It has been an interesting and wonderful last couple of weeks with Halle.  We are learning a lot about her and she is certainly learning about us.  We still haven’t been able to get her to sleep through the night, but Jen just bought a very good book about sleep.  We are trying some of the methods and so far they are working well.  It will just take some more time.

Since we got Halle she has always been able to stand for brief moments and take a step or two, but now she is in full Frankenstein walking mode.  Check out the video below and listen very carefully for the frog she stepped on.

Awesome B-Day Cake! - Click to Zoom

Sorry I haven’t written lately, but as you may be able to guess…things have been busy! It has been 9 days since Halle came into our lives and her transition is what I would consider very smooth. The sleep deprivation and jet lag after we got back was pretty extreme. So extreme that Jake was dismissed from going to school for the rest of the week (3 days).

As always, Jen has been nothing short of spectacular while acclimating back to being a mother of an infant. We both have to admit that we completely forgot what it was like to be parents of a one year old. Jen has a theory that our brains are trained to forget what hard work it is to care for an infant so that we want more. Unfortunately Halle has attached herself to Jen so much that Jake and I don’t get much close up time. Today that changed a bit, but I will go into that later.

Halle’s progress was moving along so quickly that we thought it would be ok for Jen’s mom and her husband to come up from Chicago for Thanksgiving as long as they understood that Halle needs to bond with us before she bonds with them, which may take awhile. Parenting an adopted child has a completely different set of rules…which I wont get into detail here, but it isn’t like bringing a baby home from the hospital that you can pass from family member to family member.

This Thanksgiving we decided that we didn’t want to cook, but we didn’t want to go out. Enter the amazing food wonders of Super-Target! For $69 we got a full blown Thanksgiving dinner that you only pop the Turkey in the oven for 4 hours and heat up some sides. I was expecting something similar to The Sizzler (not sure if that translates to the midwest), but it was spectacular! The mashed potatoes were amazing, the green bean casserole and stuffing were just right and the cranberries didn’t suck (not a big fan). I know buying Thanksgiving dinner from Super-Target seems pretty ghetto, but I don’t care what you say! It rocked! So there!

She pick the pencil! - Click to Zoom

So after stuffing our faces we had to change sets like we were a big Broadway production. Why? For Miss Halle’s birthday of course! Halle’s BIG first birthday happens to be on Thanksgiving this year. Tol is a Korean tradition that celebrates the birthday of a one-year-old baby. To tell you the truth, we really didn’t have a lot of time to plan for this and make it the big production that Halle deserves, but we did our very best. The big event of a tol is to put the child in front of a table of food and objects such as a pencil, microphone, money, medical instrument, computer mouse, etc. The child is to then pick one of the objects which will determine the child’s destiny. Halle picked a pencil which is believed to mean she will be a scholar. She then picked a body temperature gauge and then money. I know only the first one counts, but I would like to believe she will be a well educated doctor who makes the big bucks!

Halle wasn’t in the best of moods for the tol so we had to quickly run through it. Halle’s foster mother gave us a traditional Korean dress called a Hanbok. It is beautiful. We slipped her into it with a medium amount of fussing and got some photos of her in it. It was a bit big for her small frame, but I’m sure she will grow into it very soon.

We then celebrated an American tradition of letting Halle stuff her face with cake and make as much of a mess as she wanted to. I love that one!

Feed Momma The Cake! - Click to Zoom

I would say the day was a success given the amount of time we had to prepare, the day being one of the biggest American holidays, Halle only being home for 9 days and having house guests. I took a ton of photos and video today. I don’t have the video ready, but you should go look at the photos in The Johnston Family Photo Gallery (click on Halle’s 1st Birthday/Thanksgiving 2009) here:

http://www.clayjohnston.com/galleries/the-johnston-family/

I have also put up a couple of other photo galleries from our trip, but I haven’t updated the captions yet. So feel free to look at the photo, but some may not make sense until I put captions in them.

Thanks!

The first couple days back home with Halle have been interesting.  All 4 of us have the most screwed up sleep schedule.  I think Jake has acclimated the best, back to central time.  Last night, I was wide awake at 2am and didn’t go back to sleep until 4am.  Jen and Halle were also awake so I went into Halle’s room and we played for awhile.  She is finally starting to warm up to me.  I told her I wasn’t as scary as I looked and she agreed.

I can tell Halle is mostly happy and getting better every hour.  She is wandering around the house more and is curious about everything.  She even tried to eat Jake’s homework today.  We decided this afternoon to venture out for a trip to Target.  Not one of those small, we need a couple of thing trips, but a full on Super Target trip…groceries and all.  We fully expected Halle to freak out in the car seat, but she did great!  She was very interested in everything going on outside.   We put her in her Ergo (like a backpack/frontpack for infants) and she was as happy as a clam in that thing.  We made it home and Jen took her to the bus stop to introduce her to some of the neighbors.  She is a very popular girl around here.

Halle loves to smile and giggle.  She is starting to babble a lot more, but since I don’t speak Korean babble, I’m not sure exactly what she is saying.  She is probably mentioning how much she likes me clean shaven.  I’m not a big fan of it and neither is my skin, which has promptly broken out in a rash like some sort of pubescent teen.

We took a couple days off of taking photos while we recoop, but I did take a couple today that I can share.

Playing in the living room - Click to Zoom

So Happy! - Click to Zoom

On My Way To Target - Click to Zoom

Today was our first full day at home and it went pretty great.  Of course, that is easy for me to say…I pretty much have total freedom since Halle is still clinging to Jen like a protoplasm (I don’t even know if protoplasms cling, nor exist…but it sounded good).  So Jen slept when Halle slept and fed her.  Me?  I did all of our trip laundry, ran some errands and took a drastic step…I shaved my beard…

This is what I really look like under all that hair

Go ahead… let the comments flow, but as silly as I look, I would do it a million times over to get the reaction I did from Halle.  You see, she was pretty freaked out by me (and still is a little).   She would just stare at me, like I was some sort of beast and when I came in too close at times, she would turn away.  Not anymore with my baby smooth chin.  There was an immediate improvement (coincidental or not) in her behavior with me today.  She let me come in for some smooches and even giggled when I did so.

I think she did really well today.  We gave her a VERY quick bath and while she cried, she settled down about 30 seconds after it was over.  We all sat around and played with her this morning and this evening and she was as happy as the first time I met her.  We also took a stroll around the block to introduce her to the neighborhood.  Right as we walked out the front door, an 8 point buck was standing across the street…we have a wooded area across the street.  I have NEVER seen a buck in our neighborhood before.  It was huge!  Just as it caught a glipse of us, he sprinted down the park.  We showed Halle off to a couple of neighbors and she was very smiley to all of them.  Did I tell you we had the best neighbors in the world?  Well, we do, so if you are looking for a home…look here!

It’s now midnight and time for me to see if I can sleep.  I woke up at 4am and caught a 3 hour nap at noon just as cousin Julie suggested.  I think it worked well.  Thanks Jules.

Good night…