Why I Cried Today

Spring At The Zoo

With yesterday's beautiful weather, we decided to head out to the zoo for the year's first visit.

Rex loved this flamingo
and the feeling seemed mutual

The wonders of the train ride

Lately, our youngest is a super sweet daddy's girl

I am so thankful to be doing life with this crazy bunch:

It Must Be Spring Break When...

#girlsatplay

Rex Is 8

I can't believe that our middle child turned 8 recently.  I can still so vividly remember the pain of missing his second birthday while we were in process of adopting him even though a small eternity seems to have gone by since then.

Rex's birthday party was dinosaur themed this year and we celebrated with family and friends at Recreations Outlet.  I kept it super simple and stole most of my food ideas from another mom's blog.  Decorations were easy to come by as well.

Chocolate Swamp Cupcakes:
gluten-free, dairy-free, canola-free
and pretty darn delicious

My ice age cake: key lime and coconut

Easy-peasy party favors which I bought in an adoption fundraiser and then added a dinosaur lollipop:

Even though things were slow to start and rushed in the end, we were happy to see our family and friends surround Rex on his special day.

Happy, happy birthday to our only son,
our strong and silent kid,

our most cuddly child

whose laughter is irresistible.

You have come so far since your set-back last summer,

growing and learning,

working hard,

impressing those who have the privilege of helping you along,

showing your love for us every single day
and proving your understanding of the world without many words.

We're so thankful you're ours

and we love you forever.

Picture Of The Day

This girl likes to choose her own accessories.  She boarded the school bus looking like this today:

I especially enjoy how she's channeling Michael Jackson with the single black velvet glove.  She makes us laugh every day.

The Sounds Of Apraxia

We have a son with a great desire to communicate and many things to tell, but unless you know him well you'll have a difficult time understanding him thanks to apraxia of speech.  He's probably using somewhere between 75 and 100 spoken words at this time and some are more easily recognizable to the untrained ear than others:

Here you'll see that he not only knows his colors, he tries to name them all:

We're so proud of our Rex and his continued hard work and effort in communicating.

Mesrop Mashtots

For her biography project at school, Ella chose to research Mesrop Mashtots, the inventor of the Armenian alphabet. She had initially been assigned Ronald Reagan which held zero interest for her, so after some discussion, she and I proposed Mashtots as an alternative and her teacher was more than happy to let her go that route.

The research was done at home and at school, the written portion of the project was completed at school, and the portrait was homework.  The portrait had to use at least three materials symbolizing the person's accomplishments.  So, for Mashtots, we chose a halo to represent his sainthood, a map to represent his travels at a time when traveling was very difficult, pencils to represent that he taught people how to write, some of the letters he invented to represent the new alphabet, and the Armenian flag to represent how he strengthened the Armenian people.

This was a fun project for Ella and me and a great was to celebrate her cultural heritage.  We're pretty proud of our portrait.  Ella plans to give it as a present to her Armenian parents.