I can't say that we accomplished everything we had hoped to this last year, but overall I'd say there's no regrets here at the Chou Chou Shu Head Office and we're looking foreword to 2007! After-all, that's what New Year celebrations are all about; we all get to start over fresh. We've got a brand new calendar full of open boxes waiting to be filled in with new plans, new hopes and new dreams!
We've made a few resolutions - I won't post them here, as they're mostly the same ones we made last year, and the year before. Still it's nice to set some goals.
So tonight we plan on partying it up; we'll raise our glasses both to the highlights of 2006, and to our Great Expectations for 2007.

And so we close 2006 with a few choice quotes lifted off the web, which we offer up to you...

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. ~ Lord Alfred Tennyson

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing. ~ Abraham Lincoln

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Kai loves getting his hair cut. Any talk about haircuts gets him quite excited. I make a point of not saying the word "haircut" in front of him unless we are on our way out the door to get one, as it's like saying "go for a walk" in the presence of some dogs.

It took some time after he first came home with us for his hair to normalize. In China he had received a poorly executed traditional boy head shave/sort of mohawk thing that they had let grow out a bit before we arrived. So for the first few months with us he had a jaggedy front heavy sort of "style" going. When we talked about getting that evened up his older brother Ben (who has very strong opinions about how things should be) balked at the idea. "That would take away his HuiHui-ness." Ben argued. So we did our best for awhile to keep the front somewhat uneven. As his hair has thickened and continued to grow out this has become more difficult, and the last time we went for a haircut (just before his birthday) he ended up with a pretty straight set of bangs across his forehead. I thought that the best solution would be to just get the whole top/front cut a lot shorter next time, but Kai was able to fix things on his own...

Tina Someone left our barber scissors out in the bathroom and he found them...

I think it really gives him back a big dose of "HuiHui-ness".

Donna's Family FotoFun Friday Challenge #10 is "PigTails". When I first read that I thought, "This is discrimination!" How can our SON be in this week's challenge? Then I read Donna's fine print and saw that she provided an alternate theme of "Attitude", as she felt that pigtails seemed to up the 'tude her daughters put out. So I thought I could probably come up with something to fit that. Then this morning Kai wanted Tina to put her hair clips in his hair. They were playing around with that and then Tina managed to produce the above hairstyle.

And I think Donna's right about the affect of pigtails on the child's attitude!

Kai's Birthday isn't until Wednesday, but we celebrated Sunday with family and friends. I think this photo pretty well shows his level of pleasure over the presence of four candles on a cake! He has been involved a bit in the planning of the event. He got to go with Tina to buy the Curious George decorations and party favors, and has been talking about his "Curious George Party" and "blowing candles" for a week now.

We had struggled a bit with how to do this party. Part of us wanted a Huge Celebration for him, it's so easy to get carried away with these things. But we also didn't want an overwhelming event. Birthday parties can be intense for young kids, so we decided to reign it in pretty small. We had Kai's aunt Kris and Uncle Mark and his cousins Devon and Taylor come up with Gramma O, and we invited Kai's good friend Mimi and her two big sisters and mom and dad. This was really a perfect sized gathering. We had lots of food out and people had fun visiting. There weren't too many presents, so Kai could get through the unwrapping without falling too much into that "harvesting" behavior. Gramma scored with the most popular gift - a "Sit and Spin". Kai is one of those kids who loves to spin, and there are a couple of these at his pre-school, so he was thrilled to have one of his own. For some reason Playskool thought this toy needed to be "updated" with flashing lights and annoying electronic music. Sorry Gramma, we pulled the batteries, but Kai is still enjoying it.

Cutest moment at the party:
our family has a tradition of giving the birthday child their age in $1 bills. So Kai's cards from us, his aunt and uncle, and grandmother all had dollar bills in them. As Kai opened the cards Mimi collected the money and put it into her pocket. Mimi's mom reminded her that during the engagement Kai's money is still his.

These are currently Kai's favorite jammies. They have snowmen on them, they have footies, they're soft. Did I mention they have snowmen on them? We shot this picture the other night when we had just put up the tree. We are working on trying to get Kai to "pose" for pictures. I think this took about 30 clicks. Our miserably cheap, slow digital "camera" is not well suited to the general wiggly nature of a 3 year old, even when they're trying to cooperate.

*Thanks to Double-Happiness for the photo topic idea!

Our Christmas Tree is finally up! What a busy weekend this has been, and it doesn't look like a boring one is on the horizon any time soon either. Saturday morning we started by going to a craft party with a local play-group for children adopted from China. It was a small gathering with about 10 kids there. Kai was the only boy, but his friend Mimi was there. We met some families we didn't know, and saw some we did, including the other local family from our agency that was in China with us. A woman from the Chinese language school was there and we talked with her about getting Kai enrolled for the spring, since he'll be four then.

At noon we headed across town to go the the Waldorf School's Holiday Faire. We had a great time there even though it had started to rain pretty hard. We were laughing at one point as we stood in the rain waiting to get into the "Enchanted Gnome Woodland". The gnomes had gone a bit power-mad and were not allowing anyone in. So there were a dozen or so people queued up in the rain trying to get in. Finally a taller gnome supervisor persuaded the underground workers to admit a few of us. We toured their mine, dug for treasure (found some!) and visited their tidy little home where they shared some sliced apples with us. This little gnome looks suspiciously like Kai's neighbor Susannah...

We had soup, visited the Snow Queen, saw a beautiful puppet story, did a little shopping, played on the playground and got to look at the kindergarten classrooms. Kai had a great time and went all day without a nap.

On Sunday we got up early and went out to breakfast with Kai and Ben on our way to cut down a Christmas tree. Ben was very quiet all morning, when he did talk it was about cars he wants. I would almost have thought he was being dragged along, except that he has very strong opinions about what kind of tree we need. Kai seemed somewhat puzzled by our mission and wasn't too sure about what we were after. When asked which tree he wanted he selected a baby tree that made Charlie Brown's look good, so we stopped asking for his input, and really, Ben's was enough. We chased back and forth across the rows looking for the perfect tree. Somehow, the "perfect" ones always seem to be about 3 feet taller than we can accommodate, but we finally came to consensus and made a selection. Ben did the honors of sawing it down and we headed back.

Later while Kai napped Tina got the tree into the house. He was quite amazed by this when he got up and immediately went into "helper" mode. He thoroughly enjoyed going through the ornaments and helping to hang them on the tree.


It was a little sad not having Cam along with us this year to get the tree, but he has moved out, and was working this morning as well. He and his girlfriend Brittni came for dinner this evening so they got to see the tree and we had a nice visit with them. Before bedtime we turned out all the lights except the tree which Kai really enjoyed. I don't know if he really remembers any of Christmas last year. He had been home with us for less than three months, and was dealing with so many new things. This year he is really enjoying all of it.

We found a really fun site through one of our favorite discussion forums. It lets you put your photo and voice on a dancing elf. Click on the picture to see our results! Go on, click it - I promise it will make you smile!

(That's Kai saying "Ho, Ho, Ho!" but they tweak it to make it more elf-like.)

I got this photo ready for the blog a couple weeks ago, but then it was Thanksgiving, and then it snowed, and then NoBloPoMo ended and I took my little break. But this is such a great picture I had to post it.
Tina managed to get this with our "camera". Mimi has been on the blog a lot with Kai, because they are such great friends. She is 13 months younger than Kai, but they are on par with one another in many areas. Kai has started to get taller than Mimi, but Mimi's language is more sophisticated.
They are in pre-school together 2 mornings a week and this has really strengthened their relationship. Tina caught this shot when their pre-school class visited the local children's museum. The two of them were playing in one of the environment displays, and when Tina asked to take their picture Kai was being too wiggly, so Mimi just grabbed him! Do they look like good friends to you?

Whatcom Hills Waldorf School's Holiday Faire is this Saturday!
I stole this cool picture out of the school newsletter, and I see that it is drawn by our friend Carol Hewitt.
This is a great picture for Holiday Faire, as it really is about gnomes kicking it up.
We love this school. Both Cam and Ben are alumni, and have fond memories of their time there. The Holiday Faire was our first introduction to the school back, I think, when Cam was only 3! We certainly plan on being there this weekend, hanging out with the gnomes, and I'll probably post about it again, but I thought it would be good to give them a shout out just in case some Bellinghamsters hit the blog before then to remind them about it.

Kai's cousin Caitlin emailed this photo to me the other day, asking if I could tell her what it was. It took me a little time searching, but I found the answer to her question. Do you know what it means? Leave your answer in the comments and I'll confirm the correct answers later this week.

Wow, I thought I wasn't going to do this. But if I didn't post today, what would happen to my routine? And I am nothing if I'm not about my routine. So here we go... The First Post of December. I always find the first post of the month a bit sad as it makes all the great posts from last month roll off into the archives and all that hard work is no longer immediately visible. This month that's especially annoying as it was the first time I've posted every day in a row for that many days.
On the plus side I get to add this cool badge to the sidebar:

It's a nice little reminder of how good I felt yesterday seeing all 30 posts in a row on here. I'd like to see how it feels to have that not be such an amazing thing. After all, my favorite blogs to read are the ones that are usually updated daily.

I've been back to work the last two days, but It's been a fun week being home with Kai and Tina because of the snow. Kai seems to really be making some developmental steps. His vocabulary is expanding quite rapidly - pronunciation is still pretty rough, but getting better. And he's using some "new" toys. While I've been typing this he's sitting on the couch next to me with a shape sorter box, and he's really got the hang of it. He got this toy as a gift a year ago and really had no idea what to do with it. Earlier this evening he and I spent about a half hour with play-dough. He loves this stuff now, which is also fun to see as a year ago he was literally afraid of the stuff.

So that's it, my first post of December. Is there another full month of posts in me? Stay tooned and find out!