Celebrating one year!

It's hard to believe that one year ago, we were in China adopting TongJie.  The actual date that we got him was May 7, but since this has been a busy week for us, we celebrated our "family day" today, on May 12, which also happens to be Mother's Day.  We had a fun day!

First, we went to Starbucks:

 

Then we went and checked out the brand-new Pybus Public Market.  This place is super cool, and we're really excited about it!  I didn't take any photos of the inside, and not all of the shops are open yet, but there are a lot of neat little stores that will be there.  And the market is right along the loop trail, so it will be easy to walk down to the river or to run around in the grassy areas.

TongJie was mostly interested in an empty bike rack in the back parking lot of the market.

The riverfront park is right next to the new market, so we walked out on the dock.

After our adventures at the Pybus market and the park, we had dinner at the new Cafe Rio restaurant.  It was really good!  They give free cheese quesadillas to kids under 6, but what TongJie really liked was sharing my rice and beans.

After we got home from our fun afternoon/evening, we went for a walk with Albert, but I didn't take any pictures of that.  Unfortunately, it ended badly when TongJie tripped and scraped his knee, but luckily we were almost home when that happened.  All in all, it was a fun family day celebration!

This past week, the weather has been unseasonably hot, like in the 90s!  We got out all of our summer clothes and have been taking advantage of the hot weather by spending lots of time outside.

Last week, I tried a new recipe for chocolate "pudding" made from avocados (recipe link here, if you're interested) and it was a big hit!

Indoors, TongJie has been entertaining himself by making "slides" for his truck on the couch using books all lined up.  This keeps him busy for a long, long time.  He gets everything in place just so, and then drives his truck back and forth, while mentioning "slide" (only when he says it, it sounds like "shwai") every once in awhile, I guess to make sure I know what he's doing.

We just had our 3rd post-placement visit with our social worker yesterday and everything went great.  We really like her and she seemed very pleased with how well TongJie is doing.  We had to take his measurements for the records, and he's about 27 pounds and 34.5 inches.  That's a big change from 19 pounds and 30 inches a year ago!

Jeff found some sunglasses and gave them to TongJie and he loves them!  He figured out that if he puts them over his ears, instead of behind his ears, they will stay up.  Otherwise they slide down too much because he's sort of lacking the dimension to the bridge of his nose that glasses would normally rest on.  By putting them over his ears, it makes the fit tight enough that they don't need to rest on anything in the front.  He looks like one cool dude with his shades on!