Emily's Birthday

As most of you know, Emily's Birthday is December 24th. Since this is too close to Christmas, we have kept with tradition and celebrated her birthday on the Saturday of the week before before Christmas. This gives at least a week between celebrations. This year that was on December 15th.

Since we had Kirsten's Company Christmas Party the night before, the girls spent that night with my parents. It worked out rather well. It gave us plenty of time to get the house ready for the party on Saturday Morning. It was a pretty simple affair involving my parents and Kirsten's parents. Emily, of course, had a very good time. Any day is a good day if you get presents. :-)

I insisted on getting her what I thought was the perfect gift. One of those somewhat indestructible working digital cameras. She is always wanting take pictures using mine, after all. Here is a picture of her using her camera.



Below is a picture of her using what turned out to be her actual favorite present. Yep, it is fake makeup.



This gift was from my parents. Actually, they also got her one of those real makeup sets for girls. We were somewhat taken aback by the gift. I guess it must have showed on our faces, because Mom mailed us the gift receipt on Monday so that we could take it back.

Below is a picture of Kaitlyn playing with her favorite thing from Emily's Birthday Party. Yes, that is a balloon. She had hours and hours of fun with the balloons.

One holiday down, one to go

***NOTE*** For some reason 11/7/2007 entry didn't post properly and I didn't notice. I have posted it now, so there are now two new posts.
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The month of November has been very interesting. We had a Pop Can/Bottle Drive as a fund raiser for the Korean Exchange Students Club. This is to help fund their two week trip to Korea in April. My job entailed driving a pick-up truck around while kids went door-to-door asking people to donate pop cans and bottles to their cause. We even roped Kirsten's Father into helping. He also drove a pick-up truck around.

We spent about six-hours on a Saturday and raised over $2000. There is a rumor that one or more of the bigger companies in the area may match the amount raised. That would be cool.

We are scheduled to do another pop can and bottle drive this coming Saturday.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, we traveled down to see my Grandmother. She is 85 and the last living Grandparent that I have. It is a fairly long drive, so we stayed in a hotel on the way down and back. The girls really enjoyed it, because the hotel had a pool. I am not sure that they enjoyed the actual visit with Grandma, however.

Finally, we had all of Kirsten's Family over to our house for Thanksgiving. Everyone brought some portion of the meal, so we didn't have to provide everything. Everyone had a really good time and ate way too much (as usual).

As if our month wasn't busy enough, we spent most of our one free weekend decorating the girls room. This mostly involved painting it a nice shade of purple and hanging some new curtains. Kirsten also put up some cute stickers on the wall and the girls names. Now she just needs to get some appropriate bedding to make the room complete.


This is the family with my Grandma and her husband Bill. Patrick was not able to attend because of his Theater Recital.

Emily helping to paint her room.

Kaitlyn helping to paint her room. Unfortunately, we did not get any afterwards photos.


A couple of photos showing how their room looks now, except that it is not this clean generally.

I had to include this photo. We were decorating the Christmas Tree. Someone played with the beads and got them all tangled up. When we asked who did it, we got this "Blame Game" response. In reality, it was both girls, but mainly Emily.

The Holiday Season is upon us

***NOTE*** I wrote this on 11/7/2007. I don't know why it didn't post. I thought it had.
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Over the past couple of weeks, we have survived Halloween, had a very interesting week with and exchange student from Korea and a nice little visit with a family that adopted a girl from China with us when we got Kaitlyn.

Halloween was a lot of fun. The girls were able to trick-or-treat at Grandma Ma's place of business (a nursing home). Grandma had a very good time showing off her grand daughters and the residents enjoyed seeing all of the kids. After that, we got together with Kirsten's brother and his family and trick-or-treated downtown. Then we all met back at Trevor's house for a very nice meal. Finally, about 7:30 we made it back to our place and passed out candy for about an hour.

It was a very busy afternoon and evening. The girls enjoyed dressing up. Emily was a princess and Kaitlyn was a doggy. Unfortunately, I carried the camera the entire time and never got a single picture. In my defense, it is very difficult for one person to keep an eye on a 3 year old and a 4 year old, in a crowd of kids. I didn't really have time for much else.

Here are some pictures

Patrick and his neighbor Rubi with their Korean Exchange students. All of them loved playing foosball. They did it a lot.


Patrick's Korean Exchange Student (Min Soo). This was taken on the day that Min Soo left.

The girls with their new Chinese Outfits.

Kaitlyn and Natalia playing dress-up. They were adopted at the some time from the same orphanage. They had a great time playing together. We need to get together with her and her family more often.

Not a lot going on

Not a lot going on lately. I thought that I would post up some recent photos of the kids.

Emily fell asleep one night while watching TV. She slept like this for 15 minutes before her head finally fell to the floor.

The girls with some new play jewelery.

Playing dress up with the old Halloween costumes.

Patrick buried in the sand on the Oregon Coast.

Patrick is stylin' in his new hat. Unfortunately, someone at his school must have liked it better, because he no longer has it.

River Rafting Trip

In August, Kirsten, Patrick and I took a little guided trip (4days and 3 nights) down the Rogue River in Southern Oregon. Although we like camping, we decided to take it easy, so we shelled out the extra money for a lodge trip. That is, instead of camping, we stayed at various lodge's along the way. You know, hot and cold running water, private toilets, clean sheets, etc. It was very nice.

Because of some cancellations, it was just the three of us and our guide. Although Kirsten and Patrick spent most of the time in the raft, I generally was following along behind in my own tahiti (blow up kayak). It was a lot of fun. There was a lot of white water and we saw a lot of wildlife, including black bear, elk, dear, bald eagles and osprey. We also saw steelhead, salmon and even a sturgeon jumping.

We are already trying to determine when we can take the girls down the river.

Here are a few photos from the trip. We used a couple of waterproof disposable cameras, instead of our digital, so the photos are not great. Just click on the photos to see a larger version for more detail.

Patrick in a tahiti on the first day. There was some stiff wind in the afternoon of the first day and you had to constantly row. It was not a lot of fun for him then.

Kirsten shooting some rapids in a tahiti on the third day. Although she enjoyed it, it was not what she was looking for on this vacation. She much preferred riding in the main raft with the guide doing the stearing.

This is me in the tahiti. I tended to give the main raft plenty of room after the first set of rapids. I was too close then and almost got washed under the main raft. OK, so it probably wasn't even close, but it did scare me enough so that I always stayed way back.

You have to look close, but you can see me being completely submerged in some white water. Thank goodness the tahiti was a 'self-bailer'. I had it full of water on several occasions. By the way, I made it through this section just fine.

As you can see, I did not make through this section. That is my tahiti upside down. You can just see my head about 15 feet to the right. I had wiped out way up around the corner and then had to ride the white water on my back for a couple of hundred feet before they could fish me out.

This is a photo that Patrick took the first night.

Here is a picture showing how close Patrick got to the deer while getting his picture. Some of the other kids that were at the lodge (on a different guided trip) were actually getting the deer to out of their hands, but I wouldn't let Patrick try that. It is still a wild animal after all.

Here is a photo of us taken on the third day. The guide took us on a morning hike to show us where we would be rafting later that day. As you can see, the trail was basically on the edge of a cliff.

This is a picture taken from where we were standing, looking down at the river. You can just see the churning of what they call the 'Coffee Pot'.

Family Camping Trip

In July we took the annual Family Camping Trip. We go for at least 5 days with Kirsten's Parents and her brother and his family. We have managed to make it six years in row now. This year Kirsten's Mom had some conflicts with her job and was only able to make it up for a couple of days.

Also, poor Kaitlyn was bitten by some bug that caused her right eyelid to swell so much that she could hardly open it. It didn't really seem to slow her down very much however. Kids are so resilient.

Here are a few pictures of the trip.

Rafting down the creek. We didn't get very far before I had to get out. My large bulk kept causing us to bottom out on the rocks.

Bath time. Kirsten purchased a portable solar shower. Just fill it and leave it in the sun for about half of a day and you have about 5 gallons of fairly hot water. Enough to get the girls wet, then soap them down and then rinse them off, with a little left over to wash Kirsten and My hair.

Emily really enjoyed being able to help wash the dishes. Of course, in a few years when she could truly be helpful, she won't want to do it anymore.

Emily and Kaitlyn sitting around the fire. You can see how swollen Kaitlyn's right eyelid became. It was mostly gone by the end of the trip.

Kaitlyn playing as superman or something.

The boys played a lot of poker. The Dad's got involved for little while also. We used rocks, pebbles and sticks to bet with. The rock was equal to two pebbles and a pebble was equal to five sticks. No money was actually used.

A few pictures

Well, we have moved. Things were a little tight there for a while last week. Signing papers on two houses, transferring/stopping/starting various utilities, packing, cleaning, etc.

Anyway, I have my computer system up and running. Also, I have finally purchased another tool to download files from our digital camera. I have several months of catching up to do.

Here are a couple of pictures from June.


Photo of Dad's and Daughters during our Mini-Gaoyou Reunion. Quite the Motley Bunch!


Emily and Kaitlyn enjoying a treat in our backyard. Now the old house.

We have accepted an offer on our house

Well, we got lucky. A family that has already sold their current house (it close on the 10th), was purchasing another house in our area. Unfortunately for them, the sellers of that house backed out of the deal. Suddenly they were left with no where to live. So they started looking again and decided they like our house. They have made an offer and want it to close as quickly as possible.

Therefore, our current house will now sell at the same time as we purchase our new house. This is great news, because we couldn't really afford to make two house payments.

On another note, we just got back from vacation. We went camping for five days. It was a lot of fun. I will try and download the photos from the trip soon.

Anybody out there want a house

Our current house has been on the market for 5 weeks now and only three people have looked at it. We are starting to really worry about it. We are having an open house this Saturday, but I don't have very high hopes. From what I have read, Open Houses only work to sell a home about 5% of the time.

On a brighter note, we are about to have a couple of nice vacations. We will be camping with Kirsten's side of the family next week. This will the sixth year in a row that we have done this. We always have a great time and I always gain five pounds during the week.

A couple of weeks later we will be taking a river trip. This is just for Kirsten, Patrick and Myself. The girls will be staying with my parents. It is a four-day trip down the Rogue River (in Oregon). Everything is provided and we will be staying in different lodge every night. It is a little spendy, but we bought it last November before we knew that money would be tight.

Emily and Kaitlyn are both doing very well. Emily (who is four) is finally getting used to the water. When we go in the hot tub, she is able to put her entire head under water without panicking. Kaitlyn (who is two) has no fear of the water at all. She will jump off of into the water an sink to the bottom. After finally clawing her way up to air, she will climb out and jump back in again. Don't worry, Kirsten or I are hovering within inches of her at all times.

Kirsten is enjoying her job. She likes being able to get a lunch every day and she always gets off work at 6:00 PM. Things have been a little slow there however and she has been somewhat bored several times. The current employee's have informed her that this is slow period and it will pick up.

We are buying a home

Well, we now have an accepted offer on new home. It is a nice place with a large back yard. There is an oak tree at the back for some nice shade and some nice leaves for Patrick to rake this fall. :-)

It is 2655 sq ft. This is quite an upgrade for us. I may sound like I am bragging, because I probably am, but we are very, very excited. I am especially excited about certain things. It has that fake would deck, which means that I don't have to stain or waterproof anymore. :-)

Also, it has the vinyl type of siding, which means that I won't ever have to paint the house!!

Now we just need to sell our current house.

Here are a couple of photos.

Living in Limbo

As you can imagine, things have been very busy around the household. We spent two weeks getting the house ready to show. This involved fixing a lot of little things. Spreading a lot of bark chips. Cleaning a lot of areas that don't get cleaned very often, like the outside of second story windows. We also had to pack away a lot of our stuff. The garage is half full of packed boxes and extra furniture. It is important to make your house look bigger by having less stuff in it, so we are already half-way packed for the move.

Anyway, I went to post some new photos, but I can't find the items I use to download them to the computer. It seems that in our initial packing of stuff, we must have gotten it into a box also.

Our house has been on the market for two weeks now and only two people have come and looked at it. They both gave it good reviews, but are not ready to purchase anything just yet. It is a buyers market out here now, so we are not expecting to sell our current home very quickly.

Last Monday we toured the new town with our real-estate agent, which happens to be our sister-in-law. We looked at eight or ten homes. Out of all that, there is only one that is a possible choice. We have come up with another list of ten homes. We will look at those tomorrow.

Everyone here is doing well. The girls are just as cute as ever. They are constantly testing their boundaries. We have to keep right on top of things.

It's Official - We're Moving

My wife has accepted a position at a new Vet Clinic. This one is about 60 miles away from where we currently live. Since that would be too much a commute, we are going to be moving, which is most of the reason for the new job anyway.

Once we move, we will be within minutes of Kirsten's parents and her brother's family. She has been wanting to get a job around there for couple of years now. So, after interviewing at several places over the last year and a half, she finally gets a good offer. Then she gets another offer only an hour and a half later.

We are very excited, but a little stressed. We want to be moved before the end of summer, so that Patrick will be starting school at the new one. We don't want him to have to transfer part-way through a year. So, now we are working constantly to get the old house sold, so that we have enough money to purchase a new house.

I will probably put all kinds of interesting things during the move. Check back for more.

My learning disability

The other day, one of our auto's was in the shop, so I and the girls drove in to pick Kirsten up from work. Unfortunately, a dog came in at the last minute that needed an emergency C-Section. So, while we were waiting Emily, Kaitlyn and I went across the street to McDonald's. The food isn't that great, but they did have a nice play structure to keep the girls entertained.

After forcing them to eat at least one chicken nugget each, I let them onto the structure. Emily was off like a shot, as usual, but I was surprised to see how easily Kaitlyn was climbing inside of those tubes. Generally Kaitlyn needs a lot of coaxing to do anything like that.

Anyway, as I should have know, she gets all the way to the top and is too scared to come down the slides. As a matter of fact, she is too scared to go back down the way she came up. I should have known better. So, there she is at the top yelling, "'ary Daddy, 'ary". I am trying to coas her back down from outside, and talk Emily through coaxing her back down. I hope the other parents were too annoyed with us.

Finally, I gave in and climbed up the large twisted slide to get her. Those things are smaller than they look.

Then, I did something really stupid!!!! I let her go back into the play structure. She convinced me that she was going to go down the slide by herself. What was I thinking? She gets back in there and repeats her performance. After a couple more minutes of "'ary Daddy, 'ary" (I am pretty sure people were getting annoyed now), I am climbing back up the large (but narrow) twisty slide to get her.

We're Back

Actually, we haven't gone anywhere, I just haven't posted for a while. I can't believe that I have not posted for over two months. I have probably lost everyone that used to look at our blog regularly (both of them).

Well, what has been happening? Well personally, it has been work, work and more work. Except for a weeks worth of vacation. My wife and I took a trip to Disneyland for four days last month. Yes, just the two of us. Since we took the family to Disneyland in October, we didn't feel too guilty. It was a lot of fun.

That is about all of the excitement here. There is just not much going on.

Here are a couple of pictures of the girls.

This is just a really cute picture of Kaitlyn.


One night when we were watching TV, Emily decided the my legs were a very comfortable spot to lay. The next thing I know, she is fast asleep.

Another view of my sleeping daughter.


Probably every kid has picture like this one. This is what happens when you leave children unmonitored with markers. At least she only drew on herself and the markers are washable.

Last video scrapbook for a while

Well, this is the last video scrapbook that I have created. It is for the family trip to Disneyland that we took last October (2006).

Video scrapbook for Camping 2006

Well, I have yet another "video scrapbook" (I like this term better than "video slide show"). This one is from our family camping trip in August of 2006. I realize that y'all are probably getting bored with these video scrap books that I am posting, but the good news is that I only have one more. In a week or so I will post one for our Disneyland trip in October of 2006.

Another Slide Show

Here is a little slide show for our family camping trip back in July of 2005. This was just a few months before we got Kaitlyn. I thought that some of you might find it interesting.

Some adoption movies

I am attempting to use YouTube to display the little movie slide shows that I created about our two adoption trips. Let me know if you have any problems with these.

Raising a Girly Girl

Well, I haven't posted anything for a month. I took a little unannounced hiatus from the blog. I apologize to my loyal readers (both of you) HA :-) Here is a small post about Emily.

Anyway, Kirsten and I have come to realize that both of our daughters are girly-girls. They like to dress up, pretend to put on make-up, etc. This morning Emily got up too early (4:30 AM). I sent her back to bed, but she was still up at 5:00 AM. So I let her get in bed with me, but she had to lay there quietly. That lasted about 15 minutes, then she started describing her wedding to me. It was interesting enough that I let her talk.

For only being 4 years old, she has put a lot of thought into this. The important parts to her are the make-up that she will get to wear. Also, the man that she will be marrying will give her a ring, ear-rings and a crown. So basically, at this point she is a material girl.

Annual Snow Trip

We have just returned from our annual snow trip. Which is kind of funny, when you consider that we just had snow for a couple of days at our home. Anyway, we have been doing a three or four day trip up to the mountains, to play in the snow, every year now for four years. The last couple have been with my parents and some good friends of ours that have two children of their own.

Every year is different. Last year it snowed almost constantly. This year it was mostly sunny. The place that we rent has four bedrooms. One with several bunk beds for the kids and three others with queen size beds, one for each couple. Each family is responsible for cooking and cleaning one dinner and one breakfast. We generally share the lunches. It works out fairly well and we have lots of gourmet meals to ooooo and aaaahhh over.

We spent a lot of time playing games. My parents taught us all a game called 'Mexican Train' using dominoes. While the title isn't precisely politically correct, the game was very enjoyable and we all are hooked.

We went up to the pass (where the snow is deep) and went tubing a couple of times. My Dad and the boys went up there three times. Dad went down the hill at least twice as much as anyone else.

All in all it was a very fun time. Below are a few pictures from the trip.

Emily really enjoyed going sledding. Here Grandpa is pulling Emily on the sled. This only lasted until the hill get steeper, then she had to walk herself.


Emily walked up this hill about 15 times. She really enjoyed the sledding.


Patrick (in the red) did almost no sledding at all. He only went down three times. Mostly he and his friend worked on a snow cave.

Kaitlyn was not really enthralled with the snow, but she had a good time in the car with her Mom.

Snow Day

Here in Western Oregon, we had some snow yesterday. We had about 2 inches of total snow. This is unusual for the valley. We generally get snow one out of every three years. The kids had a really good time in the snow. Also, it was nice to get outside now that they are all feeling better.

Here are a few pictures from that day:

Interesting Times

Many of you have probably heard of the infamous ancient Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times". Well, I brought the curse on to our family last week. You see, I was looking at our blog last week and realized that I hadn't written anything in a couple of weeks. I was somewhat startled, because I generally try and update the blog every week, I feel that I owe it to our two regular readers :-)

Anyway, there I set, in front of a blank page on the computer. After a few minutes however, I realized that I had nothing to say. There was nothing going on in our family that was worth writing about. Things were good, we were happy, but there was nothing really happening. So, then I went and did it. I thought, "I need something interesting to happen."

So now, the last few days HAVE been interesting. All three children have been running a constant fever. Two of them vomited (one several times). My wife and I are still well, but I don't expect that to last very long. On the plus side, the sickest was my 12 year old son. He doesn't require as much care like the girls. Also, when Emily threw-up, she did make it to the bathroom sink first, which is much better than almost everyplace else!!!

The good news, is that all the fevers broke last night and everyone is doing much better today.