Our Love Bug

I'm a bit late for Halloween pictures but we've been a little busy. Our little family got to take a vaca to the beach for a week! (: (I'll share some on that later)

Isn't this the cutest love bug you've ever seen?!?

The weekend of Halloween was a wonderful time, we got to spend our Saturday with our dear friends, Chris and Katie and their little lamb, Rosemary! We went to a puppet show in the morning and came back to their house for pumpkin carving, yummy food and a fun filled night of laughter. There is always laughter with these two girls around... always the entertainers for sure.

Carving time.

The end result—mine is Hello Kitty.

Precious girls

They are anxious to pray. (Doesn't this melt your heart?)

and the day isn't complete without a PJ party

On Sunday our neighborhood families all got together for a cookout in the cal-de-sac and it was so great! I love our neighborhood... And Mae has some friends here that I hope will be with her for life. After the cookout our family headed to a big church "trunk or treat". We met our friends Dan and Becca and their 5 kiddos (: and enjoyed the carnival. Mae was so funny and happy to run all around in her costume and by the end of the night she was beyond exhausted. All in all, I was so in love with our love bug and can so easily remember last year without her.

This is my favorite picture... look how excited she was!

And this is the end of the night—she's completely exhausted.

The sweetness of Mae

We've had Mae home with us for 6 months now... We can hardly believe it. On one hand we feel like we've always had her and at others we stop and say "we have a daughter! That's our DAUGHTER". It's so natural being her parents, each day we are with her is such a gift.

She is talking more and putting words together. Most of the time she is talking her own little language but she shocks me when she proclaims something clear as a bell in English. She told Griffin, "that's mine" at breakfast when he got a little too close to her waffle. She says "amen" after we pray and it completely melts us. She says "bye" in such a cute southern way and waves and says bye every time I put her down for a nap. She just said "I love you" today!! I said I love you to her when I put her in bed for nap and she said it back. And then I asked her to say it 2 more times just so I could hear it again. She was very pleased with herself and happy to say it more times (;

Her favorite thing is to be outside and we are loving the cooler fall weather, so we enjoy our afternoon walks up and down, up and down the street.

She loves playing with her friend Luke down the street. They hug and kiss and hold hands. There's nothing cuter than seeing them share a seat together or when Luke pretends falling on the floor just to get Mae to say "ut oh" again. They are precious!

She loves to eat and I really can't think of anything that she doesn't like... We hear "more, more" all through the meal just because she likes it. It's very gratifying to cook for her (: if you ask her if she is all done, she almost never is. She sweetly says, "no" and will keep on eating. It takes her up to an hour to finish a meal.

We stopped giving her a bottle at night back in September and we really thought it was going to be hard for her to give up but she was totally fine. She enjoys reading books together instead and we say our prayers and then she asks us to sing the itsy-bitsy spider... After that she holds her little finger in the air to ask for one more (: I never thought Cody and I would sing duets together; funny how different we are now.

She is an excellent sleeper. Our girl goes to bed at 8 and doesn't wake up now until 9:30!! She loves her bed and sometimes she wants to stay in bed longer... she is happy to sit and quietly play.

She is so loving and easy, we are truly spoiled. Mae Juan Lekberg has brought us more happiness than we could have imagined. I can hardly picture our lives before her.

Tough Guy

I drank a Full Throttle energy drink around 7:00pm and now it's 1:50am and I'm still wide awake(this is Cody by the way).

I've been trying to get focused and pay some bills, organize my office, etc. but I keep getting distracted by my friends on Facebook. I've chatted with several of them tonight and each time the conversation ends up in the same place...with me talking about Mae. I've seemed to tell each person the same thing, so I thought I would bring everyone who reads this blog in on the conversation.

More than anything, this post is a warning to men out there. To be more specific, it's a warning to men who might have a daughter one day. Here's the warning: YOU ARE GOING TO BE RUINED WHEN YOUR LITTLE GIRL GETS HERE. Plain and simple. You are done for.

I like to think of myself as a tough guy. I like to shoot guns, build stuff, fix stuff and break stuff. I've done things like pull the motor out of a classic muscle car without an engine hoist. That's right, we (my cousin Patrick and I) didn't need a fancy tool like that. Nope, his dad had a backhoe and it worked like a charm. On that same note, I've done manly stuff like operated heavy machinery...when I was 11 years old. My dad owned an excavating business when I was a kid and one day I jumped up on a 30,000 pound trackhoe and pretended like I was driving it. Dad motioned for me to turn the key and I thought he was joking. That is until he jumped up in the seat with me and told me what all the joysticks and pedals were for. Before I knew it, I was driving around the job site digging holes and knocking down trees. Needless to say, that day was the highlight of my 11 year old life.

I've done other things like jump cars over mounds of dirt, crashed motorcycles and jumped out of airplanes. I've been punched in the face, had a tooth knocked out while playing football and I once broke a window with my fist (it was on accident but, hey, I broke glass with my fist).

For these reasons, and many others I don't care to list, I consider myself a pretty tough guy. Recently though I've began to second guess my tough guy status. If you were to live at my house for a few weeks, you would see some things that would make you question this claim. You might hear me singing the theme song of The Backyardigans as I walk around my house. Maybe you walked downstairs and saw me sipping invisible tea out of a pink tea cup and asking for "more" in a high pitched English accent. You might have even seen me with half a dozen of Mae's bows in my hair. Seeing and hearing these things can't be undone and, no doubt, you would say, "Yep, Cody has lost his edge. He isn't nearly as tough as I thought he was." To this I would have to disagree.

Playing tea party, singing dumb songs and letting my daughter put bows in my hair are all things I expected to do when I became a dad. It's the things I didn't expect to happen that has me questioning my toughness. Like when I get really frustrated with Mae because she isn't listening to me when I tell her to NOT go up the stairs. "MAE. GET OFF THAT STEP NOW." To which she replies (in her sweetest voice) "Dadda." No matter how frustrated I am, I can not help but smile. There are many nights when I'll tip-toe into her room just to hear her breathe. Seriously. In a day and age where I have access to pretty much every song ever written, all I want to hear is her quick little breaths as she sleeps. The other day I was getting ready to go to work and I grabbed my sunglasses. Mae saw this and said, "bye" puckered up her little lips and walked over to give me a kiss goodbye. It took everything I had not to cry like a little girl.

So as it turns out I can handle getting punched in the face, crashing a dirt bike into the lava rock covered ground of Central Oregon and taking a forearm straight to the teeth without a problem. But a 25 pound little girl from China gives me a kiss goodbye and I'm wrecked.

Well, so much for being a tough guy. It was fun while it lasted.

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"We have our sick boy back! So relieved to see this face. "

Happy TWO year old!!

So, I'm two weeks behind in getting this on the blog... but here's our darling girl's BIG TWO. We did lots and lots of celebrating. Our family celebrated Mae on Saturday and she loved every minute of the festivities. She loved the decorations...She loved the company of people. Aunt Mimi's family (Cody's sister) came all the way from Washington to be with us.

Mae's enjoying some snacks with her Nanny (great-grandmother).
And she LOVED the cake! This was her first taste of frosting and she was very pleased. Her Nonnie (my mom) made this very special, beautiful two layer cake to celebrate 2!
Most of all I think Mae enjoyed her presents. With each one she'd exclaim loudly "oooooooo". It was so fun to see her so happy.

I sewed her this little play house as her gift from us. It just goes over our table so that we she can make believe and have fun with her friends.

We are so overwhelmed with all the love that filled this day. Each and every moment was perfect and we loved sharing this year with our baby girl. It is so unbelievable to remember last year and just loving a far off daughter and a small beautiful face from a few photographs that were given to us. We loved her dearly from across the world but the love that we know now that we have her is beyond measure. We know her so well and it has been less than 5 months with her. She is so sweet, unbelievably funny and quite a character. We can't wait to see what this next year as a family unfolds. It is an adventure like I never knew... there is nothing that can explain it. Being Mae's mom & dad is a daily gift.
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G R I F F I N
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I feel like I have to share that we have had a hard time these past couple of weeks... our dog, Griffin has been really sick. Today we still don't know exactly what it wrong with him. This dog is family. Those of you that share the love of an animal know the heartache it is to see them sick. We are praying for his recovery. I so badly want him to come back home and spend many more years as Mae's best friend. If you would please pray for our boy.