Barefoot Chic

When Ruby realized it was Cleo's Birthday, her party planning DNA kicked in full throttle. She started immediately on creating a birthday banner, then a homemade card, planned a party activity (she read "Go Dog Go" to Cleo on the backyard bench), and asked if we could get Cleo the biggest bone we could find. Gavin happily followed her along on the ride.

The weather was perfect today. It wasn't hot. It wasn't cold. I fear an unbearable summer so I am trying to fit in as much outdoor fun as possible before I am forced to hide in well air conditioned buildings for a few months. Today the kids and I went to the This is the Place Heritage Park, where we spent four perfect hours.

Clockwise from top left: Ruby wandering through the grass of the orchard, Gavin climbing an apple tree, a log train in the park playground (Gavin can't resist trains, just like his daddy!), Ruby spelling her name in the Deseret Alphabet-- printed very small under her name on the slate), the miniature firehouse, Gavin doing the laundry in the pioneer chores cabin, and Ruby plowing the field (we clearly support non-stereotypical gender roles in our home!)

We happened to go during Baby Animal Days, which meant there were plenty of adorable animals to pet and feed and hold and wish you had a farm (that other people cleaned!). Ruby loved being able to hold the animals and was able to get them with total ease (no chasing or choke holds). We were also lucky enough to be the only people in the stables when it was time to feed the lambs. The kids were in heaven.

Dear Family and Friends,

We need your help! If you know us well at all, you know how much we love our kids. They mean everything to us, and we probably wear you out with stories about their exploits. We’ve always wanted to have more, but we’ve run into a little roadblock. As most of you know, I had a short but very successful battle with testicular cancer some three years back. Since then I’ve been short a player on a two-player team, and we just learned that the other player is, well, all kick and no goals. We’ve both always felt like adoption might be a wonderful way to build our family, and now it seems that possibility has taken on a new importance.

That’s where you all come in. Adoption has been transformed over the past several decades, mostly for good. Birth mothers have a much greater role in choosing the family their baby goes to, and often have much more access to the child as they grow up, based on plans set up with the adoptive parents. Matching up birth mothers with adoptive parents has become a much more active and interactive process. It turns out that the vast majority of adoption placements occur because friends and family hear about or know personally of a birth mother who is considering adoption. As the birth mother decides on an adoptive couple, they then work through an adoption agency or adoption lawyers to ensure a proper agreement is arranged.

To put it simply, we’re asking you all to please keep us in mind. If you know of or hear of someone who is considering placing a baby for adoption, please tell them about us. We’ve set up a website to help people get to know us and hope you will share it with people you know – it’s at www.nateandsinaadopt.com. This is a bit scary for us, putting our lives out there for anyone to see, but we know that the internet can be a powerful tool for sharing news and information. Facebook, blogs, and email provide several simple methods which you can use to help:

1- You could post our web link in your Facebook status feed, sharing our story and request with your friends.
2- We’ve also set up a community on Facebook, Nate and Sina Adopt, we invite you to join and “like” our feeds, which also help share our family hope with a wider network
3- If you have a blog, please consider posting about our family, our desire to adopt, and share our website.
4- You could also add a link to our adoption website to your own blog.
5- Finally, feel free our blog on to any of your friends and family who may be interested in hearing our story.

If you do try any of these, please exclude our last name and also consider adding a couple personal comments to your messages to help your friends and family know we are real people who really hope for another child to add to the love and laughter in our home.

Thank you in advance for all of your love and support.

Love, Nate, Sina, Ruby, and Gavin.

If you know Sina well at all then you probably can guess one of the things we did while in Salzburg.


That's right, the Sound of Music bus tour - all the famous sites, accompanied by tourist sing-a-longs and endless Sound of Music trivia. Funny thing, Sina already knew all of the trivia.




Let's be honest. I'd be more eager to admit publicly that I enjoy the movie but for one thing, and I think you all know what it is. The Haircut. Ted Turner used to take old movies and colorize them - can't he work some magic and swap Maria's hair out for something different? Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins looks great, I daresay even sexy. Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music? No need to fear for those vows of celibacy with that one. That being said, when your guide dresses up like this you can't help but enjoy the tour in spite of the Hair.




There were more dandelions...


And running through dandelions of course...

Call it a premonition, serendipity, or just plain dumb luck, but we went to Salzburg, Austria from Germany for a few days. Ok, so we won't actually be living in Salzburg next year, but Vienna's less than four hours away by car, so we can visit often, right?? We loved it - the weather was perfect again, the town was perfect, Leslie picked the perfect hotel for us to stay in, and the restaurant at the hotel was perfect.


Ruby found a pet unicorn:


Sina found flowers:


And Gavin and I found the nicest McDonald's sign on the planet:


Did I mention the weather was perfect?


A dog trainer once told us that a tired dog is a good dog.

These posts are a chronological mess, but I'm procrastinating the postings of our trip to India because there are WAY too many photos to choose from! So for now we'll jump ahead to our trip home from Sri Lanka back in April. We stopped in Frankfurt on the way home for a week and drove down to Southern Germany and to Salzburg in Austria. We used Barkley as the excuse - the poor boy is far too old to handle a 24-hour plane ride all in one shot these days, right?? So we dropped him off at a big dog hostel they have at the end of the runway in Frankfurt (the Germans do love their dogs, after all), and headed off through the countryside. The weather could not have been more perfect. We met up with our friends Dave, Leslie, and their son Max in Schwangau, right below the infamous Castle Neuschwanstein. The weather was beyond perfect, the scenery was about as different from Sri Lanka as you could get, and the dandelions were everywhere!




Before long it devolved into a sort of out of control photo-shoot/fairytale.






We went to dinner in nearby Fussen, where I ate a whole lot of pork...


...and Max, Gavin, and Ruby ate a whole lot of ice cream.


Gavin had an ice cream hangover the next morning.


Oh yeah, and there's a castle there too.




Huh? Sri Lanka who?

Time to catch up on a few posts! Back in February when we were still in Sri Lanka, Sina and I took the kids to Singapore for a long weekend. Besides all the other reasons to love Singapore (fantastic food, much cleaner than some South Asian island countries who shall remain nameless, fantastic food, great shopping, fantastic food, 7-Elevens about every half a block, more fantastic food, hot enough to justify buying a Coke slurpee every half a block...you get the picture...), they have a great, great zoo there.

For a little extra chicken feed they let you feed some of the animals there. Now I've fed a lot of animals in my lifetime, but mostly of the bovine and ovine variety. As much as I liked that, feeding these was much more fun.





I forget now how old these turtles were, but I believe it was older than all four of us put together!





But the best ones to feed were the manatees. Their mouths are one of the strangest things we had ever seen - kind of like a friendly, mouthy version of a porcupine.





The kangaroo exhibit claimed that early white explorers in Australia saw a kangaroo and asked a nearby Aborigine what it was. The guy replied "kangaroo", which in his language meant "I don't understand your question." :):):)

Singapore also has a great bird zoo!
(that also has fish ponds...)



They had a big enclosed space with lots of Lories, really noisy and colorful birds you could feed nectar to. Lots of fun...





...until you had six or seven of them fighting over you. I think Alfred Hitchcock may have had some experience with these maybe?



And they have a great night safari zoo - that's right, a night safari zoo that's only open after dark and has all sorts of nocturnal animals and low lighting so you can see all those animals that are sleeping when you usually go to the zoo. But too dark for photos. :)