Busy Weekend

This has been a crazy week in our household. I had a couple days toward the end of the week where I had meetings after work so I got home after Grace was already in bed. When that happens I don't get to see her at all since she is usually in bed when I leave in the morning. When I finally did see her on Friday it seemed like she looked just a little older. The good thing is we had an action-packed weekend and got to spend plenty of time together.

On Saturday we represented our Adoption Agency at a local adoption conference. The conference had a workshop for families considering adoption from China or waiting to adopt and we were asked to bring Grace and talk a little bit about our experience. Talking about our agency, our adoption and Grace are our favorite things to do, so we couldn't say no. We had a good time at the conference and I hope we were able to help some of the families trying to decide which path to take and helped ease the mind of the waiting families. We really know what they are going through as just a year ago we were in their shoes. Hang in there!!!!

After the conference we visited with some of our travel mates from China--Zoe and family. The girls had a great time together. K cooked a wonderful meal for us which Grace enthusiastically acknowledged by literally licking her plate clean. It was great to get together and catch up and see how great the girls are doing. Some pics from the day...

Today we went to the local mall to get Grace's Easter/18 month pictures taken. After the pictures we decide to go for a visit to the Easter Bunny which let's say did not go so well. Grace wanted nothing to do with the furry guy so we hopped out of there as fast as we could. I guess we should have known how it would go from the look on her face in the picture we took while waiting in line.

We made up for it by taking a ride on the carousel which seems to make everything better in the world of Grace.

18 Months

Grace turns 18 months old today. She is starting to act all of her 18 months as well. We are noticing much more independence out of her lately. From wanting to feed herself and becoming more picky with food to figuring out how to push our buttons to get a rise out of us. She definitely knows what "no" means but doesn't always choose to listen. She is way too cute to get mad at though even when she is being naughty. Recently she has also started calling us by our first names, I guess Jen and I will have to start referring to each other as Ma-Ma and Da-Da from now on.

While we were outside the other day Grace discovered the concepts of terrain and momentum. Grace has been walking for almost 6 months now so she is pretty much an expert as long as she is inside. Now that the weather is getting nicer she has had the opportunity to attempt to navigate the not-so-flat ground in our back yard. She took off as she normally would, stepped in a little hole and found herself flat on her face with almost a mouth full of grass. She was not so happy about that but she has since learned to slow down and is doing much better.

After conquering the back yard we moved on to the front yard where we have a little bit of a hill. This is where momentum came into play....She couldn't quite figure out why her walk turned into an uncontrollable run. So she did what any toddler in trouble would do and used her deepest voice she could muster and yelled "Nooooooo". I was laughing pretty hard at this point but was able to scoop her up before she face-planted again.

No pics this week but we do have a cute video of Grace finding new uses for cleaning appliances.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

From the cutest leprechaun ever!!!!!

Sick Baby

A couple weeks ago Jen and I were having a conversation about how healthy Grace has been. She has had a couple little colds here and there but nothing major so far. We knew we were jinxing ourselves just by having that conversation. So of course this past week Grace got sick with a 102.5 degree fever. The fever only lasted a couple days but she has had a cough and congestion most of the week. It has also affected her appetite which is WAY out of character for Grace. Normally Grace will eat everything and anything that we put in front of her so we knew she wasn't feeling well when she wasn't finishing her meals and turning down some of her favorite foods.

We did start to notice a couple weeks ago that Grace is getting a little fussier about certain foods. Most of the time the fussiness is just that she wants to feed herself which can get messy with certain meals. It is probably just her age or a phase she is going through but I guess we are due, she has made it pretty easy on us so far.

Even being sick this week Grace was still in a relatively good mood. She did get a little more whiny than normal at night but overall she did pretty well. We were even able to get outside for some fresh air and a little walk around the neighborhood today as the weather warmed up to almost 60 degrees.

A couple pics from the week below.

First PB&J

Apparently it's serious business

Love that smile

Not sure what is going on here but her expression is too cute.

Motion Shot

Teddy Rabbit Has Some Competition

Since we arrived home with Grace her favorite stuffed animal has been Teddy Rabbit. He keeps her company on car rides, goes to bed with her and sometimes joins her for breakfast.

Lately though she has developed an obsession with Melmo (Elmo). We aren't really sure how it started, she only has one musical toy with Elmo on it and it isn't really a toy she plays with all that much. Her interested started a few weeks ago when changing her diapers she has to hold a diaper because there is a small picture of "Melmo" on them. Then a few days ago we were out for dinner and there was another toddler on the other side of the restaurant and Grace help pointing at her and calling her "Melmo". We kept correcting her and telling her "No, that is a little girl, not Elmo". But she was adamant, it took us quite a few minutes to realize that the little girl's sippy cup had a picture of Elmo on it. Guess she told us.....

So this weekend we headed out on a special shopping trip to get Grace a stuffed "Melmo" of her own. We found just the right one and seems to be fitting in just fine. We were a little worried that he was going to bump Teddy Rabbit out of the top spot but he is still the top bear. But I think we definitely now have a 1a and 1b. It is so fun just to watch her walk around with the two of them clasped in her arms and see how happy and excited she gets. This is the type of stuff we were waiting for and makes parenting so much fun. Some pics of the three amigos below....

The frozen one

I think I may have mentioned somewhere on this blog that back before we started the process to adopt Jen and I (well mostly Jen) went through fertility treatments. There were around 6 IUIs and 3 IVFs the last of which left us with one frozen embryo.


When we started the adoption process we were glad to leave all of the stress of the fertility stuff behind. Although there were new stresses of the ever extending wait but for us that was much easier to deal with that the injections and crazy drugs* from fertility treatments. So we pretty much forgot about all that until sometime in 2007 about 6 months before our referral when we got a bill for the storage of the frozen embryo. We either had to pay $500 to store it for another year or use it. There were a couple other options such as discard it or donate it but none of those options appealed to us. We couldn't use it with our pending referral, so we paid the bill and not too long after we had our referral for Grace.


A few months back we got another bill for storage of the embryo. We didn't want to continue to pay $500 a year to store the embryo so now it was decision time. Based on our previous experiences we were pretty sure if we did use it, it wouldn't result in a pregnancy. We weren't even sure if the doctor would be willing to transfer only one as they usually transfer two to increase the odds of it working. Unless you are Octomom then they transfer 6.....well that is a blog post for another day. So last month we had the (FET) Frozen Embryo Transfer. We went into it this time around with no stress, if it worked that was great, if it didn't well that was OK too. We have our Gracie and our life is pretty perfect right now. We found out a couple weeks ago that it didn't work which was pretty much what we expected. There were no tears, it was almost a feeling of relief and closure on a rough period of our lives. Plus Jen really loves her coffee, cocktails with the girls and her skinny jeans.


So now we are moving on trying to figure out what is next for our family. We want Gracie to have at least one sibling, a Chinese sibling would be ideal, a brother would be pretty cool too. Or maybe a Special Needs Chinese adoption will be in the cards for us. No decisions have been made yet, just talking, discussing and dreaming.


* This is my name for them as they sometimes made Jen really emotional

Sledding

We are in the midst of another sizable snowstorm in New England so I decided not to drive into the city today and stayed home for some fun in the snow.

A couple months ago we went to the local Target and unsuccessfully tried to buy a sled for Grace. Unfortunately, no stores actually sell sleds in the winter, I guess you need to buy them in the fall, who knew? So we improvised a bit today and took Grace sledding in the backyard in a laundry basket. She didn't seem to mind that it wasn't actually a sled, she didn't even mind Mommy dumping her. See the fun below.

Mmmm....Ribs

We took a trip into the city this weekend to have dinner with Cat and Joe. Back when we were waiting for Grace we all went out for ribs at Redbones and were anticipating a time when Grace would be enjoying barbecue with us. Well the day finally came and now that Grace has almost a full mouth of teeth she was up to the task.

A couple of weeks ago we were a bit surprised when Grace started refusing food, not like her at all. We soon figured out that she wasn't actually refusing food, she wanted to feed herself. We have been doing a lot of the feeding for bonding and attachment but Grace seems to have had enough of that. It can be pretty messy and meals now take a lot longer but she is doing pretty well.

Some pics of our Redbones trip below, Onsie complements of Joe and Cat.

Put down the camera and gimme some ribs!!!

Mommy, look at the flying pig!!!!

Mmmmm....