Present Overload

Well, as usual, my parents have overdone themselves again. They tend to go a little overboard with the Christmas presents. They have six grand kids. This year they got each grand kid nine presents. Take into account that a lot of the presents are clothing and it isn't as bad as it seems. Still, it does seem excessive.

All in all, our Christmas was very nice. We stuck by our tradition of homemade clam chowder and one present on Christmas Eve. The next morning the girls slept until after 7:00. We actually got them up. After breakfast, we all got cleaned up and dressed. Then we opened our presents. About 10:30, we packed up and headed over to Mom and Dad's for the rest of the day.

Here are a few pictures from the day.


Finding what Santa has left them

Emily with her Santa Gift

Kaitlyn with her Santa Gift (Little Mermaid Doll)

The whole family on Christmas Morning

Christmas Party

We had my company Christmas party at our house last Saturday. My company is very small. There are only four of us, but we have eight kids between us. Seven of them are between the ages of 2 and 6 (Patrick is 12). So it was a huge hit when my father showed up dressed as Santa.

It actually turned out better than I thought. I had previously purchased a gift for each child that Santa had with him. Each child went up to Santa to receive their gifts, except the two children that were two years old (including Kaitlyn). Also, Patrick knew that Santa was actually Grandpa, but Emily and Kaitlyn didn't figure it out.

Patrick was very good. He made a big deal out of Santa and put most of the other kids at ease with the situation. Plus, he played well with all of the younger kids, which gave us parents more time to relax and enjoy ourselves (and eat).

So, all in all, the company Christmas party was a huge success.

Christmas shopping is complete

We are done with our Christmas shopping!! This has got to be a first in our household.

Kirsten and I took a couple of days away from the kids, letting my parents were watch them. We took a trip to the coast and stayed at a very nice hotel over looking the beach. The weather was perfect, sunny and no wind, about 60 degrees. While we were there, we took a couple of nice walks on the beach and went out to eat a couple of times. Once at Mo's (a tradition) and once at a very nice restaurant.

Also, we did a lot of shopping at a factory outlet mall. We were able to score some great deals on clothes for the kids among other things.

After a couple of nights at the coast, we left early and got back into town several hours before we were to pick up our kids. We shopped for that time and got everything we needed to get for the kids (both ours and the nephew's) for Christmas and Emily's Birthday and almost everything for the exchange presents for the extended family (some items are perishable and need to bought later).

This is truly amazing for us. In years past, we have still been shopping a few days before Christmas.

All in all, we are

First batch of Holidays

We survived the first batch of the holidays. That is more of an accomplishment than you think. Our Thanksgiving weekend started on Wednesday Night. We met all of Kirsten's side of the family for our traditional Chinese Food Dinner. We meet at a fairly central location, so each family only has to drive about 30 minutes or so. I am not sure exactly how this got started three years ago, but everyone really enjoys it, so it will probably continue for the next several years, at least. Which, I have to admit, please us very much.

We spent Thursday at Kirsten's parents house with her parents and my parents. That was very enjoyable also. Lots of good conversation and everyone was nice and relaxed. The food was excellent. Everyone had a really good time. Kaitlyn was really tired, so I put her down for a nap. She was kind of nervous, so I layed there with her and ended up sleeping for an hour myself.

On Saturday we spent the day at my parents place with all of my family. We showed up a little early, but since it was sunny, we just took a half-hour walk around their neighborhood. The food was pretty good and later we had some cake. We were celebrating my dad's 65th birthday and my nephew's first birthday. All of the kids really enjoyed playing outside on my father's electric ride-on toys. He has a firetruck, tractor and hummer. Kaitlyn and Emily seemed to be doing fine, so we didn't put them down for naps. That turned out to be a fiasco. Emily actually did just fine, but little Kaitlyn was an absolute terror from about 4:00 PM on. She actually took a little nap from 5:00 to 5:30, but that seemed to only make things worse.

Here are a few pictures from the day:

Gaoyou Mini Reunion

In November of 2003 our adoption agency (ASIA) sent a travel group of 14 families to China. 11 of those families (including us) adopted from Gaoyou SWI, but only four of these families are local. Yesterday these four local families had a small get together.

It was very good to catch up with everyone.

Any, here are a couple of pictures. I think that I have all of the names correct. If not, please leave me a comment.



From left to right: Katie, Mei lin, Tian, Bing, Emily and Tori



From left to right: Katie, Bing, Mei lin, Tian, Emily and Tori

Silly Kids

Well, nothing truly unusual has happened in our household recently. It is winter, so the kids have had colds, but nothing too unusual. Of course, kids being kids, every day is an adventure in general.

Recently all of the kids decided to wear their pants on their head. I am not exactly sure why, but they found it to be a hilarious activity. Hey, at least they were entertaining themselves. Kirsten got a couple of cute pictures. Here is one of them.




Here is another cute picture. The girls were watching a movie on TV.




Well, that is all for now. Not much to write about. We are starting to gear up for the holidays. There should be all kinds of fodder for the blog from that!

Hunting

Patrick and I went hunting with my father over several days last weekend (I took some time off). We were hunting deer, but didn't see anything that was legal, so we came home empty handed. Of course, actually bringing home the meat is secondary. Mostly, it is a male bonding thing for us.

We hunted every morning and then went out to dinner or saw a movie in the evening. All of us are avid readers, so one night we read for four or five hours. During the hunts, we took time out to do some shooting. We shot the .22 rifle, Winchester 30-30, Remington 7mm, 410 shotgun, 357 Magnum revolver and the 44 Magnum revolver. It was Patrick's first time with most of those firearms.

We saw several sunrises, hiked through a lot of brush and ate a lot of junk food. Also, Patrick (who is 12) got to drive. We let him get behind the wheel and drive for three or four miles. He never got the truck over 15 miles per hour, but he had a real good time and learned a few things.

It was a lot of fun and real good for all of us.

Kicking and Screaming

This is an interesting post about an unpleasant experience.

On Saturday, Kaitlyn got her fingers smashed in a door. Emily was going to the bathroom. Kaitlyn finds this an interesting experience and was following her in. This annoys Emily so she shut (and locked) the bathroom door. Unfortunately, Kaitlyn's fingers were in the area where the hinges are.

Kaitlyn didn't cry much at first. She just kind of whimpered and looked at me. From my angle, I couldn't see that she was injured. I just thought she was whining because she wanted in to the bathroom. Then she fell and hung there by her fingers. I kind of panicked and lost my temper at Emily who didn't open the door very fast. In retrospect, I think that she was having trouble getting the door unlocked. We now have a rule that she can't lock the doors in the house.

So, the door comes open and the middle fingernail has been completely pulled out and is flipped upside down over the front of the finger. It is barely attached at all. That is when I learned that only about half of a persons fingernail is actually visible. Almost 50% of it is under the skin!

Anyway, I put the fingernail back on top of finger (not back inside) and wrapped a bandaid around it to hold it in place. Patrick called Kirsten (she was at work) to let her know that he was at home watching Emily and I was on my way to the Emergency Room. I was very glad that Kirsten was able to leave work early and come to the ER, because of the kicking and screaming issue.

As most of you know, Kaitlyn doesn't care for strangers. She took to Kirsten pretty well, but it took her about a month to warm up to me. Anyway, it seems that strangers at a Doctors office are 10 times as bad. First, the Doctor needed to look at the hand. It took Kirsten and I both to hold her still for that. Then they needed to take three X-Ray's. It took Kirsten, I and the Radiologist to hold her steady for that. I would really like to have seen those X-Ray's, because there were at least two adult hands along with Kaitlyn's in each one of them.

Well, none of the fingers were broken, so now it was just a matter of putting the fingernail back. This involved a numbing shot, some tweezer like instruments to help put the fingernail back, one Doctor to do the work and two nurses, one dad and one mom to hold the little 23 pound ball of fire. I have a new appreciation for the phrase "Kicking and Screaming the whole way."

Kaitlyn fought the process so hard that her hair was completely soaked with sweat. She whimpered and cried the whole time we were at the ER, but she was giggling and playing within in seconds of leaving. She didn't want the stuffed dinosaur that they gave her until we left. Now it is one of her favorite bedtime animals.

Now we get to the bandage. They put a few layers of gauze bandage on her entire finger, stretched the trailing ends down across her palm, wrapped them a few times around her wrist and tied it off. Then they put a tight fishnet type of mitten on her hand. All of this lasted about 30 minutes. We had settled down on the couch at home while we were trying to get something for her to eat. I glanced over and she was happily playing with the bandage which she had removed. Since then, we have put on several bandaids, but they rarely last more than an hour.

Well, kids sure do make your life more interesting.

Disneyland Vacation

We are back from our vacation to Disney. We were gone for seven days. We spent parts of five days going to Disneyland and/or California Adventure. We took Emily and Kaitlyn back to the hotel for naps everyday. We also spent one whole day at Legoland.

I will write more about the trip later. In the interim, here are a few pictures from the trip.

Trip to the Zoo

Yesterday we took a trip to the zoo. We needed to get out of the house for a while and decided to that a trip to the zoo would be a nice family outing. Also, it would be a good trial run for our upcoming trip to Disneyland. Everything went pretty well, except for the snack situation. It is obvious to us that we need to take a lot more snacks with us when we got to Disneyland. Also, we determined that girls can easily handle going an hour or two past nap time and still be mostly pleasant to be around, as long as they have plenty to eat and drink.

While we were there, we bumped into my sister and her family. It was nice to see them for a few minutes. I found it funny that their family and ours are both have yearly memberships to the zoo and both forgot their new membership cards and brought the expired ones instead.

Here are a few photos of the day:

A few observations about kids

In a few weeks, we will be taking a family vacation to Disneyland. Kaitlyn doesn't really understand what that means. Emily is very excited, but can't get the time or distance concepts down. Patrick is trying to act cool about the whole thing, which tends to come off as bored.

Why do teenagers (or tweenagers) have to act like things are no big deal? They think that this is acting cool. I don't get it. Granted, Patrick has been to Disneyland or Disneyworld four times, China twice, Washington DC twice, etc. Vacationing is kind of old hat to him. Still, I miss my little 5 year old son. The one that yelled "Yahoooo" as the airplane was accelerating for take-off. People burst out laughing 10 rows away.

As for Emily's time concept, Kirsten has helped with that. She worked with Emily and Kaitlyn (mostly Emily) to create a nice paper chain for everyday until we get to go to Disneyland. It is pretty cute and has stickers of Disney characters on every link. Emily has the concept that we get to go when the chain is gone, but she doesn't really understand why we can only remove link at a time.

We tried to remove one link every night before bed, but kept forgetting in the madness of trying to put the kids down. Now we remove one every morning. It works much better and it is nice to see the chain getting shorter, even for us old folks.

Kaitlyn is now 2

According to our documentation from the Orphanage, Kaitlyn's Birthday is assumed to be Sept 15th. Since the 15th was on a Friday, we had a party on the 17th with family members. Since the party was after nap, it took Kaitlyn a little while to get warmed up, but the presents really got her out of her shell. Here are a few pictures from that day.

Kaitlyn really got into opening the presents.


Of course, she got lots of help from her big sister.


Here we can see her two of her favorite presents. In the background is the doll that she absolutely must go to bed with each night. She is holding the pens from one present. She loves to draw.

Latest Camping Pictures

Here are some of the pictures from out latest camping trip.

Another camping experience

We went camping again over the last weekend. This was just a two night affair at a campground only 45 minutes from our home. It was a lot of fun and created a lot of material for the blog. I will post some pictures in couple of days. Anyway on the semi-interesting stuff.

We had to set up the tent-trailer after dark. This is because we couldn't find our two kittens before leaving the house on Friday. We thought they had gotten out somehow, but it turned out that they had figured out how to get up into our gas furnace. I am going to have to take care of that before winter.

Setting up wasn't too bad. I learned something. The electrical system doesn't work until the sink is raised into place. Which is interesting, because we needed light to get it into place. Kind of a Catch-22 situation. Anyway, we will know next time and not spend 15 minutes working on the electrical system first.

Patrick found a rather large pole in the woods. He named it 'Doom' and used it like a pretend weapon (bazooka, javelin, spear, etc.). Shortly after finding it, a bug crawled out and stung him on the thumb. Quite funny (and ironical) now, but a little worrisome at the time. 'Doom' turned out to be lot of fun. My mother created a 'Hide Doom' game. It was annoying to Patrick, but pretty entertaining to the rest of us.

We went on family walk on Saturday. We had basically gotten around to the otherside of the campground, to the hiking trail, when something stung or bit Emily. It obviously hurt, but she was mostly a trooper about it (once the bandaid was on). You can always tell when she is really hurt, she acts pretty tough. When it is fairly minor, she acts like the world is ending.

Anyway, back to the hike. After a brief return to camp for first aid, we went back out on the path. A quite a ways out there, Emily needed to go potty. I tried to help her squat down, etc, but I apparently still need work with girls, because she wet all over the back of her pants. Boys are so much easier outdoors! We basically turned around and went back to camp at that point.

On Sunday, we cleaned up and got ready to come home, which was a fiasco. It started with the trailer. One of the four corners on the popup roof got stuck. In the process of trying to get it down, Kirsten got a nasty little cut (more like a chunk taken out) on her finger. In my attempts to get it down, I eventually broke the lift for that corner. My father and I had to hold that corner up and slowly lower it while Kirsten lowered the other three.

We finally got it down and then Kaitlyn was poopy, again. The poor girl had a case of the runs. Of course, we had just used the last diaper out of the diaper bag a few minutes earlier and you know where the extra diapers were! We were able to lift the top about 12 inches and Patrick (after about 10 minutes of work) was able to crawl all the way to the back of the trailer to retrieve three diapers. Whew, crisis averted.

We got the top back down and were ready to go when Kirsten said, "Eric, do you have the car keys?" Kirsten had put them in her jacket pocket. Then later we had packed all of the coats in the trailer! So here we are lifting the stupid popup roof again. We were getting pretty good at it by now, so it only took a couple of minutes to find the jackets and retrieve the car keys.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, but it sure was nice to get home.

Everything is fine here

There isn't too much going on in the Murphy-Thursam household recently. We are just enjoying the last lazy days of summer. We went to a 'Fun Center' on Sunday. It was the company picnic for Kirsten's work. It was fun. First, we played some mini-golf. Emily only lasted one hole. Kaitlyn always had a hole-in-one. She carried her ball with her always and then would drop it in the hole and take it back out. Emily and I rode the Go Karts together. She kept saying, "Go super fast, Daddy!"

Later, we had a good time playing some of the fun arcade games with the girls. We won (and were given) enough tickets to get two of everything, except suckers. This caused a little bit of a problem, until Patrick used some of his tickets to get a sucker for the other girl. Then on the way home, both girls took a couple of licks from their suckers and were done. Go Figure!

Here are a couple of cute pictures of the girls:



Emily in my working hat




Kaitlyn loves to where dress-up high heels

Kids Play Imitates Life

It is fun to watch Emily and Kaitlyn play together. Their play imitates life so often. Yesterday Emily had one of the kittens wrapped up in a small blanket and was trying to put it down for a nap. Kaitlyn watched for a few seconds then got the stuffed cat doll and wrapped it up.

Here is a picture:




They also like to play Haircut. Without the scissors, of course. Here is a shot of that:




Sometimes, they even get Patrick into the act:

Back from vacation

It has been a while since I have posted anything. Things have been hectic and we were away for our annual camping trip with Kirsten's family. The camping trip was interesting and fun. Scroll down to see several photos of the trip.

Highlights:
- Kirsten came down with "Fifth's" Disease on the day we left. She had to go into the emergency room the next morning. She had a nasty rash that lasted about 24 hours. Her hands and feet are still slightly swollen and here joints (especially wrists, hands and ankles) have ached ever since. Apparently it could take up to two months for that to go away.

- Kaitlyn was sick during most of the trip. She threw-up on me once and was very snuggly, but seemed to have a good time playing, wading in the creek, etc. Imagine our surprise when I took her to the doctor yesterday and she has Strep Throat. We are such bad parents.

- Patrick fell trying to cross the creek on a log and bruised his ribs. Not bad, but enough to be annoying (to him and everyone else too).

- The new trailer worked out very well. We generally slept pretty well, although it is amazing how much snuffling and snorting noises the kids make all night long. Including Patrick.

- The food was excellent as usual. We tend to try and out do each other with our gourmet meals made over the camp fire.

- The Tillamook Forest Interpretive Center was very nice. A nice museum. Interesting history about the Tillamook Burns. A very nice replica of an old Lookout Tower.

Pictures (there are 12):