This has been a bit of a running joke between Tina and me for the last week or so. Kai and Shen are truly the best of friends and love to be and play with one another. This does not mean their relationship is devoid of sibling rivalry. Shen is always vigilant to make certain he gets to have or do anything Kai might be having or doing. A constant refrain of Shen's is, "Me Too!" He says it so much that we have started calling him "Shentoo-Metoo". By being his taller, somewhat fussy devoted companion, Kai became "Kai-Threepio".

This only took us a year to accomplish. We began the process of trying to get some speech help for Kai last spring. The district did qualify him for participation in their developmental preschool program, but not for speech delays. The speech therapist insisted his early exposure to Mandarin made it impossible for her to accurately evaluate his speech development. After arguing with her at three different meetings over the course of the year, we had finally had enough and went over her head.

It turns out that there are standard measures she was able to administer to Kai, and according to these tools he does qualify for assistance. At the meeting where we reviewed this with the district "team" it was almost painful to watch the way she was handled by her boss. The way they made her go over the paperwork with us you would think she was a student-teacher on the verge of flunking out. I almost felt bad for her, but it didn't have to go down this way. She could have made some effort at cooperating with us long before it came to this. I have a feeling we aren't the first ones to have a difficult time dealing with this person.

My remaining complaint at this point is that after fighting for a year to get Kai the help he needs, he will not actually start receiving service until next fall. At my meeting with the Assistant Director of Special Education over a month ago I complained loudly that this was how it was going to play out. She acted truly hurt and insulted that I would even dream of suggesting the district might drag its heels until the very end of the year on this. And what is the schedule now? We meet to review and approve Kai's Individual Education Plan on June 10th. His last day of school is June 12th. Yeah, what was I thinking?

Today I was playing around in Google Earth - looking at the satellite photos of the places Kai and Shen used to live in China. I was looking down at the roof of the hotel we stayed at in Baoding last summer and started clicking around on other photo links nearby. A block away I found this photo...


The first night we landed in China on our trip to adopt Shen, our guide Bob (who helped us adopt Kai two years earlier) took us to this restaurant for dinner. It's themed after the Monkey King's mountain home. Unfortunately we didn't bring our camera with us that night so we didn't get any pictures of the restaurant. Consequently, I was very pleased to find this photo online. You can click on the photo above to go to the Panoramio.com website.

This is a movie that Cameron made around the same time as the other ones I've posted. He put it together out of random clips he found on the camera that Ben had shot with his friends Christian and Cody.

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We're going a bit nostalgic as we've been digging through the extensive digital archives here at Stinky Mouse Home Office and have found a number of gems we dearly love and want to see circulated a bit more widely. This first little clip we're putting up is a home video montage of our family gathering over the 4th of July 2003 that was shot and edited by our son Cameron, he was 15 at the time. Watching this I can hardly believe this was only five years ago. There's a line in the song he used for the video that goes, "Time goes flying by!" And That Is So True. I can't believe how much these kids have grown up since this was made.



The music is a song called "Happy" by a punk band called Goldfinger. One of my favorite memories is of taking Cam and Ben up to Vancouver on a beautiful Father's Day afternoon that year to see this band perform at a club in Vancouver. Man, Time Goes flying By!