#Miller6Pack

Chinese New Year is a wonderful opportunity for us to help the Gs celebrate a little bit of their heritage. So we see it as a special day in our house. The girls each wore one of their pretty silk dresses (qi paos) for the day. And we made these pretty lanterns. Easy, fun, and lovely. We had a yummy dinner of orange chicken, noodles and veggies, egg rolls, and oranges. Notice the girls are using their chopsticks! This was my (unsuccessful) attempt at making fortune cookies. These are the fortunes in the above cookies. Gracie wrote them. :) Happy Chinese New Year!  Gong Xi Fa Cai (Mandarin) Gong Hey Fat Choy (Cantonese)                                                                        恭禧發財    

It is not uncommon with international adoptions (and China in particular) for the children to have unhealthy teeth. Gracie had some really bad teeth. She needed oral surgery when she was 4. It was not good. Since then, though, her teeth have maintained a healthy status quo. So when Gemma came along, we were totally prepared for some bad teeth. Imagine our surprise when, at her first dental visit in December, she only had 1 cavity!! Surely that was too good to be true. Alas, it WAS too good to be true. That one cavity was on a front tooth that was abscessed and would need to come out. Sigh. Okay. We can handle this. After all, it's MUCH less work than poor little Gracie had to get done. So, today was the big day for Gemma to become toothless.  AFTER I think you'll agree with me that she's pretty much the cutest toothless 4-year-old around. :)

Christmas #1 begins early on Christmas morning at Grandma and Grandpa Peterson's house. Amy's Grandma Lundberg met Gemma for the first time. Great Grandma and all the kids sang "Jingle Bells" together. It was heartwarming! Gemma "won" these glasses in the annual Peterson Christmas Bingo game. Simon's cousin--Christian Duhamel--played multiple roles in Seattle Children's Theatre's production of A Year With Frog and Toad . He graciously invited us to be his guests, and the girls LOVED it! Christmas #2 occurred at Grandma Dee's house in Kellogg on Dec. 29. Christmas #3 happened on Dec. 31, at Great Grandma Perry's and Great Grandpa Jim's house in Kellogg. We also celebrated 2012 there. HAPPY NEW YEAR! The whole gang My beauties 2011 was a blessed--albeit a whirlwind!--year. The biggest change was adding our precious Gemma to the family. God is so good! We are re

Despite Christmas Break being far from a "break" most of the time, (we have been busier on break than we are normally!) I've had some spontaneous moments of reflection where I have found myself marveling at how drastically our family has changed since this Summer and how much has transpired since August. I have to admit that writing is not my forte, thus I struggle with how to frame this post. So many thoughts and emotions have engulfed me that I find myself needing to come up with a way to capture them to make writing about them later an easier task. The title of this post is the best way I could sum up my feelings about the last 5 months of 2011 as so much has happened. Further, I find myself several times throughout the day wondering if I really experienced the last 5 months or if I am dreaming. It is quite surreal to say the least. It is not until I stop and remind myself that we brought another person into our family that I realize the magnitude of the events that