Happy Father's Day!!

Such a busy weekend...Claire's birthday on Saturday and Father's Day on Sunday. Even though we lost our electricty from around 10pm Saturday night til 7pm Sunday, we had a great Father's day! Our promised breakfast for Dad ended up being fruit salad and a pecan carmel ring...everything else required electricity! Dave didn't mind.

Ben was so proud of the car air freshner that he made for his Papa!

Proud Papa!

Cute Hat!

Such a monkey!

Happy Father's Day, Papa! We Love You!

Ben, Claire and Christa

Chuk Tol, Claire!!

Chuk Tol (Happy 1st Birthday) to Claire! We celebrated by having a party that combined both Korean and American traditions! A traditional Korean celebration includes 4 components:

Praying & giving thanks

Making & wearing birthday clothes

Preparing the Tol table and performing the Toljabee ceremony

Sharing food with guests

Here, Claire is dressed in her hanbok, which the Korean traditional dress. Her hanbok was a gift from her foster parents in Korea.

Here, Claire is sitting at her Tol table, where fruit and rice cakes (in the middle of the table in front of Claire) are key foods that are included on all Tol tables. The different rice cakes have different meanings. The white ones on the bottom left are for pure and divine clean spirit and longevity. The reddish colored cakes (top, center) ward of evil spirits so Claire can grow without disease. The green and white moon shaped cakes (bottom, right) are either empty or filled. The empty ones mean that Claire will grow to have a big heart and the filled ones mean that she will grow to be wise.

Food is also presented in towers to show guest that food is plentiful and meant for sharing. In addition to the fruit tower, there is a cookie tower and a candy tower (yum!).

The objects in front of the rice cakes were for Claire's Toljabee ceremony. It is customary to place these objects in front of a child on their first birthday and what they choose first second foretells their future. The objects include:

Money=wealth

Rice=prosperity

Food= public service

Thread = long life

Pencil-scholar

Scissors=talented with her hands

Jujubes (red dates) = many descendents

So, what did Claire choose? She started to grab the jujubes first, but changed her mind and grabbed the pencil, followed by the thread. So, if this holds true, she will be a scholar who will live a long life!

Now, onto some American traditions. Here she is in birthday outfit #2 -a girl can never have too many outfits for special occasions :o) !

She didn't know what to think of the cake! She had more fun digging into it than eating it. She wasn't trying any of it, so we gave her a taste and she really didn't care for it (are you kidding me?!). We tried to feed her some cake a couple of times and she didn't want to have anything to do with eating it...just playing.

Cousin Joey, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoyed his cake!

Mama and the birthday girl, who is such a blessing!

Dave, Christa, Ben and Claire

Where's the Fire?

Last week, Dave and his Mom took the kids to the local fire station open house while I had to go to New York for work. A good time was had by all!

This picture has nothing to do with the fire station open house, but I had to post it. Claire loves hanging out at the window, looking out, feeling the breeze and squealing at passersby. It's pretty darned cute! She's getting close to being able to pull herself up by herself!

Hose guy!

Not too sure about this Sparky Dude

The long anticipated ride in the fire truck!

They ran into Ben's old buddy, Zach, who we haven't seen in a while! Believe it or not, they are the same age (I think Ben might even be a couple of months older), even though the size difference is huge!

Dave, Christa, Ben & Claire

Prayers for Claire's Birthmother

Tomorrow is Claire's first birthday! As we prepare to celebrate this very festive occassion, we feel the need to take a step back and say a prayer for Claire's birthmother. Tomorrow will be an especially difficult day for her. We send our prayers and gratitude to her for making an incredibly selfless decision which gave us the biggest gift we could ever wish for. We can't imagine having the strength to do this, but we are eternally grateful that she found this strength in herself. We wish her peace, health and happiness.

We also send our prayers our to Mr. Kang and Mrs. Lee, who would love nothing more than to be here to help us celebrate.

If you think of it tomorrow, please say a prayer for them as well.
Thanks-
Christa, Dave, Ben and Claire

Where is our summer?

Like most of the country, summer is taking it's time getting here this year. Regardless of what the temperature reads, we're still trying to doing the things we like to do during the summer....

...like going for a boat ride up at the cabin. This was Claire's first time out on the lake and she didn't mind the life jacket at all. In fact, she really enjoyed being out on the water (notice all the extra clothing she's wearing...did I mention we're still waiting for summer here?).

Check our my new shoes!

And look at me riding my toy!

Here's our little ham, having a great time at his preschool's end of school year concert.

Is that snow???? No, but it sure looked like it had snowed. We were pelted with a nasty hail storm recently. Fortunately, the only damage we sustained was to our poor plants. At least we hadn't planted any of our annuals yet because of the cold and wet spring. They were all still in their flat containers in the garage during this nasty storm.

We recently had some new family photos taken. Here are some of our favorites