Beautiful Dream - Our Kaelynn Rose

It is so hard for me to even imagine that another year with our sweet baby girl has just flown by. I sat this morning, and wrote her yearly birthday letter - which she will someday get to read - I think I will give them to her when she turns 18 - maybe with a copy of this journal (if I manage to maintain it) and photo albums.

As I wrote to her, my thoughts, and feelings and memories of the last year, I cried. I cried for her Birth Mother (for her sacrifice, and gift of ultimate love for her, and ultimately to us), for her Birth Father (who might never know she exists), for Omma & Appa - who only get to watch her grow up through pictures, letters, and occasional visits, and for all of us adoptive families who are so truly blessed by the miracle of adoption. I marvel every day at her, at us, our little family - and how perfect it is, and how perfectly it was created!

But the tears were happy too. She has brought so much joy and love to us. We are so incredibly lucky and blessed to have been given the ultimate privilege of helping her grow up and grow into the amazing person she is becoming. Our baby, our toddler, is happiness beyond measure! We couldn't have created a better match - she is, without a doubt, the best thing to have ever entered our lives!

Her birthday was a wonderful, fun-filled, CRAZY day - just like her!!! We were so lucky that Kaelynn and her cousins got to celebrate her 3rd birthday together. She wanted a Tinkerbell party - so we ordered blue dragonfly wings for all of the kids and other Tinkerbell party supplies (balloons, napkins, plates, decorations, and gift bags of course!) and had an awesome party!!!

We made her a traditional cake - Mommy made it from scratch - but bought icing. Then Daddy created beautiful Tinkerbell wings on the cake. We had flower shaped sprinkles and flower candles, and a beautiful Tinkerbell candle. She was SOOOO excited to see the cake when we walked out singing Happy Birthday!!!

After cake, she got her birthday presents - she was spoiled rotten of course - and loved everything she received. She got Mommy & Baby Stuffed Black Lab doggies, a beautiful pair of sparkly purple fairy wings, a gorgeous, all natural dream catcher to hang over her bed, She especially loved the feather!! And a new princess movie - Beauty and The Beast. Her traditional Korean present this year was a pink purse embroidered with butterflies - which of course was a favorite present and needed immediately to have something in it!!! There were a lot of other presents too - including some to come back at home in CA. She had a wonderful birthday!!! A great celebration, for a sweet little girl!!!

Christmas day in Arizona was wonderful. The kids, east coast kids, were, of course, the first ones awake, and they were SOOOO ready to open their stockings! It was definitely hard for their Mom & Dad to keep them busy and happy till everyone else could be wakened and get some coffee/tea.

Santa had brought a VERY special gift for each of the cousins - a Build a Bear animal - white Leopards!!! Each with their own name! We chose ribbons for each of them so the kids could tell them apart. They carried them everywhere and played with them all morning!!!

The East Coast kids ripped through their stockings in about 2 minutes flat, but Miss Kae is the careful, methodical one. She pulled out one toy at a time, looked at it, played with it, and then had to be coaxed back to get the next thing out!!! She loved it though, and was especially interested in the tiny clementine in the bottom of her toe!! Such a little fruit bat!!!

My brother and sister in law - the East Coast Munson's do all the presents in the morning, so, to make it easy ont heir kids, and keep them happy - family presents happened pretty quickly - everyone just kind of ripped everything open. Not at all the way we do it, and Kaelynn was very confused, but we managed to get her to open things.

She got a lot of pretty cool presents - a baby dinosaur that walks, roars, and wags his tail - from Mimi & fader, a mermaid princess costume - handmade by Aunt Jen, The beautiful book Blueberry Girl from Aunt Haidee & Uncle Marek, and even a few gifts from Mommy & Daddy!!

We tried to have an easy "rest of the day" - we played with toys, read books, even got the two little ones down for naps.

Then, we had the "requisite" big, family meal. Paul had worked on the turkey, and it was AMAZING!!! And each of the rest of us made one of the side dishes - which were also delectable and SOO tasty!!! After stuffing ourselves as completely as possible, we got the kiddos off to bed, and spent some family time just talking and relaxing together. We may have held back a few of the "grownup" presents, but I am not really sure, it was all such a big, fast, blur!!! It was fun though, and so special to have us all together in one place!

December was of course, full & busy. Between holiday preparations, decorating, getting our tree set up and then heading to Sedona for Christmas it was pretty crazy!! We decided to have a "faux" tree for our apartment this year since we were going to be gone for over a week in Sedona, we decided maybe it was a better choice for this year. I found a pretty nice one, and once we got it up and decorated it was cool. The only problem was I missed the wonderful pine smell of a real tree - and searching for something to make the house smell like that real tree was a very difficult task! I ordered some scentsicles (little wood sticks you hang in the tree and they worked great for a few days as long as you were close to the tree. I finally found some candles that worked well and put more "scent" out into the apartment. Next year, I will order the Scented Oil Owl that hanges in the tree as an ornament. I've read reviews that says it works MUCH better!!

The cats of course LOVED the tree - which shocked us since it wasn't real - but Puck especially enjoyed climbing around inside of it - and bending all of the branches! Kae had fun playing "hide and seek the Puck"!!

We of course spent LOTS of time seeing Santa - Miss Kae still won't sit on his lap alone - but she gets VERY excited about going and getting to see him and having her picture taken - it's just that Mom, Dad, or both, have to be in the picture with her!! We saw Santa at Disneyland this year. The wait was a long one, but afterwards we got to see his real reindeer - who are waiting for Christmas Eve in a very swanky corral in a very hidden location in Disneyland. They have heated blankets, tons of hay to eat, and are really being treated like the royalty they are!!

Speaking of Santa, Kaelynn found a Santa hat at the local pharmacy and HAD to have it - so I tried on a couple of occasions to take some pictures of Miss Santa Kae - I got a few cute ones, but she was not overly cooperative!!!

Another kind of sad event - bittersweet - came in December. Just before we left for Arizona, literally Just before!!! Kaelynn had what was to be her very last in home Speech Therapy session with her therapist Christian. Kaelynn and Christian had become great buddies and Kaelynn had made amazing progress in her language development with Christian's help. So, on our final day - we made Christmas cookies, and took pictures. We will miss Christian a lot, but Kaelynn needs to move on to the school district to continue her Speech Therapy - so a new adventure - with new friends will begin in January! Christian is getting married, and we wished her many wonderful years of marriage, and gave her a small gift. We hope, one day, we might be able to have her babysit for Kae - once she isn't working for Newport Language Centers and could do so without getting in trouble!!!

That afternoon we drove to Arizona - and just as we pulled into town, it started snowing!!! It was a perfect beginning to our vacation in AZ!!! We took Kaelynn out in the snow, ever so briefly, just for her to feel it on her hands and see it. When we woke up the next morning the whole house and yard was blanketed in snow! We of course, bundled up and went out to play in it before it melted away!