Early Chinese New Year Celebration

Today we got to enjoy an early celebration of Chinese New Year (the Year of the Rabbit officially starts on Feb. 3). This time, Emerson got to hang out with us for some exposure to a great Chinese tradition. Overall, we all had a great time. This is my first year as V.P. of the organization, so I got to be on the other side with my friend Dawn is already doing an awesome job as President. A lot more people than I would have expected made for a busy event for us, but it was fun to see so many people excited about the group.

The dragon dancers (put on by a local Kung Fu school) proved, once again to be too much for Amelie. We ended up outside for part of it. Loud noises have always bothered her and the show of the dragon being led in by a guy in a mask with the cymbals serenading behind him was too much. Overall, it was a very awesome effect though and Emerson was riveted.

We got home and started putting together the care package we got for Han. We just need to send the letter to the Director and Nannies off to get translated, then we'll send it on in hopes of him getting it before we come to China!

LSC Arrived today and is off to Immigration

We received our packet from China today including the much anticipated and long-awaited Letter Seeking Confirmation (LSC). This was the official letter from China saying that they thought it would be a good idea for us to be Han's parents and so, they approved!!

What this means in logistical terms is a day of copying, stapling, collating and rushing off to the post office to send the packet to the USCIS office in Texas where they will begin the process of updating our status to allow us to bring Han back into the US. Once we have this back, another set of processes begins including starting the process to get Han a visa while we're in China so we can bring him back to the U.S.

The great and unexpected news is that we were initially told to expect traveling to China in 6-8 months which would put us there between July & Aug. Because our LSC arrived so much sooner than we expected (it came after a week rather than the predicted 5-12 weeks), we now can expect to travel in 3 to 4 months!

Han, here we come!

In the meantime, I'll post pictures of our first Asian treasure who continues to dazzle.

It's a Boy!!

I have not been good about maintaining this blog for quite a while now and, believe me, it's not due to a lack of information to share! However, my resolution for the year is to get back on it even if it means more frequent, but shorter entries.

So, for the latest news! We're getting a son! Just saying that word causes a funny, but wonderful effect. Being in beautiful, frilly girlie mode for so long, it seems so happily surreal to get to say "daughter" and "son". Our little boy, Han Min, is from the Sichuan province (close to Amelie's home province of Hunan). We will now have a perfectly balanced family consisting of our Spicy Girl and Panda Boy.

Today is the eve of his 3rd birthday, a day he'll get to share with his Uncle Lenny who is a full and exact 30 years older.

How fun it was to tell Amelie she will be a big sister. As Allen and I brought her aside, we had a little photo album with the 7 pictures of him that we had from China. We asked her, "Do you know how we've been trying to get you a baby brother or sister?" and she nodded excitedly as the smile grew big on her face. We said, "Well, how would you feel about a little brother?" She jumped and squealed and we handed her the pictures which she treated like a golden treasure. She studied the pictures and would pronounce "He's so cute!" She then carried the book and stored it in a safe place in her room. She got to take it to school to show her friends and teachers the next day which she did with high excitement.

Spring News

Well, it's been a while and I'm way past due, so I wanted to drop in with an update. It's amazing what a difference a few months can make. Since I last reported, Amelie has learned to tie her shoes (and double knot) - need I mention she is only 4?!! She has become very interested in reading and writing. We have since gotten to ride with Emerson in the mornings and some afternoons and the 2 of them are avid readers, writers and artists. Amelie's focus and attention span is growing by leaps and bounds and we are finally getting a lot of use out of the coloring books, paints and other art materials around the house. She is so proud of coloring in the lines and recognizing site words and being able to draw hearts and stars. It's priceless to watch her concentrate so intently and proudly on what she is working on.

A few things we have gotten to do since the end of the year:

Our big ski trip to Park City, UT with Micah and Katie. We had a GREAT time and Amelie loved ski school. It was somewhat surreal to see her go on the lift with the instructor and make her way down the mountain with her classmates. It snowed about 2 feet while we were there and Amelie had a great time just walking around in the new fallen snow, building snowballs and even a tiny snowman. She happily got rocks and mulch to help make buttons and arms. We spent our days skiing followed by dips in the pool and hot tub in the snow. What a novelty to sit in the hot tub during a heavy snow! She has since mentioned several times that she misses Utah. So do we!

We also got to go on a field trip to see Jack Hartman in concert. Jack Hartman sings over 600 songs that children absolutely love and Amelie and Emerson even got to get their photo with him.

Let's not forget our new Evergreen camper which we've already gotten to go on a couple of trips.

Amelie is definitely a trooper for any of these trips and loves to help set up. Luckily, this one is easier to setup than the popup (although we'll always have fond memories of that one!). We did our maiden voyage during an unnamed storm over to Hillsborough River State Park and one that was a bit more relaxing over to Ft. Wilderness. How lucky are we? Granny Great stayed with us on that venture and Nana and Papa met us out for the day. We all got to enjoy a cookout and roasting marshmallows with Chip and Dale followed by some pretty cool fireworks over at the beach.

In February, we were blessed with a visit from Micah and Katie and a birthday party for Cole. We also got to go to a pretty cool Chinese New Year celebration to help bring in the year of the Tiger.

In January, we were wowed by performances of Amelie and Emerson in the Multicultural Festival and had a blast at Pirate Day at Disney where the girls got pirate princess makeovers and were the hit of the Magic Kingdom for the rest of the day. Amelie's pirate name was Meg Damploather and Emerson was Jean Shipmonk.

Merry Christmas and Happy 2009!

It's been a while and I really do need to catch up. Today, we are facing the Day After Christmas anticlimax. But, this has been the most fun Christmas yet. With Amelie being 4 now, we are in prime Christmas years. We spent the month from Thanksgiving until Christmas listening to Christmas music, baking Christmas things, watching Christmas shows, looking at lights and everything else we could think of to get into the Christmas spirit. She woke us up at 5:30 to see if we could go out and look to see if Santa came. Of course Santa came - with a vengeance! She was just as eager to see and help others open theirs as well. She was so excited and full of energy and it was so much fun to watch and experience this with her.

Amelie has changed so much just within the last 6 months. As she got closer to 4, she seemed to have acclimated much more to a role of a nurturer to those younger than her (she had previously been somewhat impatient with babies and children smaller than her before). She has adjusted so well to school and is now coming home writing her name and asking how to spell other words so she can write those out as well. We have notebooks scattered throughout the house and car so she can write and take notes whereever she may happen to be. Other things like games and art project are much more enjoyable now and our options for things to do around the house have opened up a lot to us now.
Since I last updated the blog, we celebrated Amelie's birthday with a party at Backyard Adventures with 17 of her friends. She had a blast even though, at times, she showed she is still not at ease being the center of attention. She had been planning her birthday party since May when we were in D.C. and even wanted to invite Barack Obama (who was not able to make it). We also got to celebrate the actual day with the Suitt's since Victoria's birthday is on the same day. We all went to Disney and really enjoyed getting to watch the girls experience Disney together.

We also have been camping twice - once to Fort Wilderness the day after Thanksgiving and are now making it a tradition to camp there the whole week of Thanksgiving and get to stop by Granny Great's on the big day before going back to enjoy our Disney passes. We went camping again in December with Ging and Poppy at Fort Desoto where we got to fish right from our campsite. We experienced one of the dramatic storms the first night we were their where the wind was quite impressive, but had a much less eventful trip the rest of the time.

Amelie still amazes us with her ingenuity and creativeness where she can take random objects and see something else in them. When we were at Fort Desoto, there were little stands with plaques of information about different things at the fort. Amelie would stop at one to tap her stick and conduct music.

Bunny is still her best friend who travels everywhere with us and is a great emotional support (or great turmoil if we make the mishap of forgetting him like we did on Thanksgiving). When we were camping at Fort Desoto, Ging and I had taken her over to the playground and were about to head back when Amelie said, "Wait a minute, I have to rub Bunny's ear first". We all stopped while Amelie went into a trance for about a minute to rub Bunny's ear on her ear. She also did the "nursy" thing with her tongue. After about a minute, she said "Okay, I'm good now and we could go on our way.

She is a very affectionate and loving child who asks for hugs throghout the day. One day, I was having lunch with her at her school when one of her friends walked by. Amelie called her over and gave her a hug and a kiss before she went on her way. She has also shown natural leadership skills to those around her (even if they are several years older). She has a very positive way of getting others to do her bidding while making them feel good about it. Some friends recently went to observe Amelie's classroom where they got to see Amelie in action. They were the fly on the wall for me. They told me how Amelie was so proud to see someone she knew in the classroom that she kept bringing her friends over to introduce them to each other. She then had brought some work on to the rug where she had one of her friends holding the box top for her. Another friend soon came over saying she wanted to help and Amelie had a dilemma since there was only one box top. She quickly solved this problem by saying, "I know! You can hold this corner and you can hold this corner" and they both did as she said and were smiling the entire time. Eventually, 2 more friends came over and Amelie had to find jobs for each of them as well.

Fall Fun

Well, it's officially Fall in Florida now. The weather over the past few days has been wonderful - finally, because it's been very hot up until now!

Amelie is full-fledged into school right now and doing very well. She has a group of friends whom she talks about every day after school. Mostly, she says that she is friends with girls and not with boys, although every now and again she mentions a boys' name as a potential friend or someone who made her laugh. For example, today she said she sat next to Emerson at lunch and Ben and Sebastian were cracking them up. Apparently, they were being quite silly. The other day, she got in the car and said very seriously, "Now Mama, listen to this". Of course, this got my attention. She then said, "I have a best friend, her name is Raelaene and she's a kindergartner".

She started the year going 1/2 days, but then wanted to go full days to be with her friends. So, we switched her to full days and she's been doing well. She's not napping there because the group nap setting was just to interesting to her. The first week she switched to full days, she would get in the car telling me amazing stories about how kids could just lie down on the ground (on their mats) and sleep! Some would "just sack out!" according to her. So, soon after, I get a note from her teacher asking if it was possible for her to just come into the classroom after lunch/playtime with the older kids instead of staying in the nap room. I spoke with the teacher in the nap room who told me that Amelie always liked to chat with her during nap time. The teacher would have to tell her it was time for napping and she couldn't talk since everyone was supposed to be napping. Amelie then would talk the rest of the nap time in a whisper and told the nap room teacher that she loved her. Not surprising, no one gets too upset when Amelie breaks the rules.

The girls from the older class who work the car line in the morning love to see Amelie coming in. Even with closed windows, I can hear the girls yell "It's Amelie!" and rush over to help her out. One of the girls even abandoned the child in the car in front of us one morning when she realized Amelie was next. Oops...

We've been working on some other projects at home. Allen put together a homemade pizza oven which we've been having a lot of fun with. He also makes very good homemade dough. This was a huge hit since we all got to shape our own pizza crust and put the toppings on our own pizzas. This, of course, made a big mess which was part of its popularity. Amelie was very excited about this whole process and was very eager to help me make my own pizza.

We also started doing a makeover of Amelie's room as part of her birthday present. She has definite ideas on what she wants now since her favorite colors are pink and purple. It will be a princess room and we have more work to do, but she was very eager to help with the painting.

Happy Gotcha Day Number 3!!

It's hard to believe another anniversary of Gotcha Day is upon us. It seems like no time ago when we were so impatient to hear any bit of news about our little Amelie and now she's getting so grown up and in school already!


A few days ago, I brought up the idea of Gotcha Day to her and what happened on Gotcha Day in China. I told her more about how she lived in the orphanage and the nannies took care of her until we were able to get her. I told her how, on Gotcha Day, she and the nannies got on the bus to come to see Mama and Baba. She completely focused on everything I told her and asked a lot of questions about each bit of news. I told her that Gotcha Day was the happiest day of mine and Baba's lives and I asked her if she knew why. She said, "because you got to get me?" and I nodded. I may have mentioned this to her before...


We started off the day with Amelie getting us to the point of tears laughing so hard (so much so that Allen laughed his breakfast eggs right out of his nose). Amelie said, "Mama, does a rooster lay eggs?" and I said, "No, chickens lay eggs". She followed by telling us a joke, "Why did the rooster lay eggs?" and we said, "Why?" to which she said, "to be nice to the chicken". At which point we laughed (it's all in the delivery in case it doesn't translate well in text) and then eggs shot out of Allen's nose and we never quite recovered after that.


Today, we celebrated the 3rd celebration of Gotcha Day by all taking the day off work and school. We went to Weeki Wachee Springs knowing how fascinated she is by mermaids and wanted to surprise her by showing her 'real live' mermaids. Amelie was thrilled to see a show with live mermaids where they re-enacted the story of The Little Mermaid which she knows very well. She started off by waving frantically at the mermaids who swam close by the window and watched the rest of the show intently while Allen and I were laughing hysterically at the turtles in the Springs that followed the mermaids' every move in the attempt to eat their hair. After the show, Amelie said "See! I told you mermaids were real!"


The rest of the park was pretty dead and the water park was closed so we made our way to nearby Tarpon Springs and had a wonderful time walking around the sponge docs and going in and out of shops and eating at a local Greek restaurant. I went into a spice store and the owner commented on how he admired people like us for taking children in and raising them. Then, continued on to tell me about how he was given up by his birth mother when he was 18 months and it was the best thing that ever happened to him because he went to a great, loving family. I told him we were out and about celebrating Amelie's 3rd anniversary of Gotcha Day and he gave her a stuffed animal puppy from his shop which she loved!


Amelie, who loves frosting on cake exponentially more than the cake itself, had me in tears laughing again today when Allen looked away from his dessert and Amelie, very nonchalantly, and with the precision of a surgeon, used her fork to remove the frosting from Allen's eclair and ate it before he ever turned around. Allen then turned around, not having a clue as to what transpired and Amelie, quite nonchalantly again said "this cake is only mine". At which point I lost it and had tears coming out of my eyes.


Amelie, over the past 3 years, has made us laugh and smile, pained when she is hurt and feel immeasurably proud of what a wonderful child she is. How lucky are we?