Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?

Mid - Autumn Moon Festival

We celebrated a big Chinese holiday today with stories and a wonderful dinner. What a beautiful full moon we have out there tonight!

Three Months with Isabella

What is there to say? Three months ago today we walked into the civil affairs office in Guangzhou for a second time to meet another daughter for the first time. The emotions were similar and yet made different not only due to experience, but the knowledge that our newest little girl had been fostered for almost 18 months by the same family. We knew that bonding was pretty likely in time but were sure we'd go through some intense grieving first. Instead her grieving was very mild and she seemed to attach to us quite quickly looking us in the eye from day one. Chris sometimes jokes that since God only gives you what you can handle that He must not think we can handle much! This could very well be true. We recently had to take Ellie in for her blood work and they did finally get three vials from her after three sets of phlebotomists tried with her screaming and fighting the entire time. Her results are back and everything is great! What should be negative is; what should be positive is; and what we thought would be negative isn't; and what we thought would be positive also isn't. This is actually some very miraculous news that we will have verified in a few months. Our precious daughter continues to sleep well, eat well, and play well. There are still some issues with sharing but I anticipate those will last a lifetime. She still has a huge smile on her face every morning when I come into her room and Elizabeth goes up to her crib to kiss her and to say "I love you, Ella." She is just a joy!

Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?

Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?

The Little Rabbit

The Little Rabbit is a book about a little girl who gets a pet rabbit and she eventually has babies that need a home. This book isn't my favorite but Elizabeth seems to enjoy the pictures and for some reason she liked the activity of matching crayon colors with the items on some of the pages. Maybe we'll even make it to the pet store to inspect a real rabbit this week.

My Blue Boat

This week we started reading My Blue Boat - the final out - of - print selection that we were able to find. This book has many similarities to Yellow Ball so we will spend some time discussing that and as soon as I find some watercolor paint we'll be doing some painting on paper plates. There are also plans to make a boat and float it in the bath tub. One of the pages is similar to the Van Gogh painting Starry Night so we found a picture on the internet and looked it over.

Pull - Ups Anyone?

Yellow Ball

This week we are "rowing" Yellow Ball. Today we read through the book for the first time and found where the yellow ball was on each page. I plan on buying a yellow ball for Elizabeth the end of the week and playing some of the same games portrayed in the pictures in the book. We also have plans to paint again with Elizabeth attempting to copy one of the simpler pages of the book. This is yet another out - of - print book that my good friend kindly picked up at her library along with next week's book.

Sunday Photo Session

Maybe someday I'll actually get a good picture of these two little monkeys - so for now this will have to do. This series does actually portray their personalities pretty well so that's a plus!