Enough With The Snow Already!

Snow is not that unusual of an occurrence here. We get some snow most years, but snow here is always like a very polite house guest - never staying more than three days. But somehow, this year, winter has settled in on us like the Thing That Wouldn’t Leave. Today was day 9! It has snowed off and on and the temperature has stayed well below freezing. And they’re calling for more snow tomorrow night! Depending on who you listen to, we may get some warmer temperatures and rain starting on Christmas Eve... or just more snow. I’d really like to see it go, but after 2 weeks of it, I’m going to feel a little cheated now if we don’t get a white Christmas.

We have a small statue of Buddha who sits in a garden overlooking our back deck.


The snow doesn’t seem to disturb his meditation.

More Pictures....

The car in this photo belongs to a friend of Ben’s. It’s been in front of our house for over a week.





Snow Monkeys...

Now We Are 6

When I was One,
I had just begun.

When I was Two,
I was nearly new.

When I was Three,
I was hardly Me.

When I was Four,
I was not much more.

When I was Five,
I was just alive.

But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever.
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.

-A.A. Milne

My Wonderful Life!

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Dear Santa

Tina let the Littles dictate their letters to Santa this year and wrote them out exactly as directed...

Dear Santa,
Hi, how you doing? Good with your reindeer?

I want a sword for Christmas. A big one! A shiny one!
I want Spiderman and a Superman toy to go with my sword.
I want a Stinky Mouse toy that can talk.
I want my own umbrella to get the rain out of my hair.
A telescope toy for me to see.
I want a new yellow race car that works. Uh huh.
I want an orange race car.
I want a big rocketship for me to go to outer space.
I need a suitcase.

Zai Jian,
Kai

Oh wait, one more...
I want an airplane car that I can drive into the sky,
and my own little kitchen set with a wash cloth,
and my own couch.
Me and Shen need our own bed: two of them.

...........

Dear Santa,
Is it snowing at the North Pole?

I want a bunny,
and a rocket ship.
I want a hat, a ball hat.
I want a pillow.
I want a TV remote like Mommy.
A vest like Mommy.
I want a book about a butterfly.
I want a tree.
A Superman, and a Spiderman.
An airplaine.
I want a phone, and a little couch.
I want a pony. A real pony to ride.

From Shen

Oh, Kai says I want a tiny sword, but I want a big one.

Snow!

We got the snow the weatherman was predicting! The temperature dropped down into the 20’s on Saturday and the wind was blowing down from the North. All day it was cold and windy, then right around dinner time the snow started. At first it came in tiny little dust-like flakes. Very pretty, but not very promising in terms of accumulation. But it picked up the pace and just kept coming down till well past midnight. By morning we had 4 to 6 inches in the backyard.

I am really happy being able to sit in my comfy chair and look at our Christmas tree all decorated here beside me. We had originally planned on getting it today, but moved the outing up to Wednesday in case the forecast for snow came true. Tina is feeling quite smug as she was the one who insisted we go Wednesday. I am quite glad I listened to her.

Kai and Shen both love the snow. We bundled them up in snow-pants, boots and coats and sent them out to play. After a bit Ben and his friend Brooke joined us and we headed over to the neighborhood sledding hill. There was less accumulation over there, but the road was covered in a nice solid layer of ice which made for fast runs.

Our two sleds are holding up pretty well and still work great! Kai and Shen each made several good solo runs for the first time. Several of our neighbors showed up after a while and Kai and Shen had a good time with them. At one point Shen started pulling Jordan down the hill on one of the sleds. It was way too slick out for any of the big people to get a hold of them before they hit the slope and we all watched with a mix of amusement and dread as it seemed certain that the sled would overtake Shen and send him bowling, but then he somehow managed to fall down at just the right moment and roll onto the sled behind Jordan. They made a pretty good run, but veered off the street and launched up and over a small bush. To the amazement of all of us bystanders, they both climbed out of the shrubbery unharmed, and continued sledding.

Tree Hunt!

It’s Wednesday - my day off, so I’m blogging again. The Littles are in bed asleep and Tina and I are watching Elf on Tivo. I can’t remember the last time I saw this, but I’m thinking it was before Kai came home as I was caught off guard by the opening scene with baby Buddy being put to bed in the orphanage. Somehow a fantasy portrayal of an orphanage with rows of cribs hits me differently than what I think the writers are shooting for. Still, it’s a funny movie and I am enjoying it.

Now, on to todays topic: We got the Tree! We were originally planning on going to get it next weekend, but the weatherman is calling for a big time cold snap with snow and everything. Since today was mostly dry in what’s been a pretty wet spell we decided to keep Kai and Shen out of their respective preschools and go today.

We were bummed that Ben couldn’t go with us today as he has to be in school or he can’t go to swim team practice. But Cam and Brittni came along with us to get their tree too, and it was great having them come as it’s been a couple years since Cam has come along to get the tree with us. And as it turns out, we couldn’t have done it without them!

We drove out the Mount Baker Highway and stopped at the Hungry Bear restaurant in Deming for lunch. After we fueled the boys up on giant cups of cocoa we pressed on to Van Zandt and the Alpine Meadows Christmas Tree Farm. We used to go to this tree farm all the time, but started going to a different one the last few years. It was funny going on a Wednesday. We were the only ones there so we had the whole place to ourselves. As we do every year, we walked way into the trees looking for the perfect one. Cam and Brittni were looking for a table-top sized tree and found a nice little one. We actually found ours pretty quickly - I think Ben would have wanted to look at a few more, but he wasn’t with us so we managed to settle on one a bit faster.

So we cut our trees and hauled them back to the barn to pay for them and drink more cocoa. The tree guy came and measured the trees then wrote up our receipt. Cam told him that he was paying for the little one, but I said I would pay for both. Cam resisted at first but I insisted so Cam graciously relented. I had spent all my cash at lunch so I asked the tree guy if they took debit cards - nope. No problem, Tina has the checkbook with her. Oh wait, there’s no checks in it. So like I said before, it was lucky Cam and Brittni came as they ended up paying for both trees! He did let me pay him back later, but it did make for a great moment.

Here’s some pictures...

Big Birthday Bash!

Today we had a giant birthday bash for both Kai and Shen at a fairly new local business called “Jump Around Fun Zone”. It’s a family run business that has leased a warehouse in a light industrial park and installed about half a dozen large inflatable play structures. They have party rooms and a great lounge area for parents with couches and free Wi-Fi internet access. It’s the first time we’ve been there and really enjoyed it!

We’ve been struggling with how to handle two December birthdays - something new for our family. And the fact that birthdays are a fairly new concept for Kai and Shen has meant that we have kept it pretty low key up till now. But this year is their 5th and 6th birthdays - I think you kind of have to have some kind of party at this age!?!

So what we came up with for this year was to celebrate each of their birthdays with individual family celebrations with a special dinner, cake and presents, and then to have one big giant birthday party with lots of friends. Since Kai and Shen will each receive gifts from family on their birthday and then again on Christmas we figured that we didn’t need them showered with gifts a 3rd time on top of that. So we asked the families of the children we invited to make a donation to charity instead of bringing gifts.

We arranged with Love Without Boundaries to help us make a donation to the orphanage where Kai lived in Baoding. We made up a little donation box and printed up an information sheet about LWB with their tax ID number and giving/adminstrative cost ratios (97% of funds raised in ’07 went to helping children). We also brought the picture books of the Kai and Shen’s adoption stories that I made for them last Christmas.

Everyone seemed to have a really good time and we raised almost $300! I think people really liked the “no gifts” idea. It certainly made the event more enjoyable for the other children not having to watch the birthday boys open package after package of plastic excess. Kai and Shen are still at an age where they can enjoy a joint event, and while we don’t count on this always being the case, it worked perfectly this year.

Here’s a few more pictures of the party...

Kung Fu Fighting

Kai and Shen LOVE Kung Fu Panda! I am enjoying this movie too, but I haven’t really gotten to watch the whole thing yet. Mainly because when it’s on I watch Kai and Shen. They are on their feet for most of the movie. I’ve never seen television as interactive as this before! So far we’ve only had one minor injury. Bonus material on the disc includes the music video of “Kung Fu Fighting” performed by Cee-Lo Green and Jack Black. Kai clears the living room floor out to make sure he has enough room to do all his moves when this video is on.

Go Jee Finally Makes The Header!

I like to change the color themes on the blog every few months to keep things fresh. I usually tweak the header graphic a bit at the same time - subtle font changes - nudge the graphics around. Last year I put a Santa hat on Mouse for December. For some time now I’ve been thinking about how to add Go Jee to the header. One of the things that was holding me up was trying to figure out a set of Chinese characters for his name. I need to talk with a native Chinese speaker about this because my limited abilities of searching online dictionaries for characters that would work haven’t turned up anything.
When Shen first started calling his big monkey “Go Jee” we assumed it meant something in Chinese, then we thought it was a twisting of George, as in Curious George, which is a favorite TV show and set of books in our house. If it was, it no longer is as Shen says “Curious George” pretty clearly and never calls him Go Jee.
Go Jee was actually a gift to Kai from some friends at work when he first came home. Kai liked the big monkey but soon latched onto a little gray mouse. Ironically, that mouse wasn’t meant for him originally, but he liked it so much we let him keep it. In turn, his big beautiful monkey was adopted by his younger brother.
Go Jee really was a beautiful monkey too. He was HUGE and had fantastic shiny fur. He was well stuffed and fat, but Shen works this monkey like a worry stone and has worn him down to a limp husk of his former self. Which is how you can always spot a really great stuffed animal.
So it may be a bit late, but GoJee is finally on the blog header with Stinky Mouse. :)

Happy Birthday Shen!

Today was Shen’s 5th Birthday and he had a Great Day! Actually he has had a couple great days since we celebrated as a family yesterday. Still he received many greetings of the day today as well and enjoyed all of it thoroughly!

In many ways this seemed like his first birthday. While we celebrated his 4th last year, he had been home such a short time with us that I’m not sure how much he really comprehended what was going on. This year however he was quite into it. Shen still is quite concerned about “stuff” and is very competitive with Kai for control of toys. Since most of the toys in the house are common shared property, we were happy about having an opportunity to give Shen a few more things that are exclusively his. We worried a bit about how Kai would handle the event as we work so hard to keep everything equal and this was clearly Shen’s Day and was the only one receiving gifts. As we anticipated, Kai did have a little trouble with this and got a bit pouty. But Shen handled things beautifully, while he was thrilled to open presents, he was amazingly gracious about sharing everything with Kai even without being asked to!

We didn’t go overboard on the gifts. We gave him a new outfit, a big truck that carries Hot Wheel cars, a fanny-pack that has a stuffed animal of the Disney character Stitch attached to it, a few Hot Wheels and the traditional Birthday Card with 5 one dollar bills in it (one for each year). Kai gave him a nice little VW MicroBus toy, Ben gave him a great little motorcycle with a rider, and Cam and Brittni gave him the DVD of Kung Fu Panda. Kung Fu Panda was a huge hit around here! Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting for quite a while after we watched that! It was actually quite sweet to see how excited Shen was when Cam and Brittni arrived. We had just seen them for Thanksgiving, but it’s still a big thing for him and Kai whenever they come over.

The other thing I really enjoyed about Shen and his birthday this year was that whenever anyone told him “Happy Birthday” he always said “Happy Birthday” back to them, and he said it with such joy and sincerity that I couldn’t help but smile every time this happened.

I saw a list of questions for a child on their birthday on another blog and thought it would be really fun to start asking them these questions each year. Here is Shen’s list...

My favorite color is Blue.
My favorite animal is a Pony.
My favorite food is oranges.
My favorite place is the Park.
When I grow up I want to be Big.
My favorite thing to do is go outside.
If I had one wish it would be A motorcycle for me on my birthday!

Happy 5th Birthday Shen, I’m so happy we are able to celebrate it with you!

Elf Yourself

So we had our wonderful Thanksgiving family gathering at my sister’s house - we even had a fantastic little pre-Thanksgiving function with our friends Pat and Paula and Jasper. There is really nothing quite like getting Ocheltrees and McCutheons together. Something about that just works whether you’re a kid or a parent. I’ve seen 3 generations enjoy it now, and all of them will tell you it’s a blast.

Now that Thanksgiving is over we can start focusing on the important celbrations: Birthdays!!

Oh, and after those it’ll be Christmas, and this year I don’t feel bad about starting the party now! I googled up “Elf Yourself” and was pleased to see they have upgraded the site again this year. They now have 4 different dances to choose from! The themed ones really need 5 elves so I took the liberty of elfing Cam and Brittni and Ben.

This first one has just Kai and Shen...

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

If you want to watch more of our elves the rest of these have Kai, Shen, Ben, Cam and Brittni in them. You don’t have to watch them all if you don’t want, I’ve posted them here because Kai and Shen want to see them all over and over again, but if you want you can go off and “elf” your favorite folk!

Charlston

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Disco

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Country

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Portraits

Visit to the Fire Station

Wednesday is my day off so I got to join Shen, Tina and Kai in going to the Fire Station with Shen’s preschool class.

We got really cool hats to wear!

We listened very carefully.

We climbed around in fire trucks!

We messed with the fire fighters!

It was a very fun time!!

Hui-Hui’s Egg Flower Soup

“I WANT EGG SOUP! I WANT EGG SOUP! I WANT EGG SOUP!!!”

Now have someone repeat that every few minutes for a week and you’ll have an idea of what it’s been like living with Kai since last Sunday. I was supposed to make egg flower soup for dinner last week, but our plans changed and it didn’t happen. He has been demanding egg flower soup every day since. Today it finally happened for him. You should have seen him hovering over me in the kitchen as I put this together, talk about a leech!

We used a packet mix to make this soup a couple times but having learned how easy it is to make from scratch we realize this was silly and are a little embarrassed about having done that. During Moon Festival we actually made this version three times in one week.

Having experimented with a number of different recipes from various websites, we have come up with a hybrid of these that we think comes very close to what we expect from this soup when we order it in a Chinese restaurant. I believe it is the white pepper and fresh ginger that give the soup the right taste.

Note: getting the eggs to form the right consistency is a bit of a trick. My best results have been to make sure that I don’t beat them too much. You don’t want any bubbles to form when you do this. Also add the eggs to the soup before you put the cornstarch mix in at the end to thicken it.

And if you are having Kai over make sure to double the batch.

Hui-Hui’s Egg Flower Soup

Cook Time: 10 minutes

Ingredients:
4 cups chicken broth or stock
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 -2 green onions, minced
1/4 teaspoon white pepper
1 Tablespoon low sodium soy sauce
A few drops of sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon fresh grated ginger (1/8 teaspoon ground ginger will work)
1 clove minced garlic 
3-4 tablespoons cornstarch (more or less depending on how thick you like it)

optional: peas, tofu, chopped tomato, corn (NOTE: while Tina and I really like extra stuff in our soup, adding any of these ingredients means it is no longer “Hui-Hui’s Egg Flower Soup” and isn’t endorsed by Kai)

Preparation:
mix 1/2 cup broth with the cornstarch for thickener

in a small bowl, lightly beat the eggs so that no bubbles form.

Bring the remaining chicken broth to a boil. Add the white pepper, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, sesame oil and most of the green onion. Cook for about another minute.

While stirring the broth rapidly in one direction, very slowly pour the beaten egg in a steady stream (pouring it through the tines of a fork from several inches above the pot is a good way to keep the stream slow and steady). stir rapidly for at least 1 minute.

Stir in the cornstarch/chicken broth mixture and remove the soup from the heat.

Garnish with the remaining green onion and serve.

Kai Channels Lyle Lovett

You know that Lyle Lovett song “She’s No Lady (she’s my wife)”?
Kai was getting off the school bus in front of the house on Friday and one of children on board asked Kai “Who’s that lady?” meaning Tina.

Kai looked at Tina then turned to the inquisitive little girl and said, “That’s not a lady, that’s my mom.”

As you may imagine, the bus driver enjoyed this exchange immensely.

Hi-Res Gotcha Video

YouTube has started making hi-res versions available of many videos. I don’t know if they are going back and re-encoding things, or if this is just on newly posted videos. I saw that the three most recently posted of my videos are available in hi-res. One of these is an edited version of Kai’s Gotcha Video that I put online there just a while ago. Here’s what it looks like in the new resolution...

Favorite Toys

Toys are a subject that Tina and I see eye-to-eye on pretty much all the time. Having raised two boys once before has rendered us pretty much immune to passing fads and the desire to buy into the latest “must have” character based toys. I’m not saying there isn’t a single Happy Meal toy in the house, but we try to keep the junk to a minimum. In fact, we regularly cull out stuff they lose interest in. We find that when there are too many toys around to choose from, the boys end up just dumping stuff out and not actually playing with it.

Of all the toys they have, the one thing they play with every single day is a set of plain wooden blocks their grandmother originally gave to their older brothers, Cam and Ben. I hate to think how much plastic crap we bought for the older boys is presently refusing to break down in some landfill right now. We are quite pleased with ourselves for hanging onto a number of classic toy items, including these blocks.

This Video Clip is Good on So Many Levels!

Jackie Chan doing a magic trick! How Great is That?!? It’s like... Hey! You got peanut butter on my chocolate!

Bad Blogger!

My good sister (Uncle Kris) gave me grief today about my bad, bad blogging habits. What’s the point of having a blog if you don’t actually post anything on it? And of all times to just slack off it’s November - National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo). I feel kinda bad about that as I managed to pull off posting every single day of the month for the last two NaBloPoMo’s. You can see my past efforts at this challenge HERE (November ’06) and HERE (November ’07).
So I guess I’m going to have to try a little harder around here. Who knows, maybe if I post more, people might start reading again. I know there’s still a couple of you out there keeping an eye on things. So I’ll see what I can do.

Shen Carves a Pumpkin

We carved our pumpkins this evening. Both boys were very excited about this but Kai preferred to just watch. Shen on the other hand was more than willing to dig right in! Here’s the finished products...

Kai and Mimi

Last Sunday we met Mimi and her family at the park. We all visited together then took all the kids (our two and Mimi and her two older sisters) for a walk through the woods along Whatcom creek. I got a lot of great pictures of all the kids, but these ones of Kai and Mimi are my favorites. While we were on our walk they announced that they were going to get married. Then Mimi told Kai he had to buy her a big shiny ring!

Fun Day At Seattle Children's Hospital

My new work schedule is taking some getting used to, but I’m finally getting around to posting a blog entry this week. We had a really great day on Sunday. We drove down to Seattle Children’s Hospital for an Open House for families of children with limb differences. Not too surprisingly, Kai and Shen’s Grandma (Scott’s mom) wanted to come too. She has a history of accompanying the boy’s cousin Devon to Children’s Hospital many, many times, so if any of her grandkids are headed down there she feels compelled to accompany them so she knows exactly what’s going on. We were a little more surprised, though quite pleased, when Cousin Devon decided at the last minute that he wanted to come with us too! I think it was a great experience for the boys. They love any outing, but they really did seem to be looking forward to meeting other children with hands like theirs.

Tina and I were hoping there would be info on prosthetics and other resources for people with one hand, and there actually was a fair amount of info there. The majority of people we met were like us, parents of young children trying to figure out what lies ahead. But there were a number of very kind adults with limb differences who were their to share their experiences and information. I talked with a really nice guy who was with a golf association for people with limb differences. He had a very cool prosthetic for holding a golf club. We talked about Kai’s options, as he won’t be able to use a prosthetic. He assured me that one-handed golfing is quite doable.

After we had been there about a half hour or so, a young man arrived in a wheelchair who had quite extreme limb deformities. He had hands, but no arms, and his legs were twisted up under his body so that he could not stand on them. Kai and Shen reacted the way you might expect young children to when first seeing someone like this, they stared a bit and kept their distance. But then this young man got down out of his wheelchair and began tossing balls around and playing with the little kids. Within a few minutes all the kids were playing with him. There was a young girl about 12 years old or so (who turned out to be adopted from China) who had no arms whatsoever. She quickly joined in the games and was throwing and catching the balls as well. It was pretty amazing to see how she did this. Before long Shen was actually wrestling with the boy who had come in the wheelchair.

Then after a bit one of the organizers of the event got everyone’s attention and introduced this young man to us. His name is Gabe and he is a freshman at the University of Washington. He has been a regular at Children’s since he was born and was there on Sunday with his parents to talk about the foundation they were starting. He talked about his experiences growing up. It was really great to hear him speak, his confidence and ease were impressive for any young man of 18, but to see someone with such profound physical challenges talk about playing baseball and basketball and the drums as if it were nothing special was quite inspirational. It was also great seeing Kai and Shen have the opportunity to meet someone with extreme physical differences and get to be very comfortable with them. We got to visit with his parents quite a bit too, and before we left I asked Gabe if I could take his picture with the boys. He was very happy to oblige...

Here is a link to the website for his foundation:

www.gabeshope.org

. There are a bunch of great photos and videos of him you can see there, and you can read about the work his family is doing to help others.

Pumpkin Patch

Tina and the boys made it back home on Tuesday from her dad’s house. He is doing okay there for now. Tina’s sister Peggy is staying with him for the time being, which is a good thing. It’s been a bit of a crazy week here at home as I have been adapting to my new work schedule, but I had today off so we packed up the boys and drove south to check out a different pumpkin farm from the one we’ve gone to for the last three years. It was a little bit of a road trip, but it was a beautiful day and the boys had a really good time looking for pumpkins.

I Miss Tina and the Boys

It’s been a long quiet week here at home. Last Saturday Tina’s dad suffered a small stroke. He is doing okay and the lingering affects seem to be mostly loss of strength in his arm and leg on one side. He was able to go home from the hospital the next day which is pretty amazing when you consider that he is 90. Len lives on his own in a big house on the other side of the state. Tina’s brother and his family are just down the street from him and have been responsible for looking after Len for some time now, but Tina really wanted to be able to help out while her father is recovering. So after a lot of thought she packed up Kai and Shen and made the 350 mile drive across the state. Normally I would have gone too, but as my first day of work at a new job was Monday, that wasn’t an option. They drove over on Tuesday. The original plan was that they’d be home today, but as we all know, plans are subject to change.

Her father Len is pretty amazing. Here’s a guy who is 90 years old, he is sharp as a tack, still lives on his own, drives, even has a girlfriend - not your typical 90 year old. Still, a stroke, even a small one, is a serious setback. Living on his own, at least for right now, isn’t an option for him. The three days Tina had over there before the weekend weren’t enough time to put a care plan for Len in place by Monday, so Tina and the boys are going to stay there a bit longer. We’re now sort of playing it by ear and waiting to see what comes together before she heads back home. Hopefully they’ll be back before the end of the week.

Here are a couple pictures I took of Len when he was over for a visit in June. He was telling a story when I took these. I love this guy.