Thanksgiving (take one)

Michelle is a perfectionist. That is a good thing because when she sets her mind to something, she gets it done no matter what the task. The staff at our adoption agency often commented on how thorough we were with our paperwork and how timely we were at getting things done. This is all a credit to Michelle because she took the reigns on that and just told me to what to do and when to do it. She is like this with everything. Sometimes I groan when we have a task to do because I know that no matter what the task is, we will be working on it ASAP no matter how tough or tedious the task is (or what football games happen to be on at that moment). But, every once in awhile Michelle's perfectionism works out in my favor (actually, it pretty much always works out in my favor in the end, but I am a procrastinator by nature so I like to put off stuff but that doesn't happen with Michelle). The other day she decided she wanted to do a practice Thanksgiving Dinner since my sister, brother-in-law and niece are coming in town for the real Thanksgiving weekend. So, today we had our dry run on Thanksgiving dinner. Everything was great, and I happily devoured this practice meal. We even have leftovers for dinner tomorrow. So, between the practice Thanksgiving and the real Thanksgiving, I plan on getting between 4-6 turkey dinners over the next two weeks when you factor in leftovers. I am a lucky man!

Okay, enough about me and onto the real reason you read this blog, stories about Jack! Yesterday we took our first trip to the beach. Well, technically we went to the beach in Vladivostok, but this was our first trip to an American beach. We took a long walk and collected some pretty cool shells. There had been a big storm in this area last week, so there were some really cool shells on the beach. I had never seen fully intact conch and hermit crab shells on any beach before in my life but there were lots of them where we went yesterday (a place called Sandbridge Beach in VA). We would have taken some home with us, but the problem was that there were hermit crabs and other creatures living in these shells. So we took a few empty ones home with us and left the rest to return to the ocean. Jack did really well and even liked to walk on the sand. He wasn't too crazy about the sand at that beach in Vlad. We saw lots of dogs playing at the beach which Jack really enjoyed seeing. We saw some huge birds and some guys catching some decent sized fish too. What a great day at the beach.

The beach trip was a nice thing to do on a Sunday afternoon but for the most part we have been hanging around the house letting Jack get used to things on is own terms. He is doing really well with most of his routines, though he is not the best napper in the world. Sometimes he naps well, sometimes he doesn't. This is the one area where he hasn't quite found consistency. He took 2 naps a day at the baby home, and that is what we have been doing here but we may need to eventually tweak that into one longer nap rather than 2 short ones. The naps or lack of naps don't really seem to have much bearing on the rest of his waking hours though (meaning he isn't overly cranky if he doesn't nap well in a particular day) so there isn't a real urgency to make a change to the routine yet.

That's all for now. Stop on in if you want a turkey sandwich tomorrow!