Decorating for Christmas

This week we've been digging out the Christmas decorations and even baked a batch of gingerbread men with Gianna. In Vietnam, Tet is the big holiday, but they also celebrate Christmas to a lesser extent. Still, Gianna may have been too young last year to remember anything about Christmas, ông Noel, or his reindeer. And who knows if ông Noel brought any toys for the kids at the orphanage. This year I plan to Fed Ex a package of winter clothes and some toys to the orphanage. We've been watching the Xuan Mai Christmas DVD over and over, and today did some Christmas shopping for her Vietnamese friends. She just likes to throw everything in the cart as if we're playing Supermarket Sweep. I also made the mistake of pointing out the pretty Christmas bows, which she confused with the word Bố, thinking Dan was around. Yeesh. This weekend we'll pick up a fresh tree, which has been absent from our house the past several Christmases when we were in Florida. This time, the family is coming to our house, so we have to make it look nice.

Also this week we met with a lawyer to discuss Gianna's re-adoption in New Jersey. The sole purpose of re-adoption is to get her a New Jersey birth certificate, which can easily be replaced compared to her Vietnamese birth certificate. Re-adoption of foreign born/foreign adopted kids in New Jersey is complicated, requiring a day in court and it seems like nobody knows what's going on. The court wants to see a homestudy less than 1 year old. We have a homestudy update that's less than a year old, so they might not accept it. Plus, all of our background checks are more than a year old, so we would have to get them renewed. What a pain. After our fruitless lawyer visit, Dan contacted someone at the state that told him we could get her a NJ birth certificate by "placing a foreign adoption on file" with the state. So we are going to try this route, after we get her passport, since it takes about 8 weeks to get your adoption documents back.