Happy New Year!

It's the Year of the Pig . . . and we've been celebrating all week long! Geesh, in China, they celebrate the new year for an entire week - and so we decided to stretch our celebration out over this past week as well! :)
We started out by visiting Chinatown in San Francisco last Monday. We loaded up the SUV, packed water bottles, a stroller and lots and lots of jackets and headed 2 hours north. We made it to SF before noon and soon realized that we would need to shed most of our layers - it was a beautiful day! The streets of Chinatown were littered with red paper scraps - leftovers from firecrackers the previous night. We wandered in and out of shops, ate lunch, even watched a traditional "lion dance" go up and down the street. It was just as we had imagined and hoped! Katie seemed totally content and unimpressed were her "familiar" surroundings. As long as we kept popping in fortune cookie rejects purchased at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory - we were good to go!

Kelsey and Emily completely enjoyed their first Cable Car ride . . . Kelsey even stood on the outside while we were traveling across town! :) As we would climb up a hill, Emily would remind me, "make sure you hold your hands up when we go down!" And sure enough, as we headed down a hill, up her hands would go - just as if we were on a roller coaster! Fun stuff! I don't really have great pics from the day . . . I decided I would just sit back and enjoy that day, rather than watching from behind a camera. I'm glad I did!

Today we headed down to Seaside to celebrate the New Year with other families with children from China. We've been meaning to connect with this group of adoptive parents, but just haven't made the time to do so - until now! We all met at a Chinese restaurant and the chaos ensued! :) It was great to reconnect with my friend Shannon, who brought her daughter home through All God's Children, as well. Shannon and her family are now getting closer to bringing home their next daughter, Phoebe, from China! We also met tons of great families - seriously - everyone was incredibly friendly and welcoming and it was so amazing to see so many beautiful China daughters!

One of the highlights of the day was meeting Stacey and her family - including cutie patootie Ryleigh from China! Stacey emailed me early on in our paperchase for Katie and we've emailed off and on since then. They only live 45 minutes away, but again, we've just never made a big enough effort to meet them - until today! I'd post pics of Katie and Ryleigh together - but trust me - Katie was not cooperative!

And that brings me to this . . .
you know how in every crowd, at every social function, there's always that one child. You know what I mean - that child who is crying and clingy and whiney and obstinate and annoying. Well guess what?! That child is our child. It's Katie. I'm serious. I'm thinking Katie just doesn't like a crowd, but if I heard it once, I heard it a thousand times today, "Boy, Katie sure does have attitude, doesn't she?!" Um, yes. You could say that. Thankfully we also heard, "Oh, Katie is so cute!" and "Oh, she sure does love her Mommy, doesn't she?" Those words helped. But not so much when your kiddo is screaming about being fed by a fork instead of a spoon and refuses white cake because she sees her sister eating chocolate. Attitude. And opinions. Lots of them.

Good thing she's so cute . . . as you'll soon see:

And lest you forget we have THREE super cute kids . . . for your viewing pleasure:

Comments

[BeckyB]

Those are awesome pics - yes, they are all beautiful girls!! We had a great time at our Chinese New Year Event as well - too much fun!!!

[Stacey]

It was so FUN meeting you all yesterday!!! Your Katie is absolutely adorable!!

Your older girls are such great big sisters...really so wonderful to see all of your girls together!!!!

P/S Don't forget that that was a HUGE group of strangers and Katie was the youngest there!!!!

[Jenny]

AWWWWW, no fair. Next time you have to come down to LA. : ) They look beautiful!