Fun Fam Photo!

What a blessing to have all of our children home for the new year! There may come a day when we are not able to be together for Christmas and New Year's so I'm just treasuring this time.

My plan was to take everyone to the local "pick your photos up the same day" portrait studio on Monday morning. Wes would be leaving town that afternoon and H. and Richy would be leaving early Wednesday morning. Well, crap. Can you guess? Yeah, right. They are closed on Mondays.

Sometimes it seems I can't do anything right.

This is what I ended up doing:
Cool, huh? One problem. Ruby was sleeping so she's not in the picture. Grrr. I may try again in May to get everyone in front of the camera again. That will be my next opportunity to have everyone here. :(

I said goodbye to H. on Tuesday night after being quite entertained by her marathon packing session. Richy is a packing genius, so she was in good hands. Before Rose was born, I used to joke that I would have to wait for my sons to get married to have a daughter. Well, H. is going to fit nicely into our family and I'll be proud to call her daughter! I hope she has a great time at college in Africa this semester.

Theo. Ruby. A match made in heaven. I thought when we adopted Zhen and Theo that we would be dealing with virtual triplets when them and Ralph. In reality, it is more like two sets of twins. Ruby is so excited to see Theo every morning. She likes to hug him and giggle and squeal at him. It's really quite sweet. They act like they were separated at birth.

I caught them playing together yesterday. This hardly every happens because at the age of 4 1/2, Theo is just learning to play. He mostly throws his toys and then goes to find them. Sort of like playing fetch with himself. But here he showed me that he can try to copy Ruby and use toys appropriately. It's huge, it really is.

He's got Mater...which is, by the way, H.'s nickname for Richy's truck! ha!

Since I don't believe that Theo can hear (and who knows when we be able to get him tested for real) I often wonder about him. Will he ever...this. Will he ever...that. Watching him play with Ruby yesterday answered some of those questions for me. Yes, he will. Yes, he is really in there!

I can't wait to get this boy some hearing aids and watch him come alive even more!

Next time...potty training! Wahoo!