Sunday, March 28, 2010

Andrew's Birthday







We are almost finished with birthday month! We celebrated Andrew's 5th birthday today. Hard to believe this is the 3rd birthday we have celebrated with him. We still have the Chuck E Cheese thing to do, but that will have to wait until later. He had the cake and presents today. His brothers have been reminding him every day how many more days it is. It was so much easier when they didn't know their birthdays. :) Andrew can't read the calendar, but he does now know the date of his birthday.






Jonathan's birthday was last Monday. We had a Chinese buffet dinner with him. He and his wife decided to go south for spring break, (I can't imagine why) so we'll do his cake another time.






Here are a few pictures of the birthday boy. He enjoyed the day and so did we.






Karen

Sunday, March 14, 2010

The Beginning of Birthday Month

This is the beginning of "Birthday Month" at our house. Three of our five children have March birthdays. The first was today - Bethany. She requested BBQ chicken pizza and apple pie - so of course that's what we had. I'm not much of a pie maker, but I managed to peel apples and put them in a crust with a little (lot) sugar and cinnamon and it turned out ok. We did have one little candle in the pie, because it's a birthday and you have to have candles. And the boys all know that regardless of whose birthday it is they will get to blow out the candles at least once. We have Jonathan's birthday next weekend and Andrew is the next. Plus, my brother's birthday was yesterday! Let the celebrating continue.
And now a few pictures to make this post complete.
Karen


Andrew on our walk last week. It was warm enough to go out and we all needed to expend a little energy so Mom wouldn't go crazy! He is showing off his collection from the walk - a stick, a cork and 3 sweet gum seed pods.
"The Boys" on our walk. Don't you normally walk around your neighborhood with your Spiderman or Power Ranger outfit and dracula cape on?

The Birthday Girl. And her birthday apple pie.


Wednesday, March 3, 2010

New Discoveries

Not much exciting going on here. Just life. School is going somewhat better. After you have to spend a few days doing your schoolwork in your room by yourself it does encourage you to be a little more respectful and do much less complaining!

We had to buy a new camera. It had disappeared for a few days and I had looked high and low for it. I finally asked the most obvious person (Andrew) where it was and of course he knew. He came out of the bathroom with it. Thankfully there were no "bathroom" pictures on it, but it won't focus properly and it makes a funny sound when you turn it on. So, one more thing Andrew has destroyed. Oh well...

Maicol has had many better days lately. I think that some of it is our reaction to his moods - quick consequences for being disrespectful. I think some of it is just more time being with us and very slowly beginning to trust. Last week he was interested in what time of the day he was born, so I pulled up the referral documents and was looking for it. He began to read over my shoulder the information that explains what events brought him to the point where he was declared abandoned and adoptable. He wanted me to read it and I did and explained some of the things he wasn't clear about. He remembers very clearly many of the circumstances described. While he has known some of this information before, some of it was new to him. I think that in the past he really had not seen any reason for him to be adopted. He felt like he was ok and didn't need a mom and dad. Going over some of this information has helped him to better understand where he was and why he is with a new family now.

Juan Pablo has become a "please Mom" and "thank you Mom" boy lately. Yeah!!! He has been spending less time sitting on his bed for refusing to do things. He has also been encouraging Andrew to be good too.

Andrew is fascinated that he has 10 fingers and 10 toes. I'm not sure if we just never mentioned that particular fact to him or it's that he can count and understand what 10 is. Whatever it is, he has been counting them for us recently. He didn't want to eat bologna tonight (which I have discovered they used to eat and love) because it's made of "guts". I also discovered that he has been putting Cheetos in the overflow holes in their bathroom sink. Why? He is just so funny! He is also learning the "2-vowel rule" in reading.

Nothing else exciting that I can think of. Thanks for reading.

Karen




Juan Pablo and Andrew being silly.
We made a cake one night last week just for fun. They decorated it with colored sugar and then we put candles on it and they took turn blowing them out. Whose birthday was it? We don't know - but I'm sure it was someones!

Juan Pablo's lego creation.


We have had about a month of snow. This was the beginning of it. Heavy, wet beautiful snow!