Merete's Birthday Party

Today, little man M had a Spiderman themed birthday party, complete with pinata, cake, ice-cream, and many, many friends. He had been looking forward to this party since (at least) E's party. Since then, he debated his theme, what cake he wanted, etc. for months! The great day finally came, and he seemed to have a blast! Thanks to everyone who came and celebrated M's first ever birthday party :-)

ABA Phoenix

Last week I went to Phoenix for our annual convention. I had fun and really enjoyed some of the talks and catching up with friends and colleagues, but being without the boys for that long was not so much fun. I did get out of the conference ghost town one afternoon and made it to the botanical gardens. There were glass art displays throughout the gardens, which just made it that much more beautiful.

Update on China

I recently got a few questions about our China adoption, so I thought I'd update our status. It's been 2 years, 4 months+ since we started the whole process. We have a log-in date of 7/2/07. At that point, the backlog was about 595 days. Since then, the backlog (with regard to getting to us) has gotten down to 469 days. They are referring about 4.2 days per month. According to some calculations, at this rate we can expect a referral in 2017. By then, E will be 14 and M will be 12. I have no clue where we'll be in life at that point, whether we'll want an infant (as we originally requested), etc. Our options are to just wait it out and see how long this actually takes, switch our request to a special needs child, or drop out of China altogether. There's no charge for waiting, so I suppose we'll stay in line and see how long it takes to inch forward and go from there. If things speed up, I'll give more frequent updates; otherwise, once a year should probably do it. Sigh.

First Swim Class

Today the boys had their first swim class. Actually, E had a few classes a couple years ago, but it wasn't enough at the time to get him swimming on his own. Both did very well, no fear, just jumping in, and in E's case, lots of dogie paddling. Hopefully we'll have some video of the little fish later this summer!

New Mother and Mother's Day

The last couple of weekends have been very eventful and special. First, little Colin was born last Sunday. He is ridiculously adorable, and Cristina is an amazing mom already!

Yesterday the boys and I meet some friends out at Kanapaha for their (once every 3 years?) luminary walk. Cara was kind enough to delay our movie night and come along. It was beautiful and fun, though I feel we now need to go back during the day so we can more of the gardens. Later Cara and I saw the new Star Trek movie, which was amazing.

This morning we went to Lake Alice for some pictures and then to Emelianos for our traditional Mother's Day brunch. Boy am I going to miss their crab cake eggs benedict!