Saturday

Our busy month continues and frankly, I'm kind of counting down the days until order is restored to our house and we don't have a million things going on!

Today we took the kids to Dirk, my photography teacher, for family photos. I have been trying desperately to get good pictures of Clarissa for weeks, and she is just such a busy kid that I can't get her to sit still long enough to get good photos. I figured that Dirk might have better luck because she usually gets quiet around strangers, so I thought she might sit still for him.

Unfortunately that was not the case, so it was a wild afternoon at the photo studio! We did photos of the whole family first and I think that he managed to get a few cute ones, but Clarissa was pretty much done sitting still for photos after that, so trying to get the rest of the photos that I wanted was pretty tough!

The photo that was most important to me today was her hanbok portrait. Every baby gets their picture taken in their hanbok for their first birthday and I know that the foster mother and my Korean friends would really love a hanbok portrait of her. We wrangled her into her hanbok and Dirk has the cutest little chair that we sat her on and after a little struggle to get Clarissa to sit still I'm pretty sure that we managed a good portrait. Whew!

I'm going to go over later this week and look at everything Dirk got and I'm really excited to see them. I think despite the fact that Clarissa wanted nothing to do with getting her picture taken he managed to get a few cute ones. Clarissa is so freakin' CUTE that I want to take her picture a million times a day, but she hates it. She's super happy and smiley all day long, but the camera comes out and the smiles dissapear for some reason. If I do manage to get her to sit still for a picture, most of the time she looks very serious, and she rarely looks that serious in person! She's a total goofball in person, I love her funny personality. Hopefully the older she gets the better she'll do for photos. I'm dying for summer to get here so that I can take her outside and take pictures.

I was seriously so exhausted by the time the picture taking was done today that I came home, we got Clarissa down for a nap and then I took a nap. I felt like I had been wrestling alligators for a few hours, lol.

Tomorrow we have a bunch of things going on. Church in the morning, then a friend from out of town is coming to visit, then I have a church meeting in the afternoon and in the evening I have MORE out of town friends coming to visit! For some reason my friends have all come to town this weekend! YAY!

Then this coming week is the week that I get Clarissa's birthday party together. We're having it next Saturday night. I'm looking forward to the party but it's been tricky to plan it because I'm trying to do a Korean themed party and it's been hard to get my hands on Korean food and decorations. Some of the Korean food I can make, but there are a few authentic things that are really tricky to make and the ingredients are impossible to find, but fortunately I found a Korean market that is ordering things for me. They're getting me Korean pears (YAY!) and they're making a big tray of rice cakes, which I've never tried but sound yummy! When we hear rice cakes we think of those hard crunchy things with no flavor, but Korean rice cakes are completely different.

I think it's going to be a fun party but this week is going to be really busy trying to get everything together. Traditionally Korean first birthday parties are HUGE and you invite everyone you know, which is what I really wanted to do in the beginning, but then I had to really talk myself down and be realistic about what I can put together right now. So we're doing the traditional Korean first birthday party on a much smaller scale with just a few close friends. It should be fun, I'm looking forward to it!

The party is Saturday night and then Sunday Melissa is going home. We'll be sad to see her go, we've had a really good time with her. I hope that she's going home with lots of good memories of her time in America. We really tried to make it a fun experience for her. When we were having family photos done today we took a couple with her in it, so when I get them back I'm going to have one framed for her to keep to remember us. I hope that we get to see her again someday. I would love to keep in touch with her family.

January has been a really busy month for us, and it's been fun but I'm really looking forward to an uneventful February. We don't have a whole lot going on in February, and that sounds good to me! :)