Happy Mothers Day!

I woke up this morning to flowers and chocolates and breakfast in bed. It's too bad everyday isn't Mothers Day! :) I'm having a great Mothers Day so far and it's even sweeter because this year I finally have all of my kids here with me. YAY! :)

We had an awesome day yesterday at the taekwondo event! The boys tested for their yellow belt in the morning and I was SO proud of them!! For some reason when I imagined belt testing I thought that Master Lee would take each kid into a room and test them privately, so we were really surprised when we walked in and realized that they were each going to be tested in front of the whole group and a a panel of judges, who were taekwondo masters from other schools!

There were probably 30-40 people there for belt testing and they each had to go up and stand in front of the panel of judges and demonstrate the kicks and punches they've learned, do a verbal test of Korean terms and then the judges asked them questions about their commitment to taekwondo. I was so nervous for them and so amazingly proud of them when they went up there with confidence and did what they were asked to do like it was no big deal. They're braver than I am! When they were demonstrating the kicks Master Lee gave them all their directions in Korean and the kids totally understood exactly what to do. I have been watching them practice and I knew that they had learned a lot but seeing them up there doing such a great job made me realize just how far they've come since we started in February! They did great! It was one of those proud mom moments. :)

Anyway, they both passed the test and earned their yellow belts and after testing everyone celebrated with a really fun afternoon in the parking lot. There were bounce houses and hot dogs and face painting and all sorts of fun things to do. There were black belt demonstations by Master Lee and the visiting masters that were incredible! One of Master Lee's black belt students did a really cool demonstration where they lined up five kids and had them bend over and then he ran and jumped over all five of them and broke a board on the other side with a roundhouse kick. So cool! We had a great time watching the demonstations.

After that they did taekwondo olympics where the kids got to compete for medals. They did a competition to see how many times the kids could kick a kicking target in 30 seconds. Josh kicked the target 66 times in 30 seconds and won first place!

At the end of the day they had a raffle and I won a $25 gift certificate to a local restaurant. We went home sunburned and tired but happy that we had such a fun day!

I know that I keep rambling on about taekwondo but I still can't get over what a great experience this has been for our kids. If I had realized how much they would enjoy it and how much it would benefit them I would have signed them up ages ago. I'm really happy that we've discovered it, it's been fun for our whole family.

In other news, we're getting really excited to have Clarissa's adoption finalized in a little over a week!! I'm so excited about that, it's going to be a really fun day. A few days after the court date we're also doing a special religious ceremony that we had to wait until the adoption was finalized to do and that's something that is going to be really special for our family. We've got lots of exciting things coming up that we're really looking forward to!

Clarissa is doing really well and growing so fast! We've reached that age where she's pretty much wearing me out with how busy she is, but I'm enjoying her so much. She's super curious and wants to get in to EVERYTHING! I'm in crisis control mode most of the day, lol. We call her hurricane Clarissa. She moves really quickly and destroys everything in her path. :) She takes batteries out of the remotes, unrolls the toilet paper rolls, empties the kitchen cupboards, takes all the magnets and papers off the fridge...I just chase her around and try to keep up. It would get frustrating if she wasn't so darn cute. Just when I think I've had enough she'll climb into my lap and snuggle and then I forgive all the messes she makes. :) She might be a hurricane but she's so sweet and loving.

So that's the news from our house. The kids earned their yellow belts, I got breakfast in bed, Clarissa is a snuggly hurricane and we have lots of fun family events coming up. That pretty much covers it! :)