A long overdue post with a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

Parker An will be three at the end of next month – he’s been exclusively using the toilet and wearing only underwear for the last two weeks – not a single accident! He’s very proud of himself, and I’m proud of him, too. He was very easy to transition, took maybe a couple days to go from diapers to underwear. Odd as it may seem, it actually makes me a little sad. Of any of the major milestones in the first few years of life (giving up the bottle, crawling, talking, walking), this one for me is the hardest. There’s just something about laying your kid down to change him that keeps him baby-like in my mind. He’s also getting the hang of his Like-a-Bike Jumper, he won’t be riding on the bike with me next spring, he’ll be next to me on his own bike.

Dinosaur Train – it’s a new show on PBS. It’s fun and teaches some cool stuff about dinosaurs and evolution of life over the last 100 million years or so. I was home yesterday and watching with Parker and the episode focused on adoption. There is a family of pterodactyls that has adopted a tyrannosaurus when it was just an egg. They take the tyrannosaur to meet others of its species, to see what they are like. While not completely analogous to trans-cultural adoption, it struck some very similar notes.

I made challah again, yesterday, for Thanksgiving. Today I’m at my parents’ home, and helped my mom make stuffing and put the turkey in. The rest of the family is going to be arriving in the next few hours.

Vietnamese is going pretty well. I am starting to get a little better at understanding spoken Vietnamese, especially in certain movies or TV shows.

Chanukah is coming up, we’re excited about that. Just got our holiday photo cards to mail out ordered this week. I’m done with all my holiday shopping, except for my sister and for Parker.

There’s more, but I’ve not been in the mood for writing too much recently.