From Scratch...

I took the time to make Jack's birthday cake from scratch. Oh, I had forgotten why it can be worth the effort. It was a beautiful three-layer yellow and dark chocolate delicacy (if I do say so myself...and I do because I ate two pieces). Jack climbed up on the counter while I was finishing the dishes and ate part of his 3-layer "baby cake" before it was even frosted. I created a cute slideshow of his party so make sure to check it out.

We had such a good time celebrating. I finally made something that everyone liked (hard to please this crowd)...philly cheese steak sandwiches. I was inspired by Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. I am addicted to that show. It makes me salivate before I've even clicked on the new episodes. The only thing I will do differently with this menu is to add homemade onion rings next time...I can hardly wait.

Make a postcard - it's easy!

New Year, New Look!

I have been coveting others' more flashy websites for some time and I finally decided that it was time for an update. Good thing I got the stomach flu from Jack...I was able to get it finished! Thanks to Jeff for watching the kids today. Thanks to my body for keeping all the food where it belongs...

I'm not sure how long this look will last. It is a bit on the pink side. I'm not a huge fan of pink, but I couldn't really find anything "not neon" in greens and earth tones. I'll keep looking. It should be easier now that I know what I'm up against.

P.S. It looks much better in Internet Explorer. I'm not sure what is going on with the html code in Mozilla. I'm probably not going to fix it because I don't really care for that browser anyway. just fyi.

Hey, Hot Stuff!

Jack found some of Sierra's sunglasses. He thought they were pretty cool.

It has been a long week for Jack. He has been so very sick. A horrible cold topped off with a bit of a stomach virus. Nothing worse that having a sore throat, stuffed nose and vomiting. Today is the first day out of the last three that I didn't rock him or hold him all day long. We even went out to eat at the McDonald's Playland last night because I was feeling so guilty about Lachlan's lack of attention. She thought that she had died and gone to heaven.

I have been back to our regular diet now for about a week (post-holiday hangover). Let's just say that Lachlan would rather eat something laced with cinnamon and sugar rather than plain oatmeal for breakfast and vegetable-based lunches. She went on a Gandhi-type fast for a few days before she got hungry enough to eat it. She is rediscovering her likeness for dried fruit and oranges as snacks. She still asks for chocolate after every meal, but hey, so do I...

I am so glad that all of the treats are finally out of the house. It is really hard to give the kids a "snack" and not have a few for yourself. I'm not really capable of a lot of self-control in this area.

Oh, and I finally started my guitar class last week. I have been playing left-handed, but our instructor suggested that maybe I would have a better advantage if I took use of the dexterity of my left hand (as it is the stronger of the two). Consequentially, I had the local shop restring my guitar for a right-handed person. It has been a hard week because I feel dyslexic. I'm not really sure if I like the change. It still feels very awkward and my finger tips are killing me! I'm going to give it a couple of weeks to see if it really does make a difference. For now, I'm just plugging away on a dorky-looking guitar (the guitar still has the pick-plate on upside down..I'll fix it later if I like the change).

Okay, So I've Been A Little Busy...

Let's just start with my daughter being a robot. Frankly, she doesn't have a clue what a robot is (and if she did she would scream and run the other way), but she really likes to climb into paper bags. This is very irritating to the cats because they are usually trying to do the same thing and they simply can't all fit in there together. Jeff suggested a compromise by cutting out some "eye holes"-it probably saved her life.

Since the children came, we occasionally have one of the cats (prisoners) escape from the house (holding facility). On one particularly cold and wet day, Fritz was stupid enough to run across the street under a pine tree. I yelled from the garage, "fine, you idiot-you can stay out!" Sadly, however, I forgot that he was out and I went to town in a blizzard for several hours. These sad, muddy paw prints on the front door show that he tried to claw his way back into jail.

We have been sledding. This is a trip on an old runner-type sleigh. Sledding is fun for the kids, but not so fun for mom and dad. I miss skiing. I try not to think about how old they will really have to be for them to enjoy that...

Okay, so Jeff likes sledding...maybe it's just me.

Jack prefers something much slower and controlled.

This is our new red sled. The inside is slicker than the outside. This is Lachlan hanging on for dear life. We tried to get her to sit in the middle but she just kept sliding out the back...zero, traction.

Jack finds out just how slippery the sled is...face first into the snow. Sledding over.

So many of you have asked me about how hard it is to have two children the same age...well, let me tell you about the Cocoa Puffs Incident.

Children are playing nicely in the living room. I decide to clean up the bathroom. I grab the cleaning supplies and dash into the bathroom. Things seem to be going well, I peek out occasionally to make sure that they both still have their eyeballs and no chipped teeth. I continue to scrub the tub. When I finish with the final rinse I realize that it is suddenly VERY quiet in the living room. I stop. I listen. And then I hear Jack laughing...not just a regular laugh, but a gut bursting round of laughter unlike I've ever heard before...

Oh, shit.

I head to the living room. Children are gone. Laughter coming from the kitchen. Make that laughter, singing and some kind of foot stomping.

My discovery reveals that the children have broken into the kitchen pantry. Lachlan has pulled down a giant (think Malt O' Meal size) bag of Cocoa Puffs. She shakes a few on the floor and then dances around on the Cocoa Puffs and sings "Hello, Hello" (a familiar nursery/primary song). Jack is shoving puffs in his mouth as fast as he can, all the while laughing hysterical at his sister! This creates quite a chocolate mess because he doesn't have any back teeth to chew with so the laughing just makes it all drool down the front of him.

"Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello, me ma moo ma meeee."

After Lachlan dances around on the puffs, Jack lays down on his stomach and swims around in the crumbs. It is even funnier when Lachlan slips on the mess she has created and falls on the floor. This brings on another round of fitful laughter.

Granted, it was just wild enough that I had to get some pictures of the whole thing. It took about 20 minutes to get the crumbs off of the kids, off the floor...Jack kept trying to grab the puffs out of the waste scoop as I was sweeping them up.

This however, is my favorite picture. This is where I started laughing...about 15 minutes after the clean up I found the kids in the hall nearly passed out from the collapse of the sugar rush. They laid on that laundry pile for a good thirty minutes before they got their strength back!

And then there was the Sweet Potatoes Incident. Jeff left for church meetings and I ran down the hall to grab a bib...ironic really, since he grabbed the sweet potatoes container and I came back to find him drinking them.

No incident here. Just Christmas morning...Hostess Powdered Donuts are not a Murray Family approved food (as Aunt Susie would say), but on Christmas morning anything goes...and the kids ate about a dozen of them. Lachlan liked washing it down with Egg Nog. She still asks for it every meal. Fortunately for her, she's so underweight that she can have it at any given time. Can you imagine? A diet that consists of pats of butter, whole milk, Egg Nog and cheese. I'll never know.

Hum, what can I say about this hair lately? Probably nothing good. Those of you who know me, know that I have firmly lived by the resolution that good hair is very important. I have often dreamed of doing wonderful things with my daughter's hair...let me just say that, uggh, Lachlan may have the world's slowest growing, fuzziest, wild-out-of-control hair on the earth. This is a picture of what her hair looks like on any given day...all day, even two seconds after you brush it it looks like this, like a mix between the Heat Miser and Sanjaya (with his mohawk).

And now, please welcome my latest DIY project. I found these cool paper mache letters at Giga-JoAnns in O-Town. They were only a couple of dollars. I spray painted it white and then glued a variety of different buttons on the top to give it a bit of texture. It turned out so cute! It was so easy and I had been wanting to do something different in her room. Just for the record, I did get a KitchenAid mixer for Christmas. I made Double Fudge Mocha Brownie Cookies from the Martha Stewart Baking Handbook and Bobby Flay's Blondies from the Blondie Throwdown. They were both so good that I never even bothered to take any pictures. I'm sure that eventually I will post a full body picture and you can just take a gander at my thighs...it will make you instantly think of an overindulgence for baked goods.

And let's not forget that it's ELECTION SEASON...oh, my gosh, can you just shout out loud for the landslide victory that it would be for the Democratic Party if Mike Huckabee even comes close to the nomination. Here's a laugh out loud piece from the NYTimes if you aren't up to speed on this dude (Two Buck Huck). I am so excited that Obama didn't take NH last night. I really wanted to even the score so that I can have these two (vs. Clinton) whittle it out to the finish. God Bless the women voters who came out to vote!! It's about bloody time we took control of this system!

Oh, and one last thing, we are so excited for Lachlan to have a new cousin. Mike Tullis and his boys (and uncle Jason Murray) will be coming THIS SATURDAY from China with Kylie (Fu Kang)!! She is from the Guizhou Region of China. It's pretty far from Lachlan's hometown, but we are so excited for that special connection. I'll be sure to post some homecoming video soon.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

To all our friends and family:

Merry Christmas and a

Happy New Year!

Two Kids, Three Cats...

We recently had the most wonderful photographer come to the house. She took all of these pictures... I was so pleased because I felt that she really captured the kids in such a natural setting. She was also very patient with my personal requests. If you ever need a photographer, I am offering my highest recommendation. Check out her stuff at http://www.jbroadhurstphotography.com/

Ready for winter

My little boy.

Feed the Cat

This is from my friend, Suzanne. We went on a humanitarian trip to Ukraine together. She is such a neat person...this clip is only one of the reasons we really understood each other.

P.S. The cat in this clip is Fritz. The only change I would make is that if he really gets upset he jumps up and turns on the bedroom lights. (seriously, no joke)

Stormy Weather

Apocalypse weather. You know the kind of day where the sun doesn't shine and the wind will blow, but then there is this eerie silence when it is so still outside that you can hear yourself breathing....well, that's today.

My friend, Denise, calls it tornado weather. I've never lived in the Midwest, but apparently the stillness is cause for alarm on days like today. The funny thing is that is feels far too cold for a big storm. I think that is why the day has had such a mysterious-ness to it. Oh, and I've had that Shaun Colvin song running through my head for TWO days..."Sunny came home with a mission"--Yeah, she came home to burn the place to the ground. Hum. Maybe I should up the dose on the old Lexapro (ha.ha.ha.)

Here's another weird thing. My dreams. I (as a general rule) do not dream. I lay down and crash. Jeff usually does all the psychotic dreaming that this family needs (ask him about falling out of bed). However, this past week I have been out of control. In fact, for the past two nights my dreams have been so vivid that I have been able to sit up in bed and wonder if they really happened. Two nights ago I seriously dreamed that Michael Scott (yes, Steve Carrell from The Office) came to the house to help me clean out the litter boxes. It was so real that I remember being seriously alarmed when I watched him start to use my good eyebrow tweezers to pick the "chunks" out of the litter box. He had a garbage bag slung over his shoulder like Santa Claus and he was cleaning them out piece by piece. The worst part was that I realized that the litter wasn't just contained in the box...it was strewn all over the basement in little tiny piles and Mr. Scott just kept commenting on how there was a lot of work to be done.

Okay, you can wipe your tears from laughter now because I woke up from my dream by laughing out loud. It was so hard to even have to explain to Jeff why I was laughing. Although, he didn't really laugh he just said, "Well, all it means is that you better get down to the basement and get the cat poopers cleaned up." So much for helping me to analyze THAT one.

Which reminds me that I never relayed this dream to Susie--I should have done that. I was just over at her house, but I wasn't thinking about my recent neurosis. Perhaps I should just leave it open to you (fellow readers). I'm sure that there are many of you who tune in weekly for your dose of Jim and Pam.

A 40-Hour Week

I'm really behind at work. uuggh. Is it possible to do 40-hours worth of work in the next two days, take care of the children, cook meals/clean house, exercise and still have a smile on my face??? Okay, is it possible to work 40-hours in the next two days? no. And if you have any questions about how my house cleaning is faring...well, check out this pile of laundry...

Yeah, there's a couch under there---and not only that, there are still about 5 loads that aren't even washed yet. I haven't been able to bring myself to start folding it because I know that I will be there for at least an hour. I can always seem to think of a million other things that I can do in an hours time. Oh, well, it's not like I've got a bunch of people coming over who will need a place to sit down. (how's that for justification?).

Earlier this week, Jeff sent me a NY Times article about international adoption and we also had some correspondence with Y Baby (who was in the same orphanage with Lachlan). I have to admit that I haven't thought about the reasons we adopted her for a very long time. After a lot of reflection, I'm surprised at how I simply accept the fact that she is our daughter. I really haven't had any time to think about her "past life". I've wondered often this week about what her birthmother looks like--I get so many comments about how Jack looks like me, and I wonder if she looks like her mother. Where are they? What are they doing? Do they think about her, or is their life simply a daily battle with survival? It very well could be...

The SLTribune had a week long series on the struggles of Chinese workers. The high cost of cheap products...something I used to teach about in my former life. How ironic that I shop on a weekly basis at Walmart and other discount stores--which, rarely showcase anything other than products made in developing countries--oh, there really is a cost for buying cheap. I hope that somewhere somehow Lachlan's parents have been able to make peace with their decisions. My heart would break if I thought that they are haunted by her...may there be some mercy for them. In the same regard, I pray for mercy on her future struggles. I hope that she will continue to be the resilient child we have come to know--that she will be able to put everything in the proper perspective.

I hope that as a mother I can do a good job of keeping her past and present in the proper perspective. It is so easy to just go through the motions of seeing that every one's physical needs are met. It is much more difficult to consider the emotional and mental aspects of life. Especially when Lachlan's are so specialized to a time and place of existence that I have never experienced on a personal level.

Hum, I'm not really sure where this one-sided conversation ends...maybe I'll have more to say after I fold all of the laundry.