Alton 18 months

I had Alton in for his18 month well child check a couple of weeks ago. He actually was just turning 19 months when I took him in. Somehow along the line we got behind by a month and it has just stayed that way. I figure since he was a month premature, it means we're right on time, right?:) Well anywho, the big news is he is growing like a champ! He went from 11th percentile for height up to 21st percentile! Yay! He hovers around 50th for weight every time I take him in and that stayed the same. He still doesn't say much as far as words. He says 'mama' but not just for me. He calls me and John both mama. His other only consistent word is he calls Amber 'baa'. I've decided to go ahead and set up a speech evaluation for him through the Birth to 3 program. I made the phone call early last week and am in the process of working on the scheduling of it with our B to 3 coordinator. Alton may or may not qualify, but I just want to get some professional input either way because if he could use some therepy we should get started on it sooner than later. I've been taking tons of cute pictures of Alton to try to score some perfect ones to get ready for our next post placement report. He still LOVES tractors!

Look! I made a tractor train!

I can drive 2 at once!

Daddy dressed me in bibs today and I'm looking too stinkin cute!

Wait a minute, I see something over there that I haven't tried destoying yet!

If sissy can do it, then so can I!

Faster Ena! Faster!

I love my 4 wheeler almost as much as I love tractors:)

Pumpkin gutting:)

One of Athena's most favorite activities ever is gutting pumpkins. From the minute pumpkins are brought home all she can think about is when she gets to gut them and play with the guts. I would dare to say she looks forward to it as much as, if not more than Santa Clause coming, Easter Bunny coming and even her own birthday. We got some awesome pumpkins last weekend from our friends' very prolific pumpkin patch. (thanks guys!) Every night when I pick her up from daycare she asks if we could gut a pumpkin tonight. I've held her off all week because our weeknights are so short on time and we should wait until the weekend. Smart little thing asked me what day it was when I picked her up today and when I told her it was Friday, she knows Friday is a 'stay up late' night and therefor is part of the weekend! We got started with the cutting and gutting the minute we got home:)

We collect the seeds for roasting, though there were hardly any in this pumpkin for some reason. ps-don't you love her new haircut! It's all layered and stacked up the back and so cute on her. So easy to comb and go in the morning too. I love it!

This one's for you Katie:) We're working on our language and vocabulary development. Saying what the parts of the pumpkin are. Here she is showing off a piece of the pumpkin 'flesh'.
Realy getting into it with both hands.
She drew the face on with a marker, then I cut it out.
It was a little windy and cold when we went outside to light it so she ran back in to get her blankie to keep her warm while I snapped about a zillion pictures of her and her new pumpkin friend 'Eleanor'.
Good night Eleanor!

Crayon snack for 4K:)

We made these cute edible crayon snacks for Athena's treat day at school. I got the idea from the Our Best Bites blog over on my favorites blogs list.
First you cut pretzel logs in half and dunk each end in colored white chocolate. The Wilton brand is called 'candy melts'.

I printed these sheets for the wrappers from that blog too.

Super fun:)

Mama mobile number 2! Lets try this again:)

Now that all of the dust has settled from my car accident we finally had the time to do some car shopping and buy a new mini van to replace the one that I totaled. I loved my old mini van. We bought it used with only 23K miles and got so many awesome options on it that we never would have spent the money to get on a new one. I would have happily drove it into it's ripe old age for the next 10 years. But, many things in life are out of our hands and sometimes you just need to take the hand dealt to you and move forward;) My new mini van is definitely awesome too:) I love the color (charcoal dark grey that shimmers in the sunlight and looks black at night with chrome trim) It is a brand new 2011 and I think we got a pretty decent deal on it because it's a model year end clearance car since the 2012 models are already on the lots. It also has some pretty neat/different features that my old one didn't have and after driving it for just one day, I love this one now too:) So, here is my second smokin' hot mama mobile after laying my first one to rest after just one year.

Here's Alton having fun coloring with crayons:) The fun of coloring lasted for about 1 minute!
After that he decided to pull an all-boy-Alton move and destroy the paper & throw it. I tell ya, after reading the book Gender Matters (a good read that I recommend to any parent) and raising both a boy and a girl there is no doubt in my mind that there are definitely innate personality differences in boys and girls that comes from their gender regardless of how they are raised/parented. This kid is a trip after raising only a girl so far:)

Ena's first day of 4K!

Athena had her first day of 4K today:) She was beyond excited this morning and let me tell you she is beyond tired tonight!! It's a district run 4K program, but it is physicaly housed in the private preschools in town because of space/room issues. We requested her current preschool/ daycare as her 4K location and got our request. I can still drop her (and Alton) off at 7:00 and pick her up at about 4:30/5:00 like usual. They simply walk her down the hall to the 4K room when the time comes and pick her up to walk her back when 4K is over. She is in the afternoon session which I think she will really benefit from because she recieves her regular preschool in the morning and then district 4K in the afternoon. Had she gotten the morning session, she would have district 4K in the morning, then return to preschool/daycare in the afternoon just in time to eat lunch and have a 2 hour nap. The way it is now, she gets twice as much school but no more nap. That's why she is so very tired tonight, but we'll slowly bump up her bedtime little by little each night to make up for it:) She said everything went great and came home very excited about her first day:)

Got cucumbers?

If you have a garden full of cucumbers you're looking to use up, make this dip immediately! Even if you don't have a garden full of cucumbers, run to the grocery store to get the ingredients and still make it:) It is delicious. It's like a cross between dill dip and the yummy cucumber sauce you get with gyros. I actually don't have any cucumbers in my own garden, but we have several friends who do, so we have had a steady flow of cucumbers being given to us and many of them have gone into batches of this dip. These are the only ingredients you need, plus salt-100% all natural:)

16 oz. container sour cream, 16 oz container plain non-fat greek yogurt, 2 large cucumbers, a big bunch of dill, one bunch of green onions, and salt.

Directions

1. Peel, scoop the seeds out from and dice the cucumbers into tiny pieces. Place them in a bowl, heavily salt them, and set aside. The salt draws out the extra water in them so the dip doesn't get water and also any bitterness they may have.

2. Combine the sour cream and yogurt in a large bowl.

3. Finely chop the dill to make 3 heaping tablespoons and add to the sour cream mixture. The large bunch of dill in the picture was the perfect amount.

4. Finely shop the green onions and add to the bowl.

5. Put the chopped, seeded, salted cucumbers in a mesh strainer and rinse them very well to get all of the extra salt off. Next place them on a dry, clean kitchen towel, bring the edges up to form a pouch around them and wring them out over the sink as hard as you can. Water will come gushing out! After they are wrung out of all excess moisture, add them to the dip.

6. Stir it all together and then add salt to taste.

The dip is really good with veggies, pita chips, grainy tortilla chips and regular chips. This makes a huge batch if you make the whole recipe. I made it for a lunch party with about 10 people and still had a good amount of leftovers. We used some of the leftovers in bacon chicken wraps-Yum!! You can halve it too if you don't have any events coming up with a large crowd to help you eat it up.

Post Placement

People are quite often surprised to learn that there is yet more paperwork that needs to be done after you have traveled to adopt your child and bring him/her home. It's definitely not the shear amount of paperwork that you do leading up to the adoption, but it's a decent amount. In the state of WI where we live, we have post placement paperwork for 6 months after receiving the child as per the state. We need to fill out a small questionnaire/report each month for six months as well as have our doctor fill out a form each and every time the child visits a doctor for any reason during those first 6 months whether it's for an illness or simply a check up. We also need to meet with our social worker to discuss how things are going at month 3 and month 6. At this time, after the 6 months have passed, the social worker helps us to fill out the correct forms and use all of the information she has gathered from the reports and meetings from the last 6 months to apply for adoption finalization (re-adoption) in the state of Wisconsin. Some people choose not to do this because the adoption is fully legal and binding from the court system in Colombia so it's not really necessary as far as the adoption process goes. We always choose to do it though because there are benefits. The biggest benefit is that the child will be issued a Wisconsin recognition of birth certificate. Though it may seem silly to get this when the child was not in fact born in Wisconsin, it just makes things a lot more convenient down the road. When we or our kids need a new copy of their birth certificate for any reason (register for school, apply for marriage license, etc...) it's a heck of a lot easier for us to go to our county court house to get a new copy then to try to get one from the county they were born in in Colombia. It also makes the application for a social security number down the road a lot easier too and thus applying for a US passport down the road as well.
Now there is also separate post placement paperwork requirements for Colombia in addition to the Wisconsin requirements. For Colombia there is a longer report/questionnaire to be filled out every 3 months for 18 months. Along with this report they also request 5 pictures of the child only (no other family members) to show that the child is growing and doing well. Again the adoption is in no way hinging on these reports. The adoption is legal and binding from the court system in Colombia once we singed sentencia. The main reason for the reports back to Colombia is that the orphanage staff and directors truly care about, love and have genuine concern for all of the kids and really do want to see how they are doing:) I also think there is some element of them reporting to the ICBF officials about how the children they placed are doing in order to keep their license/ability to maintain an adoption program, though I don't know the specifics. The following are the photos I choose to send for Altons 6 month post placement:) Handsome little man!


After the 18 months of post placement report are done, you don't need to maintain any further contact if you don't wish to. I do though. I still send information back to the orphange once a year for Athena and will for Alton. Just a photograph and a short letter saying how she's doing-what types of things she likes, activities she's involved in, how she's developing. I figure after the gift of family that they have given us, it's the least we can do to let them know that the kids are amazing and doing wonderful:)