The next fall

Hi everybody!  I was planning to post something new on the blog every season or so, but obviously that is not happening, ha ha!  We ve been busy, but having a good time.  Life with a four year old is great!  TongJie is in preschool at St. Paul's Lutheran School this year and has a wonderful teacher.  Here he is on the first day of school:

And here is TongJie's school photo from this year:

We recently had a visit with TongJie's cleft team at Seattle Children's Hospital.  It was a very long day - he saw a lot of different specialists: Audiologist, ENT (ear, nose, and throat) doctor, Surgeon, Speech Language Pathologist, and Pediatrician.  Things are looking pretty good, and it sounds like he will be having another surgery sometime in the next few months.  We are still waiting for Children's to schedule the surgery so we don't have a date yet.  It will not be nearly as major of a surgery as the palate repair a couple years ago.  This one will be a lip surgery to correct the direction the muscles are pulling (right now the muscles are pulling his lip up towards his nose).  This will also lay the foundation for sometime down the road when TongJie will have surgery on his nose.

Looking back further, we had a great summer and fall.  Aside from the summer of 2012 when we adopted TongJie, this was the first summer since Jeff and I have known each other (14 years or so I guess - wow!) that neither of us was working or going to school.  So, we got to enjoy a lot of family time together going to parks, hiking, camping, and just being together.  It was fun!  Then, at the end of the summer, we celebrated TongJie's fourth birthday.  Earlier in the summer, we had bought a wooden train set at a yard sale and we'd been saving it for his birthday present.  It did not disappoint!  He loves it, and still plays with it all the time.  To say that TongJie is interested in trains is an understatement.  Like many little boys, he absolutely loves all things train related.

Also over the summer, we tore down the old shed in our backyard and got a new one built.  We really like the new shed!  It has windows, a storage loft, a workbench for tools and projects, and space to work out.

Here are other pictures of things we've been up to:

Merry Christmas, everybody!