Aargh!

Our school held a family fun literacy night with a pirate theme. Mary Clare was soooo excited and behaved wonderfully all night!

She loved helping decorate. She had to listen to each shell. The ones below were her favorites. She said she could hear the ocean in one and mermaids in the other.

You never know where you're going to find treasure...we sure found ours in China.

Our State Fair...

It is Fair season in our neck of the woods and the Huazhou girls are all about things that spin, jerk, fly and generally go very, very fast. Mary Clare has wanted to ride the Dragon roller-coaster since last year so it was the very first thing we did. They were both too short to ride alone so Lee and I went with them. Mary Clare cracked me up by instructing me in the fine art of coaster riding. "You do it like this, Mama!" she shrieked while throwing her hands up in the air. The girls rode and rode and rode and on occasion so did we. I even rode the big ferris wheel although I have to admit to having a few moments of panic. We do much better when Lee does the height things and I do the spinning ones. We ate junk- french fries and elephant ears and tons of lemonaide. The girls received lots of compliments and lots of the "are they twins" questions. They LOVE to match and ask for clothes alike but Margaret Rose gets annoyed with the twins question. "I am 6!" she declares as politely as possible, "She is 4!"

Hey look! Another roller coaster! Let's go!

We were up waaaay past our bedtime but had a fantastic time!

Fun on the Farm

MC and MR start their day by feeding Dilly-bird honey bunches of oats- yum! Then it was off to Country Adventures with our local Adoptive Families group. There were 115 people there this year and it was understandably chaotic. The girls still managed to have a great time though.

This is Mary Clare's favorite part of the farm- the donkey. She met her first donkey when she was 2 and it was love at first site. She looks forward to giving this one a good brushing every year.

Miss Angi helped the girls pick just the right pumpkin.


After our yearly pose on the pumpkin wagon it was back on the hay ride down to the pond for the cookout of hotdogs (veggie dogs for us) and marshmallows.

Happy Autumn!

Friday Frolic

Mary Clare came tearing across the school yard this afternoon with this pink twirly thing. She'd used her blue buck card to get it for Margaret Rose (she has a blue one that somebody gave her last year) and couldn't wait to get home and give it to her. The girls and Baba had a good time making noise and spinning.

Margaret Rose's afternoon was made when she got a picture of her Huazhou friend in the mail. This is a very special girl and no matter how much of MR's China past she forgets, she ALWAYS remembers AhTzo!

County Fair

There was no way that Margaret Rose could miss the fair in the town I work in since Mary Clare got to go with her class. So it was back to the fair grounds on Thursday evening and this time we were joined by our good friends Alice and Mike and their wonderful grandson. It was the perfect evening with a gorgeous sky, moderate temperatures and no crowds.
Margare Rose loved the slide so much she had to go back and do it again.

But this was her favorite ride. She LOVES to swing (she actually thinks we moved her to her new school because it has swings) and these were like flying. At the end of the evening we let them choose one last thing to ride and the girls wanted this.

On Tuesday Margaret Rose looked at the picture of MC on this ride and got all excited because she told us -these are Chinese bees!! Huh? Then she pointed out that they are holding up 2 fingers like practically everyone in China does when they get their picture taken so they must be Chinese. Makes perfect sense to me.

Watch those ponytails fly!

A blue snowcone and a red one- perfect fair food.

Good night! Yeah, right! With all that sugar?????????