Decorating a different kind of Tree

Aunt Trudy and Uncle Todd sent us a cool gift this year. (Thank you for the cool gift!) They sent us a pre-baked gingerbread tree. All we had to do was decorate and eat it. We had our nieces over because they just had a new baby brother and he was in the hospital still and they helped us decorate.We started out stacking the tree using frosting glue in between the layers. Lance of course just wanted to eat without decorating.Then they each got a chance to put some frosting on the tree. We had green and white for the snow. Then they put candies on it (and some in their mouths).

The finished product. It looks just a little different than the picture on the box:)

Everyone posing and getting ready to dig in. The pieces at the top were pretty small, but you got a lot of candy with those pieces. In the end it evened out.

Chowing down on the tree. They each got to eat one cookie from the tree. Yum, yum, worth the effort!!! I bought us a Gingerbread house to make before I knew about the tree, I guess we'll do that next week!

Finally decorated the tree

Today we finally got around to decorating the Christmas tree. My dad took me to buy the tree on Thurs. (it was supposed to be the only warm day of the week, but the 34 degrees were chilled by the wind and it was really cold!) Ryan and the boys set the tree up on Thurs. night and we finally got around to decorating today. We had to push it in a corner this year because I didn't want to rearrange my entire living room for one week just to see all sides of a tree.

Liam loves looking at each ornament while he puts them on the tree. We have a tradition of buying 3 ornaments each year. The boys get to choose one they each want and then we buy a Star Wars family one. The Star Wars ornaments now out number the others and that is a sore spot with me now. We no longer have a Christmas tree, we have a Star Wars tree. I even left about 10 Star Wars ornaments off this year (due to space restraints of course).

Lance playing violin

Grandpa just sent us this and it is great. Lance gave the concert for them last August when they were here visiting. Lance started playing violin Aug. 2006 and has really taken to it.

Wordless Wednesday

I am going to copy my friend Amy's blog and start a wordless Wednesday post. Every week she puts up a picture from the week without caption to show a little about what happened in their world that week. There is just a short title to help you understand the picture. I love the idea because I always mean to blog, but often run out of time. I will introduce my first picture...(I have a hard time not talking, we'll see if I can do wordless Wednesday) Liam wanted to be a photographer this past week and tried out our camera.

I hate winter!!

Last Saturday (Dec.1st) it snowed, a lot. I didn't blog about it because I wanted to take a picture of the boys playing in the snow for the blog. Then it snowed again on Tuesday, a lot. I still have no pictures of the boys playing in it. A week and a half has gone by with a lot of snow on the ground and we still have no pictures because....it is sooooo cold here! I don't know what I hate more the snow or the cold. The high yesterday was 11 above, I don't know what the windchill was, but it was lower than 11 degrees. Lance has been dying to play in the snow, so he went out with his friend for a whole half hour before they were frozen popsicles. I know for you true Minnesotans this is nothing, but I hate it. I would move to CA if Ryan would let me:) The only picture I have is of Ryan snow blowing (by himself). I know it 's not that bad, I could just do without it.

Christmas Party

Today we had a great time, we went to a Filipino Christmas party. We were welcomed by two families when we got there. One family I met on line from my Yahoo Group of people adopting from the Philippines and the other family we know from the boys' school. There was constant action the entire time and we had fun. They started the program with a children's choir singing songs in English. Liam was invited up and ran up there without a second thought, wish we had pictures to share, but we didn't bring our camera.
After that they had an adult choir caroling songs in Tagalog. Next, there was a little play about how Christmas is celebrated in the Philippines, the boys' friends from school were both in the little play. In between all of the action they gave away raffle drawing prizes and door prizes. Ryan bought a raffle ticket and signed us both up for the door prizes. At one point they called Ryan's name for the raffle and Liam picked the winning envelope. They had different money amounts in the envelopes, mostly $5 bills. Liam picked a lucky one with a check for $50, that is money towards the adoption! It is so meant to be. Later when they served this huge lunch we were in line and my name was called I won a door prize of "desert plates". We were feeling lucky, that was for sure. We had a great time meeting so many new people and we are looking forward to attending again next year.

Adoption Update

I just got a call from our adoption agency and they have received all of our paperwork for our dossier and it looks complete. All we are missing is our psych eval report. We have our appointment with our psychologist this Sat. then he will take a week to write the report. We should be ready to mail in our dossier to the Philippines right before Christmas. Then it will sit at ICAB (Philippines Inter Country Adoption Board) for a few weeks. Hopefully we will have an approval from ICAB around Feb.1st. After our approval, we sit in a pile waiting to be matched with our children.

What this all means to me is that I am no longer responsible for filling our paperwork, gathering documents or requesting letters from others. In other words, I'm free for a bit.