Merry Christmas!!!

Happy 4th Birthday HaiYang

Bananna split for breakfast??? Why not?

Christmas Eve and Christmas morning were a blast!!! Everyone including Haiyang jumped in and immediately started ripping open their gifts, it really takes much longer to wrap than to unwrap. Haiyang finished and asked for more, haha. Lucky for her, her B. Day is the 26th so she had more to open the next morning. We celebrated her day Christmas evening with a Dora cake (of course) which she loved, every morning she asks for "happy birthday to you" meaning cake. Her speech is really coming along, it is amazing how much she has picked up the last few weeks, making our communication much better!!

Maybe a little late but I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and are enjoying the holidays. We are having much fun here. Haiyang enjoyed decorating cookies and playing in the 1st snow, she LOVED it!!!!

I was able to join Tessie for her Christmas party at school, it was fun to see her with her classmates and meet her new friends. Tessie has a fantastic teacher this year and a small class with a nice group of kids.

December Fun!!!!

This is my girls uniform. She has so many adorable outfits to pick from and this is what she wants to wear, don't you love the shoes?

Lucie's Christmas recital, she played "Frosty the Snowman" and did an excellent job.

We really packed alot of fun into last weekend. We also had an Ice Skating Party with TRFCC, we went to the PPG Rink - so much fun!!!! If you live in PGH and you have never done this you must do so this winter, so very festive. Lucie and I were holding our own on the ice and Tessie deserves a medal for her effort, she may have spent more time down than she did up but she had a blast and was a really good sport about it. Haiyang maybe didn't have the best time but she did enjoy looking at all the ginger bread houses on display.

So we headed out to "cut down" the Christmas Tree. This is our 5th live tree and I believe the 4th year of cutting our own tree, Lucie LOVES it!!!! I thought of going artificial, to make things a little easier this year, but L.Q. was having no part of that. We go to a tree farm that takes you out on a sort of hay-ride and you get to chop your own tree. So we set out to find the perfect tree, we have had some crazy trees, the 1st year I was super excited myself and we ended up with an insanely huge tree that of course fell over and broke the tree stand, my Dad built us a tree stand that could hold the White House tree, we will never have a tree fall again. One year the tree was 1/2 dead inside, it had been covered in snow when we chose it. Another year it had an odd trunk that branched out into two at the top. But this year we have the BEST TREE EVER!!!! Perfect!!! Well the decorating may not be but the tree is super!!

Yep that is my man chopping us a tree. We forget that Haiyang doesn't always get what we are doing so it surprised us that she wasn't having fun on the tree trip. Then it occurred to us that she probably thought we were crazy! She did enjoy the hot chocolate and cookie at the end and loved helping me with the lights and hanging ornamants.

19 Day 'til Christmas

Amazing how much fun uncooked pasta and water can be.

Here are a couple pictures from this past week. Things are continuing to move along, it gets a little better each day, not to say we don't still have tough moments (days) but it is getting a bit easier. And as the picture above shows, Tessie and Haiyang are becoming better friends, of course it helps when HaiYang is in the mood to do what Tessie wants to do - haha.

HaiYang is continuing to pick up more and more words and communication has improved greatly. It is fun to hear her speak English and we can tell she is quite pleased with herself as she learns more words and phrases. She is starting to calm down some but I have a feeling she is just going to be one of those really active kids. She rarely stops moving and gets into everything although she is beginning to learn that some things are not for her to get in, it doesn't really stop her it just slows her down :-). Fortunately Lucie and Tessie are very good at letting me know when she is doing something she shouldn't. Actually Tessie is VERY good at this.

Christmas is going to be super fun, she loves all of the decorations and really enjoyed decorating the tree we put up in the dining room. Next weekend we are heading out to cut down the "family tree", I am sure she'll get a huge kick out of that. We also have an ice skating party at the PPG Rink with TRFCC (Three River Families with Children from China), I know she love all the decorations and trees there will be to see there. Now if I could just get my shopping and decorating done!