First Snow!!

Wow! Two posts in one day! I just had to share these photos of her enjoying her first snow.

Let the Dancing Begin!!!

Megan is going to begin dancing after school on Wednesdays through a Kinderdance program at her preschool. She is SO EXCITED!!! We just had to share the video of her trying out her new outfit.

Now we have had her 6 months!!!

We have been having lots of fun lately. Mary Alice, who is taking Spanish, had fun on Beret Day, Sponsored by the French Students, and immediately made a Beret for our cats to model. Here they are, Jasmine and Misty. For those of you who do not know, Mary Alice is quite a Cat Hat Maker, and some of you have had the privilege of viewing her private collection. Maybe someday she will give me permission to share it, as it deserves a post of its own. It's hilarious. And yes, the cats tolerate this dressing up in good humor.






Megan has been making "soup" at school for the month of November. We made soup at home, both real and pretend, too. Mary Alice loves to play with her in Megan's kitchen.

Below is pie, which she also made at school and of course, I had to make some at home, too! Turns out she loves pie!!!!

I am not at all sure that she "got" the idea of Halloween, but she thought the pumpkin gushy stuff was great. She and daddy are having fun carving at our annual church party.


The finished pumpkins are below, Megan's first, Mary Alice's and then, the amazing pumpkin by Matthew, who worked for hours and hours, even avoiding dinner and dessert to finish!!! It's hard to compete with Matthew!

Mary Alice was a colonial girl. Megan chose be an ice cream cone but only kept the costume on long enough to walk next door, and then shed it, preferring instead the ease of being a pumpkin.........

Here are our neighborhood children. It's cute to see how much Megan is enjoying herself. She had no idea who they were until we showed her one at a time.

Here is a new photo of Bao Bao, (now Sofia), her "sister" from her orphanage in China, adopted at the same time as Megan. Sofia is doing wonderful and is talking like crazy. We keep in touch regularly and recently were able to "see" them over Skype with our webcam. Sofia is visiting an Apple Farm in this picture and is 3 years old.

While we are incredibly happy and think that things could not have gone better in our last 6 months with Megan, there have been some bumps in the road. She is very self directed and determined and we have had to be very strict with her about things she can and cannot do herself. She is incredibly curious (like a certain little monkey) and has no idea about the dangers that lurk around the house or the consequences of her actions. For example, one day I went to unbuckle her from her booster and she happily handed me a feather that she had been sucking on and stripped clean!! I have no idea where she got it from. Later that day, we were in the kitchen and I was loading the dishwasher and I turned about to find her eating old rice (from the previous night's dinner) off the plates! Another time, when I gave her the garbage to clean up some paper she was cutting, she said "Mama, Egg!" and showed me some raw eggs she had pulled out which I had cracked some time earlier and thrown away. Each time Megan gets into something like that I think "wow!" I didn't even think of that as a possible issue. Childproofing seems impossible with a curiousity level like that!! So anyway, I felt driven to create some very safe area in the house (within my immediate view) where she can play without me worrying about what she is doing every second. This resulted in our changing around our furniture and turning our family room into a reading/play room and the living room into the TV, media, Computer, music area. Now I can gate off the living/dining room and feel much better about her roaming around the family room. I also created an area in the basement (with the help of her lovely special ed teacher, Therese) which is simple and easy for her to play in and clean up. It took a lot of time & effort, (thank you Eric, for spending all last Saturday running the TV/Phone lines to the living room! OXOXOX) but was well worth it.

Megan's language continues to expand and she is now putting some 2-3 word combinations together. She is naming pictures in books, and this week has discovered how to move the cursor with the mouse on the computer, AND CLICK!!! without moving the mouse again, which opens up a whole new world of possible activities to her. She has a favorite video on you tube called the Tweenies Wheels on the Bus, and now she can click and replay it over and over!! Her teachers are thrilled with her progress and feel she is doing incredibly well with routines and concept development. She is rote counting sporadically through 15 or so, (not really with 1-1 correspondence), can name the letters A and M, is trying desperately to pronounce Megan correctly and can name most colors. Wow, it's incredible progress in 6 months, even if English were her first langauge.

Matthew and Mary Alice both made it into the Middle School Geography Bee! Only the top 30 scoring students in the school (of about 800) are invited to participate. Last year, Matthew won the Bee and ended up making it to the State competition level. The contest will be the day before Thanksgiving. We are very proud of them. There are several sites with games for studying and one of them includes an interactive "find that state" game. I am embarrased to say that I have no idea where over half of our states are!!! I don't even know which half of the country some are in!! I really need to practice with these maps. I can do some things amazingly well, and that is simply not one of them. And my kid won last year, and yes... he's a biological one!!! Go figure.....

We are getting ready for our annual Thanksgiving Visit to my brother's house in Georgia. We have gone every year since Matthew was a baby. We are all so excited to have Megan join us this year!!! My mother comes from Florida, as well as my sister and her family (who live near us). We have so much fun together, but it goes by way too fast. My brother has a big house so we can all stay together and enjoy the weekend.

Here is a cute video of Megan doing a "magic trick" with a disappearing ice cube.