Is it 2010 already?

Life with Cooper seems to have flown right on by – and here we are right into the deep freeze of January already! Obviously I haven’t been blogging myself much recently. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading everyone else’s Kaz adoption blogs.  In fact, reading them (and emailing some of the awesome Kaz families we’ve met through this whole journey) has made me ‘homesick’ for Kaz. Ken thinks I’m a bit crazy, but I really miss some of our experiences there. And the time we had to focus on family life without the regular, mundane day-to-day distractions was, well…priceless!

Cooper has had a lot of adventures in the past few weeks and we already have quite a few adventures planned for 2010. I won’t name all the coming adventures right now (I have to save something to write about in future blogs ) but I will let you know that we are signed up to go to Kazapalooza in June and we’re REALLY looking forward to it!

Some of you might be wondering, what exactly is Kazapalooza – well here’s an explanation taken right from the Kazapalooza blog:

The first Kazapalooza was held in Chicago in June of 2008. Over 40 families participated in the weekend events. The second Kazapalooza was held in Nashville in June of 2009 and over 6o families attended. The goals of Kazapalooza are as follows:
1. To give families who adopted from Kazakhstan a friendly inviting weekend to get together and celebrate adoption.
2. To give our adopted children the yearly experience of being around friends who are also adopted from Kazakhstan and have a shared history and culture.
3. To raise money for a charity (which will be chosen yearly by the planners) which solely helps the orphans left behind in Kazakhstan.
4. To have fun!

So, you can expect to hear a lot more about that in the coming months.

In the meantime Cooper had a most excellent Christmas and New Year’s. He started off with a family sleepover at Nana and Papa’s house on Christmas Eve. Then after a big Christmas dinner on the 25th, it was home for a good night’s sleep and then we were off to the cabin for the weekend. Then we came home for a few days, re-packed our suitcases and went to Minneapolis for the New Year’s weekend (along with Marla, Tracy & the boys). Cooper had a great time swimming, shopping, going to the Rainforest Cafe, goofing around with his cousins, having Uncle Tracy take him and all his cousins (yes, you can fit 4 boys into one cart!) to get all the samples at Sam’s Club, and running across the hall every morning to see if his cousins were up yet.

Well, I might as well stop boring you with all my yammering and instead I’ll show you some of the other highlights.

Here he is all dressed up for church on Christmas Eve:

And here he is with Mom & Dad (and a half-hidden Scully) too:

He got SO many gifts – too many to name, although he loves them all!
He became an official Calgary Flames fan (along with all his cousins):

And then he had some help opening this big box:

Which turned out to be a sled (he even tried it out under the stars on a balmy Christmas Eve):

Then it was off to bed and before long it was Christmas morning! Here he is waiting patiently with Tate to start opening his big haul of presents:

Then it was off to the cabin where he enjoyed playing hockey with his cousins (now he just needs to learn the right way to hold the stick )

He was very busy reading with Nana:

And getting Papa to lift him up so he could touch the ceiling:

His cousin generously let him borrow his hat to cheer for Canada’s hockey team:

Some mornings we had some really crazy bed-head (I guess we still needed that hat!):

But we didn’t really care because soon it was time to bundle up and go outside:

We hope your year is off to a great start as well. Bye, bye for now!

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