Our Girl is Three!

Maeve is now "tree". It is hard to believe how much she has changed since she came into our lives. That little baby has grown into a young lady--mostly. Sometimes she is still that scared, vulnerable infant. But mostly she is a confident little dynamo that her two old folks can barely keep up with. At 36 inches tall and 31 lbs she is getting hard to lug around. Luckily I have stopped aging--at least in my mind. My creaky old bones and paunchy belly tell a different story.

This was a big weekend for our Maeve. It started on Wednesday when PoPo and GungGung came to visit and lasted until this morning when they left. PoPo called when they got home and Maeve said "I miss you!"

We had a birthday party on Saturday. Maeve was sooooo excited about it for the week before. It was mostly family and a few friends. Maeve loved having all of her family around. She was especially happy to have her youngest cousins here to play with. We let her stay up 2.5 hours past her bedtime so she was a bit off on Sunday.

Monday was her actual birthday. She took some peanut free cupcakes into daycare to share with her friends. They had them for afternoon snack. You know, sugar 'em up and then send them home to their parents... One of her little friends bumped her head just before snack, so Maeve spent snacktime holding an icepack to her friend's head with one hand and picking the sprinkles off her cupcake with the other hand. We have a little multitasker on our hands.

Monday night we went out for a nice dinner with Maeve's four grandparents. It has been party party party for days now!

Preparty pics:
Here she is on St. Patrick's Day a dress from her great aunt Dolores in Ireland.

Trying on Mom's shoes.

Reading the paper with daddy @ Starbucks.

Party poses:
Cooking up some fun with cousin Bram
I found these cupcake dresses at a local craftshow. Aren't they adorable? www.sewfunky.ca
Maeve and Robyn decided that the new makeup table would be a good hair salon. I guess she really enjoyed that first haircut!

She's really into Disney Princesses these days. So her birthday was Princess themed.
Blowing out the candle.
Complete with a castle in the sky...

Birthday dinner:
With PoPo and GungGung

Birthday kisses from Mom and Dad.

With Grandma and Grandpa

Birthdays are so much fun

Where's Mommy?

I haven't been at home as much as I'd like lately. It has been busy at work, but I also took on an extra project which finished this past weekend. A few of us from my company entered a contest in support of the local food bank. We had to create a structure out of cans of food.

So we raised about $4000, which allowed us to purchase over 4500 cans of food. With those cans, we created this


It is a BIG fish tank. There's a fish profile on both sides and a face on either end. We named them Finn and Gil.

There were many other great builds and lots of cans were purchased to help kickoff the food bank's spring drive. Lots of other teams used wood, packing tape and even magnets to build their structures, but we tried to keep our structure "pure". So there is a wooden base, some bristol board and a little bit of cardboard in our structure to even out can heights, but for the most part it is just cans.

Here are a few of the other structures:










My favourite (after our own) is the basket of fruit. The use of colour from the labels was really striking.

My First "Real" Haircut

We took Maeve for her first professional haircut on Tuesday. There is a place in town called Cookie Cutters that specializes in kids cuts. I thought Maeve would be more comfortable in that environment.

She was super nervous and wouldn't speak or smile the whole time. She just sat there with a grimace on her face. She was very good though and didn't move except to follow the hairdresser's instructions. I held her hand the whole time.

So when we arrived, she looked around a little. They had a climbing apparatus with a slide. Each cutting station had a different vehicle for the kids to sit in. There was a little red airplane, a motorcycle, a firetruck, a green bug car, etc. Maeve was too overwhelmed to pick, so we chose the pink convertible for her. Each station also has a video player... but again, she was too overwhelmed to choose a movie so we picked Elmo Goes To School for her.

She was real trooper and was all smiles once she was done and we all raved about how beautiful her hair looked.

This morning she asked if she could go get her haircut again. I guess it wasn't that horrible an experience for her!

These are the many faces of Maeve from last week. You can't really see it, but she's got quite the mullet going.


Here she is getting her haircut.




The happy girl afterwards!

Sooooo much better than the bang trims that mommy gives her!!!

Family Day

February 16 was Family Day here in Ontario so I got the day off work. We had been out late with Maeve the night before visiting Uncle Peter, Aunty Carolyn and Cousin Connor, so we all slept in a bit. We had a great day together playing and taking a long walk to a Starbucks on the far side of our community.

The thing that Maeve wanted to play with most when we got home was the stringing bead set that she got for Christmas from our friends the Jagers. She has been playing with them constantly for the last month or so. (Thanks Thomas, Julianne, Jacqueline and Walter!)

Here's a video of her stringing beads while watching Bao Bei (a learning Mandarin video for kids) and dancing with her valentines froggy. This kid can multitask with the best of us!


The finished product!


I think I need to do something different with Maeve's hair now. Between keeping the bangs out of her eyes and trying to encourage the back to grow in, she's now got a mullet. Eek!

My Helper

Maeve loves to help me with whatever I'm doing -- cooking, laundry, cleaning. Often it makes the task take longer but it is more fun to do it with my daughter.

This weekend she decided she wanted some pancakes with lunch.

Please ignore how cluttered my kitchen is. One day I'll have enough cupboards to put stuff away. Or maybe less stuff!

The happy chef at work.
Enjoying the fruits of her labour.

It seems like yesterday

I can hardly believe that it has been two years since we completed our journey to Maeve and started our new adventure as a family. What a joyous two years it has been! We've laughed. We've cried. We've had amazing joys and a couple of scares. We wouldn't trade these experiences for anything! Well, I guess we could have done without the scares.

What a privilege it has been to watch our baby grow into a little girl.

The first thing we noticed when she was placed in my arms was how observant she is. She watched everything that was happening around her. She still notices and remembers every little thing. She is great at sharing, loves to help people, has great empathy when others are upset or hurt and has a huge heart. She is and always will be our little love.

We didn't expand our family by just one though. An unexpected benefit of having shared our adoption experience with a group is that they are now part of our extended family. The girls are a tie back to each others' life in China... before they joined their Forever Families. And their parents are a great support group for us!

Happy Forever Family Day Maevey! Women ai ni. (We love you.)

Happy Forever Family Day to the Xinyu sisterhood! We love you and miss you.

Maeve with her Foster Mama
Gotcha!
Our first smile...almost.
Our first family photo.
A royal photo for Queen Maeve.
Our first anniversary, this time last year.
Frolicking in the fall leaves last October
February 5, 2009
The Happy Family
Double Kisses

Xin Nian Kuai Le!

Happy New Year everyone!

Xin Nian Kuai Le is Mandarin for Happy New Year.
Xin Nian is New Year. Xin is new and Nian is year.
Kuai Le is happiness, joy, pleasure, delight, or rejoicings.

The most common Chinese ways of saying Happy New Year are Gong Xi Fa Cai (Mandarin) and Gong Hey Fat Choy (Cantonese). Even though the pronunciations are a little different, both are written the same way.
Gong Xi is congratulations or respectfully wishing one joy.
Fa Cai is to become rich or to make money.
Thus, Gong Xi Fa Cai means wishing you to be prosperous in the coming year.

And so endth the lesson for today. :-)

We went to CNY celebrations two weekends in a row. First we went to the local recreation centre for a citywide celebration. It wasn't very busy. I think because it was very cold outside and also the local Chinese school was having their CNY celebration on the same day. One of Maeve's preschool friends and her mom joined us. The girls had a hoot walking around holding hands. They got to see a martial arts demonstration, but it didn't hold their attention for very long. We missed the dancing because I didn't want Maeve to skip her nap.

This past weekend the local play group for kids adopted from China held another celebration. This one went from 3 until 8:30 and Maeve was completely wiped by the end of it. We did crafts, had a raffle, ate a great Canadian-Chinese meal, watched two different dance groups (little girls) and saw a great martial arts demonstration complete with Lion Dance. I think Maeve's favourite thing was playing ring around the roses with her friends while we waited for supper.

Maeve checks out her Chinese Princess coat in the mirror.
That's her orphanage assigned name on the scroll behind her "Yu Cai Ling"
Here's Maeve looking a little unsure at the Bamboo Bunch NY party.
These Lions is what she was unsure about.
No smiles for the camera after the scary Lions!
We bought this coat in Hong Kong on the way to meet Maeve. It just fits her now. Good thing I didn't forget about it like some of the other stuff I've bought for her!