Mom's 80th Birthday Weekend

Linda, the party-thrower and caterer-extraordinaire did her best this weekend. Mom was honored on her 80th birthday in grand fashion. It was SO much fun to spend time with Grandma this weekend before and during the party. Amy has not stopped saying she wants to be with Grandma since she kissed Grandma good-bye in the limo after the party.

Funny thing happened on the dance floor. When the disco song, "Celebrate", came on Mom said, "electric slide!", and extended her hands to me to join her in the line dance. I felt awkward saying, Mom, "this isn't the electric slide"! She ignored me and proceeded to show me that the electric slide can be done to Celebrate.

Happy Day After your Birthday Mom!

The Best Reunion Anyone Could Ask For

The Guigang girls, 2 1/2 years post-adoption, are the prettiest people I've ever seen. I was so in awe of the families that were created by the fate of our adoption and all of its timing. We traveled through China with ten families who were all brought together by two conditions: the choice of our agency, and the LID we achieved. This resulted in all of us getting a batch referral from the Guigang SWI, and our daughters spent the first months and/or years of their lives either together or at least under the same supervision. We could not have asked for a better group of couples to share this intense, stressful, joyful and unique experience with. The reunion was spectacular, and Don and I said how sad we were to leave the whole day driving home.

Amy says this is Grandma

Intriguing Isabel

Computers are back up. Seems there was an incompatibility between the Linksys router and the Mac operating system. The airport extreme (apple router) saved the day. Too bad I didn't call you, Patricia, before spending hours on the phone with apple, palm, cox and linksys. You would have saved me tons of time and frustration.

Amy is in her second phase of swim lessons and it is amazing to see her blossom as a swimming-lesson-taking toddler.

Amy and Isabel are peas in a pod. It was Isabel's 4th birthday party and we all managed to go. Oh how cute it was.

July 4th Joy and Computer Catastrophe

July 4th was wonderful in so many ways. We enjoyed a neighborhood parade and party with friends whose kids are friends with Amy. It had the joyful feel of community. Thanks to Amy, we know people in the community! The Mayor, Meyera Oberndorf, was in the parade (photo of motorcade below). At the party, she said nice things to say to and about Amy. As she walked away from us and up to the microphone to speak to the crowd, Amy said, is that Grandma?

We loved our dinner picnic on the beach. What's not to like about eating dinner on our towels, listening to the Virginia Beach Symphony and Virginia Beach Chorale group, and watching fireworks at the ocean?

While I love our laptops and iphones when everything is working, when they aren't it is a different story. I have to have a high speed connection for my work machine, and of course we want to use it for our personal laptops. What does that require? A family network. We have two different operating systems (Mac and Windows), a cable internet service provider (Cox), a router (Linksys), and a mess of cables. This weekend we had to find the needle in the haystack that was causing our laptops to be simple paperweights. Poor Amy and Don have had to endure hours upon hours of Mommy talking to one tech support agent after another, from India, the Phillipines, Canada and the US. Forgive the rant and wish us luck getting our paperweights to surf the internet again, via our ailing family network.