We Can Hardly Stand the Wait...

...Please Christmas Don't Be Late!!!



We are SOOO excited about Christmas... No, you don't understand...We are REALLLY excited about Christmas!!

The Christmas tree is up, the palm tree outside is decorated with red Buckeye lights and the pile of presents under the tree is growing daily as everyone in the family sends their contribution to the girl's first Christmas haul. The mail truck, UPS and Fedex trucks have been forming a line at the end of the driveway lately. The girls can hardly wait.

In the meantime, they will be spending some serious quality daddy time as I take over nanny duties for the week until my parents and grandparents get here and then I figure I won't see my daughters for the next two weeks until they leave.

Lately, the girls have become obsessed with this catepillar tunnel Juneau got for her birthday. Every morning one of them goes over and pulls it out from behind the bookshelf and looks at me to open it up across the living room floor and they commence crawling back and forth through it.

Our December has been super full even before Christmas gets here. Last weekend, Emilie helped pull off a surprise graduation dinner for me at our favorite Italian restaurant with my friends and colleagues from UH. It was pretty impressive considering Emilie is genetically incapable of keeping secrets most of the time. Also, since it had been a while since I graduated back in July, I totally wasn't expecting it. To make my nerd status official, I was given my very own personalized white lab coat with "Dr. Stickley" embroidered on it...however, the pocket protector and slide rule were not standard equipment on this model.

The UH Gang - minus Kaori - someone had to take the picture :(

Emilie was home all day on Thursday with the girls so of course a photoshoot ensued. Have we mentioned Nova loves to smile...

She did manage to take a picture of one of the most infrequent occurrences in all of nature...No, I'm not talking about Ohio State losing to Michigan...

Yes, occasionally Nova can be seen NOT smiling...and Emilie actually captured it. I figure she had just as good of a chance of getting a snapshot of Bigfoot.

Contrary to what it looks like in these pictures, Juneau is NOT 5 years old.

That night, we jetted off to a Holiday lights trolley tour around downtown Honolulu sponsored by our adoption agency, Hawaii International Child. While waiting for the trolley, we were introduced to a family who adopted a little boy named Van. Van is approximately 2 months older than Juneau and for the first 9 months of Juneau's life, she and Van were together in their orphanage at Tam Ky. His parents traveled to Vietnam and brought him home just a few weeks before I went to get Juneau.

Juneau and Van

Now I am clearly the most skeptical person in the world about things like this but I was holding Juneau when Ruthanne (HIC's Vietnam program director) introduced me to Van's parents. We held Juneau and Van up to each other, just a foot or so apart and immediately, both of them responded with a look that suggested some sort of recognition and they both kind of reached out and touched each other on the arms. I don't know Van's normal personality but I know Juneau well enough that her reaction was different enough from what her reaction would normally be in a situation like that that it immediately stood out to me as something unique. Had I not seen it I would have never believed it.

Juneau has been LOVING all the lights the holiday season brings so she thoroughly enjoyed the trolley. Nova was only semi-interested in the lights. She was much more interested in waving at everyone on the trolley and then giggling when they acknowledged her.

Look Dad, more lights!!

Here we are after the trolley ride posing as Ruthanne makes her debut on our blog. Ruthanne was one of the people who was so instrumental in us bringing our Juneau home and in the process, she has become a regular reader of our humble little blog.

On Friday, the Tripler Ob/Gyn department had their Christmas party and Juneau and Nova got their first exposure to the Big Guy. I chose NOT to post the first picture in which both of them are crying as they sit on Santa's lap.

Today was the Tripler Ob/Gyn residency Christmas party at Hawaiian Waters Adventure Park.

For everyone freezing their rears off somewhere back on the mainland, I won't spend too much time talking about how we spent today, December 20 at a water park enjoying some awesome water slides. Juneau and Nova both loved the kids pool and Juneau absolutely loved the waterslides. As soon as we'd splash down at the bottom of one, she'd immediately be making her "more" sign almost before her head was back above the water. The part I don't think she realized was every "more" meant her dad carrying her up several flights of stairs back to the top of the slide...hopefully my sore legs will be able to get out of bed tomorrow.

With Juneau and Nova's Grandma, Grandpa, Great-grandma, Great-grandpa, Aunt Coral, Uncle Ed, cousins Alex, Lyndsey and Brent and Uncle Casey and Aunt Carmen all coming to Hawaii in just a few days, Christmas and New Years is going to be a TOTAL blast...Stay tuned and a Merry Christmas to all our friends, family (and even a few strangers we've never met) who follow our blog...we hope your lives are as blessed as ours have been this past year.