Monday Catch up...

Wow, I'm a bad blogger, aren't I? I just got home from the gym (yeah me) and I thought I better log on and update. Tomorrow night is the mid-Autumn festival, where we will eat round foods and talk about ancestors and stare at the moon with Emma and talk about her other life. I've invited up a girlfriend who just returned from China this summer with her daughter to share in the fun.
We took the train to Portland this weekend for the day. It was a nice trip, and we took the streetcar downtown and then the tube out to the zoo. After the zoo we went to lunch downtown and then I went to Mecca (ops, I mean Nordstroms) and I fondled $600 pumps and settled for a mini-makeover in the makeup department. They were having a 'makeup event' so it was fun.
We also went and spent some time in the Classical Chinese Garden, it was lovely. here was a wedding there and it was really beautiful. We took lots of photos of the kids in the beautiful landscaping.
I'm down 15 pounds (more yeah for me) So far so good. Skinny jeans here I come!

Remodeling

I've been pretty scarce lately, I know. I thought I aught to let you all in on a little secret. I've started remodeling myself. Doesn't that sound simply lovely. At 41 it finally occurred to me that I've let myself go. I've put so much effort into my family and friends and work and what not, that I haven't spent much time on me.
So two weeks ago I started a medically supervised weight loss plan. Today I went to the gym for the first time since I can't remember when. So far I've lost 11 pounds! I know it's all water but I'm encouraged that the diet is easy enough to follow and reasonable. You eat 7 times a day. Six of those times are small portioned 'snacks' and the 7th is a full meal with at least 20 grams of protien.
I also dyed my hair back to it's original color, and put some effort into the little things I've been neglecting. Funny how life gets away from you and you don't pluck, primp and do all the little things that make you feel like a girl.
Just in case you think I've totally forgotten how to be the self-sacrificing woman, I've also signed on to volunteer at the kid's kindergarten every couple of weeks :) Some things never change!
I'll try to be more consistent in my writings. Today I was super woman at lunch and didn't get a chance to post on my blog. Tomorrow is officially the anniversary of when we met Emma. Today I wrote a letter to Emma's foster parents and sent it to be translated. I'm scooting under the wire, but the service will get it translated and send it and a box of Moon Cakes to her foster parents late next week in honor of the Mid-Autumn Festival. It is traditional to send moon cakes during that time, and I'm glad to do it. I hope that they will again write back and reveal a little more about Emma's time right before she came to be with our family.

A year of Emma

Well we are coming up on a year now that Emma has been with us - I've been playing with making a slide show to show how much she has changed. I need it to remind myself - sometimes I don't realize what a year can do! Enjoy!

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

First Day of School

Well today was a big day at our household - the first day of Kindergarten! DH, being the amazing man that he is, took off at 10am, and drove the 45 miles home so he could go with me to take the kids to their class at 11:30.
I think that the thing that strikes me the most is how my perspective has changed over the years. Five years ago I couldn't imagine that my babies would ever do anything other then lay there crying and not being able to communicate. Now they are in public school!
I'll post pictures later, when we get them off the camera. I did want to share one little vignette though about the day. After we dropped the kids off I came home and had lunch. Nanny and Emma had gone downstairs, and I could hear them. Emma, being only 2-1/2, has to wait a few years for school but she was pretending to be going today. She was packing her backpack full of stuff. Nanny was doing a great job of playing along.
when I went downstairs I found Emma, still fully dressed with a t-shirt and pants. On top of this she had applied a tinkerbell constume and wings, and her Elmo backpack which barely shut. She had stuffed in a wide array of toys and goodies so she would be 'ready' for school.
All my worries about how she would take being alone with the Nanny were unfounded. She was happy as a clam going to her own pretend school.

Labor Day Weekend in California

This weekend is a big holiday in the US - Labor Day. We took our one last quick jaunt down to California before the kids start school and headed to our family in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Our family has a condo with a deep water dock, as they are in the process of restoring a boat so that they can go out on the high seas. Right now the boat is beautiful on the outside but needs some finishing on the inside. They have christened it 'the Rubber Ducky' and it is going to sail in a couple of years.

We drove down on Friday, and Saturday we swam and played around their condo. It was HOT.
Sunday we braved BART and rode into the city. The Bay Bridge was closed for repairs and so everyone else was riding BART too - it was crowded! We went to China town. I had always wanted to go, and I needed Moon Cakes in order to celebrate the Autumn Festival. I've been mulling over September in general in my mind, as we are also coming up on the one year anniversary of getting Emma. Anyway, I suspect we'll have a joint celebration of the Autumn Festival and the deay Emma came to be with us. Although it was a terrific day for us, it was a pretty hard sad day for her so celebrating the AF seems smart. Basically AF is a time for families, where everyone goes out and looks at the full moon and thinks of their loved ones. It seems appropriate somehow.
While we were in Chinatown we stumbled across a playground just off on the corner. We stopped to let the kids run off some steam. The playground was full of asian kids, and one woman approached me. She was from China and had adopted her 7 year old from China 5 years ago. She was having nice memories of her own child watching Emma play.
We had some other excitement this weekend as well. We have noticed over the last year that Emma has trouble with how dry our climate is compared to China. This weekend we went somewhere even drier, and boy did she let us know. When Emma hits a dry warm climate, she gets nosebleeds. Not just any old nosebleeds either, but big scary ones at night. They wake her up and she feels like she is in some kind of terrible horror movie. We had one every day we were in California, and our poor family had more sheets to wash then I would have ever imagined. Of course the poor cousins we were staying with had never seen anything like it either, so we'd have 5 kids in our room, one covered in blood and 4 looking scared or crying. Weee.
Other then that our trip was fantastic!
Here are some pics of the weekend for your enjoyment...