Mid winter break, life as usual

Life has been pretty much business as usual this month. We did get our green cards last week which was exciting! Finally the whole immigration process is settled, no more worries about visas and border crossings and going into secondary screening rooms to be at the mercy of grumpy USCIS agents. We are now permanent residents (but still very much Canadians, as our allegiance to our Canadian athletes in the Olympics is clearly indicating!). 

Small things - we bought Adam a bed wetting alarm system a few weeks back, we were just so tired of changing sheets at night and it did not seem to be getting any better. We had been waking him at 11 to take him to the bathroom which was definitely helping, but it wasn't solving the problem because he STILL sometimes wet the bed before morning, and sometimes he had wet the bed before we even got to him at 11! So, we splurged and got the special underwear with an alarm. It is definitely working! The first week the alarm went off several times and he didn't really wake up, but he must have sort of heard it because by the time I got to him he wasn't very wet yet. Well in the last 10 or 11 days, it's only gone off once! And this is without us taking him to the bathroom at 11! It seems like something clicked for him last week sometime, and he's learning bladder control again. Thank goodness! We will keep up with the alarm for a while yet just to make sure he really has it under control. He doesn't even mind wearing the transmitter, and reminds us to put on his "hanging thingy" if we don't get to it right away:'-D. It's quite a relief! Hopefully the success continues!

What else . . . nothing much going on. We survived Valentines Day and all the Valentines party stuff. Brian took Lynsey snowboarding again last Saturday, and hopefully again this Monday. We have had a lazy few days at home with mid-winter break, had some playdates here yesterday. We are really enjoying watching the Olympics and feeling very patriotic! Go Canada!

February Already??

Here we are, we survived January! The last few weeks have been good, Brian and Lynsey enjoyed their snowboarding day (I ended up skipping the gym and going to the babysitting co-op playdate instead which was good!). The kids had conference week at school last week which meant we met with their teachers, and they had a lot of half days. Nathan and Lynsey are both doing very well in school. Lynsey sometimes has trouble paying attention in class but nothing to be alarmed about. We are very happy with how she is doing! Nathan is way above grade level in basically everything, little smarty pants. I was happy to hear how that he's a great kid in class and kind to his classmates, since we are much more concerned about his social skills than academic ability right now. I'm just so relieved that he seems like he will not require a lot of extra intervention. Is it terrible for me to say that?? That I'm relieved that he is catching on to everything and needs less from us to be able to succeed?? I guess time will tell for sure, but for now anyway, he is just sailing through Kindergarten without a hitch:-).

A few noteworthy things happened this week. One, we booked a getaway to San Diego for part of Spring Break! Brian's parents will join us so that should be a lot of fun! The second is that we had our Green Card interview yesterday morning. We had to get into the van at 6:30am and drive down to Tukwila (south Seattle) with all the kids. Thankfully everyone was in a pretty good mood! We got there and after checking in, we went into this room with rows of chairs where people were sitting, many with lawyers, waiting to be called. Our lawyers were in San Francisco and they didn't think we needed one so it was just us. Our kids were looking pretty disheveled, just barely presentable for a school day, and other people had dressed their kids up in little suit jackets. I momentarily wondered if maybe we hadn't put enough weight on this interview! Thankfully we didn't have to wait in that area for too long, I think it was about 25 minutes. Adam was doing pretty well, starting to get a bit anxious but keeping it well together. Our interviewer was really nice. He didn't mess around wasting our time, and was very understanding about the kids being a bit restless. He told us at the end that he didn't think there would be any issue with us getting approved, and sure enough, that night Brian checked our status and it said, "Approved"! It will be such a good feeling to get those Green Cards in the mail, like we really achieved something immigrating here. It's really not an easy task. Brian did 90% of the work in gathering all the paperwork and such, so I guess he should take most of the credit (and the fact that it's his job that got us the cards in the first place I guess lol!).