a couple of moves to find it! We are going out again with this same group next weekend for a improv-comedy show. Should be fun. We are also taveling to Canada this summer with two other neighbor families to visit some ex-neighbors who moved there in January. I can't wait. (Okay, I can wait for the long two-day drive, but I can't wait for all the fun we will have while we are there!)

Life update

Life seems to be flying by at the moment and Spring is right around the corner. We are very excited to have nice weather again, as it is much easier to survive the day with small children when you can get out of the house. We just had A's preschool conference. His teacher said he is very ready for Kindergarten. She listed out everything he can/can't do and it was very fun to see. At first I was skeptical about how she could be so specific about certain things (such as "A can count to number 49"). I just thought, I bet she makes some of this stuff up. So, right when we got home I asked A to count as high as he could. Sure enough he counted right to 49 then said 80! I guess she really knows what she is talking about. We are so excited for him to enter Kindergarten and for C to start preschool next year. I think they are both ready for the next step. C points at the doors to the 1st year preschool and says "That's my school," every time we pick up A. He is very excited about next year.

We had our pre-St. Patrick's Day party last Saturday. It really turned out well. The weather was perfect and just about everyone we invited showed up. My final count at the end of the day was 109 people (this includes children and infants!). Not bad. Unfortunately our parish school's auction was the same night, so we headed up to that after everyone left our house. We were really looking forward to the whole event, but ended up being so tired that we hardly enjoyed ourselves. We did pick up a nice photo of the church and some horse back riding lessons. Hopefully the kids can use them this summer, otherwise it looks like Susie and I will be saddling up!

Adoption update: We are done with our home study!! This is a big relief, but now that it is over, it was really not difficult at all! Our social worker was just great! We had heard rumors about other people's experiences, but ours turned out really well. We are still waiting for the final copy and then we can send in our I600A to CIS. This is the petition to adopt an overseas orphan. That is our last official step to the paperchase. We have some other loose ends to tie up, but we are getting very close. I sent about 7 docuements off to the state of KS to get certified and got them back right away. We also sent off Susie's birth certificate to Indiana for certification and got it returned with a rejected letter attached. Apparently it was the wrong type of birth certificate (it was a notarized COUNTY certificate and they will only certify notarized STATE copies...how frustrating). What is even more frustrating is that they recommended us getting a correct copy from the website vitalcheck.com. This is the website we got the first one from, so I am going to have to do some investigating Monday as to how to get a notarized state copy. More money to spend!!

I am still wanting to add pictures to this, but I am not computer savy, so I will have to wait until Susie sits down with me to do it. I never think about doing this while we are both home. Someday! (I have learned to add pictures, thank you Susie, so now you can see some of the excitement from around our house on St. Patty's Day!)