Happy 1st Birthday Danny!

Today (the 10th) Danny is 1! WOW! The last five months have flown by- so much faster than the six months between the time we saw his face and the day in July we finally met him.

Because of a busy week, we celebrated his birthday Sunday so I have photos already! He seems to like his walk behind grocery cart and is much better at walking with it than I expected. He may be walking independently in the next few weeks! As expected for 1, his favorite part of the birthday presents was trying to eat the paper.

The big kids were so cute with the birthday. They each found a ton of stuff around the house and wrapped it as additional presents for Danny. A toothbrush, a dollar, books, toys, a league baseball, baseball cards... you get the idea..

He was the neatest eater ever with the birthday cake. He barely had any on his face and in his hair. I think he was shocked that I was not stopping him for once.

Here are a few tidbits about him at 1 year:
He finally mastered crawling in the last few weeks. Before that he would army crawl or just go backwards.
He loves cheese! I could give him a piece of cheese at every meal and he would eat it.
He is a pretty good eater and does not turn away much.
You know he is done eating when he starts throwing the food on the floor. No dog in our house so we have to watch this...
He is very tolerant of his sister picking him up constantly. I must saw 5-10 times a day, please put him down.
He likes to climb the stairs- two stairs up from the family room to the entry way- not the big stairs yet.
He loves playing with the Leap Frog refrigerator toys.
He is a good napper and most nights a good sleeper.


And.... his passport arrived on Friday! We have no trips planned at this point but I wanted to get this done before I tucked away all the important documents etc. I was not 100% comfortable giving my only original documents to the passport agent at the post office to mail in but did not have any choice. I had everything they wanted but they require certified copies of the adoption agreement and I was not sure if mine were going to fly but they were all I had. I think they were certified in Taiwan and the translated version had a document saying they certified the translation but obviously it did not look like your typical document certified in the US. And my original documents came back in the mail in a separate package just like they said they would.

See sometimes the government does get things right! I'm surprised too! Actually, thru this entire process we got very lucky and did not have one government related snafu..

Here are the birthday photos.