Finally, some new pictures. This is Julianna's opinion of having her photograph taken this week. She was very proud that she got on this all by herself and managed to turn it all by herself as well.

Giving superman a big hug.
On a positive note, I have not seen The Aristocats in at least a week. I have, in the meantime, seen Lady and the Tramp enough to memorize it. There are some things that bother me about the movie. First, why does the Tramp call Lady 'Pigeon' and why is she not offended? What possesses Aunt Sarah to bring those wicked cats with her? Does she not know they have a dog? Does she not know they trust the dog with the baby? Who watches the baby when Aunt Sarah drags Lady to the pet store for a muzzle? Does she leave him in the care of those trusty cats?

Still no pictures. I have not taken any new ones lately. We are awaiting immigration clearance on the second adoption. We heard from the new central processing site that they did not receive our home study. We contacted the local office where it was to be mailed from and they don't know where it is. We also found out that some of the immigration requirements have changed and we are not sure how that will affect us. Learning some new verses: be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.

This is going to be one of those boring no picture blogs. Our paperwork is currently at immigration, which is the last of the paperwork. The wait is starting to wear on me. We have no idea how long it will take for immigration to clear us and that makes it harder. As I make my way through the Bible, I came to Genesis 22 today. I have blogged about this before, but I thought I would revisit it. It is the story of Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son and having to walk three days to the appointed mountain. As our senior associate pastor preached, three days of wondering, "how can this be right, how can God's promised son now be the expected sacrifice?" Three days for Abraham to walk on, in faith, despite the temptation to say, "God, I think I misunderstood." Re-reading the chapter today reminded me of Abraham's faith and his choice to walk on in that faith.

We have reached the blogging doldrums around here.

It feels like forever since I sat down to blog. Julianna and I had a shoe disagreement. She loves this pair, but her toes stick out the front. I've spent a lot of time hiding shoes lately.

Raggedly Ann needed to be rocked to sleep this week.

You might notice this looks different. I was trying to add an addendum and ended up deleting about a third of it. So, the update is this: we received our pre-approval for Keith Matthew today. It was a great finish to our eight wedding anniversary. So now there are three important events on our anniversary, tax day, homecoming with Julianna and pre-approval for Keith.

The photos are from a year ago today, as we arrived home from China, 24 hours late, after an unexpected stop in Japan. We don't look half bad for people who had been traveling 48 hours.

Phil and Julianna visited Dreamy and Granddaddy while I worked this weekend. They fed the fish and played with the puppies. Julianna is quite fascinated by the dog swimming in the water. She keeps asking me to pull the picture up on the computer.

I'll admit this started as an idealist dream. My grandmother always had a flower garden that attracted a lot of butterflies and I have fond memories of catching butterflies . I thought it would be great to plant a little garden with Julianna, one that we could water all summer and watch the butterflies and birds visit. So off we went to the local home improvement warehouse for a bird bath, kid sized garden tools, and pretty flowers. We also got a little fence, mainly so the lawnmower doesn't get the flowers. We set up the bird bath and marked out the area and started digging.
Unfortunately, about right now, Julianna got bored with the whole process. The dirt was hard to dig and mommy was using big tools. No place for little kid tools at this point. My solution, turn on the hose and let her clean out the bird bath, partly because water will keep her entertained for hours and partly because she had made a mud pie in the bird bath.
When I finally got to the point of planting, Julianna decided that digging in the dirt was not all that much fun and proceeded to pull the flowers off the plants. My disillusionment set in. She did finally decided that scooping dirt out and putting it on the garden buddy was fun. It was drenching wet and made a nice, muddy mess.

In the end, the flowers were planted and the bird bath filled with clean water. I'm sure we will enjoy watering it all summer and the birds will probably enjoy the water, but next time I'm going to have someone with large garden equipment come and prepare the garden spot. Applications are now being accepted, as I had also planned to grow tomatoes for our little veggie lover.

Yes, the pants came clean. Uncle Don, is called Lollipop around here.

It's really hard this week to not be nostalgic. I went back and read the post for day two of parenthood, which was all about vomit. Poor little thing would not eat and what she did ended up on my pants. Ahh, the memories.

Yesterday was Gotcha Day. Wow. We had a nice quiet dinner at home. We lit a candle and said a prayer for Julianna's birth family. I put her into her Gotcha Day outfit, which, amazingly, still fit, but she was uncooperative with photos. At least this April was filled with smiles and not screams.

It is hard to believe, but one year ago today we were sitting in the international airport in LA hoping and praying we would make it to China. It has been an amazing year. We have been audited by the IRS twice, my brother came home from Iraq, my brother-in-law went to Iraq, we celebrated the holidays with new enthusiasm, and we have seen Julianna blossom into a happy, contented child.

Our first Easter in China, with stuffed peeps.
Easter at home with real marshmallow peeps.

Now for some photos from the trip. Uncle Don took the grandkids fishing one day. I found an adorable outfit for the occasion, since every event needs a special outfit. Julianna had no fear of the worms. She even picked one out of the box herself and tried to throw it in the lake. She helped Uncle Don reel in his line. The fish, however, were uncooperative with our little outing.

Julianna and I returned from Grandma and PawPaw's today. We were greeted by a letter from the IRS informing us that they are auditing another year of taxes. Julianna might learn some choice words other than audit.
And now for a few highlights from our trip. We visited Uncle Don at work and got to sit in his helicopter. This is Uncle Don's seat.

From Easter, or as Nana calls it, Evey's Sister.
I have more to post, but I need some strong chocolate to recover from my IRS greeting. Good thing Lent is over...

Julianna has always had an avidity for selecting her own shoes.
Running, with ribbons on our knees.

Julianna has unique ways of sitting on the chairs.

Run out of seating in your TV room?
Try an old computer tower.

This morning when we brought the paper in, Julianna requested the "airplane section". I guess she is keeping up on the latest news on the EADS/Northrop Grumman tanker contract.

Who has the Metro section?

Throw me another moon pie, mister.
Julianna told me she wanted two hair bows. I started looking for two pink ones to match her outfit, but she declared one of them had to be blue. It is so exciting to have her learning new things. Right now, she is learning "karaoke" since the current favorite video is "sesame sings karaoke". Well, I need to go because it is almost time for my personal favorite, Ladybug picnic. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12...

Julianna and I had another interesting conversation this morning. She was chasing one of the cats down the hall and I gave her my standard phrase of mutual nonaggression. She looked at me and said "aggression". I repeated nonaggression, she repeated aggression. I think the cats are doomed.

Finally, a new post. The flu hit our house, but we are recovering. Julianna did go to the adoption clinic at UAB. They think she is essentially caught up on her motor skills. She tested at 2 years, six months. Chronologically, she is two years, eight months. Her language skills, though, are still a concern. She is finally interested in videos, but only ones with music and sesame street characters. The only exception is The Aristocats, which I think I now know by heart. It does, however, give me relatively uninterrupted blogging time.

I have decided to run. My goal is to run a marathon, hopefully next January. I've been taking Julianna out with me and she is a tough task master. When I run, she yells "faster, faster", then giggles mercilessly and when I stop to walk, she yells "again, again". Hopefully she won't make me eat raw eggs....

Julianna is quite fascinated by Phillip's new Star Wars book. She calls it the "Chewy Book". She gets to look at it right before bed, after she reads her other books. Phillip has shown her parts of Episode IV and she has her very own R2D2. I let her watch part of Episode I: The Phantom Menace last week. When I told Phillip, he said he had not planned on letting them watch the first three movies until they were 10 or 12 because it is like letting them read the apocrypha.

Planes, trains and automobiles....
Fixing the seat on her tricycle.

Julianna and I had quite the conversation this morning. It went something like this:


JC: Nandy (candy)
Mom: You would like some candy?
JC: Purple nerds
Mom: I will have to find the purple nerds.
JC proudly strolls over to the 'secret hiding' place and declares: Up there. Momma get it.


On the plus side, I found a bag of unopened Christmas chocolate while digging around for the purple nerds.

This lovely sequence of events happened last week.

Julianna removing Daddy's wallet from the drawer:

Checking it for money:
I think we might be in trouble when she hits the teenage years...