This Year

Ho, ho, ho and a bottle of rum, everybody! Merry Holidays and a happy breakfast of champions to all!

It's been an odd-numbered year for the Tolmans in 2013, and as tradition dictates, we now present to you a brief summary of our goings on during the past calendar. 

Nora Tolman is a sweet, gentle, kind-hearted soul, as long as no one has told her to do anything in the last couple hours. One weekend in August, she was making a bed for her My Little Ponies and singing a song about how much she loves her family, when Becky told her that she'd have to have her hair put up in piggy tails.  Nora promptly stabbed Becky in the neck with a crochet hook and bit off the finger of a state senator that happened to be walking by.  Luckily, during the court proceedings, she also scowled at the judge with sufficient vehemence to get the charges dismissed. 

Lucy is turning out to be vastly intelligent and remarkably creative, though she seems to have inherited her father's attention span.  This was plainly evident last Thursday when she penned a dissertation about the political motivations behind Tolstoy's collective works, but upon reading said dissertation, we found that she'd only read the first page of "Green Eggs and Ham."

Samantha is in the third grade.  We sometimes worry that she might be bored with the banality of traditional education.  She's just good at everything.  She's like Gwyneth Paltrow, except that Gwyneth Paltrow was in that awful movie about flight attendants.

Becky and Jon bought a house, but to be more accurate, they bought Becky's parents' house and now snuggle up together every night in Becky's parents' old room. They promptly ripped out the floors and a couple of walls to make it feel less like the home where Becky had her diapers changed, but it's definitely still the house where Becky had her diapers changed.  You can tell by the old people who live in this neighborhood who look at Becky with a mixture of suspicion and adoration. "Aww, isn't that? Oh, wait, did they? Why would would they? What are they doing?" 

Speaking of "what are they doing?", Becky and Jon have also started the process of adopting a baby.  It turns out that parenting was getting a little too easy and the amount of money in the bank was getting just a little too consistent, so changes had to be made post-haste.  If anyone happens to know of a particular little life that would do well with three doting older sisters, feel free to communicate. 

So that's about it.

May you all have more of what you want and less of what you don't.

-The Tolmans

Our Vacuous Daughter

I knew there was reason we had gone through that training as a toddler.

Molotov

It's interesting how technology both evolves and devolves communnication.
Blogging has grown cumbersome. It takes too long to sit down and compose something for ten minutes. It's boring. Facebook and Twitter have become the new cultural standards for our attention spans. I fully admit that when I scan down my Facebook feed, if someone has written something longer than a paragraph, I will usually skip it.
This blog post has gone on for an entire paragraph without a picture, so it's likely that anytone who might have happened upon it by accident has probably already skipped down to the picture of a llama and won't read this paragraph unless the llama interests them enough to go back and figure out what's going on.
I don't actually know why I'm talking about this when I should be telling the 4 people that might seek out this blog about our family.
Samantha is steadily growing into a very poular girl. I worry sometimes if being smart is as important to her as being liked. She's both.
Lucy is going through a phase that involves passionate crying whever anything doesn't go her way. She's a model student according to her teachers, but her complete inability to cope with change has us wondering whether or not she might have some sort of attention deficit.
Nora is 4. She sometimes gets a crazed look in her eyes that shows us what her Grandma Sue will look like when dementia takes hold.
As promised:

Adoption

Well, we're at this lovely place in our lives. We have three lovely girls. All of them can talk, even if they occasionally give us substantial sass, we know what they're saying. They all poop where they're supposed to poop. Our youngest is learning to read and she'll be in kindergarten next year. Everything is getting… settled. 

So we're going to adopt a baby.  It's ridiculous.  We're almost done with our home study which has involved a mountain of paperwork, four very pleasant but long interviews, and some money and we're another step closer to bringing another child into our family.

The girls are excited about it.  They're aware that it might not happen for a while. I've already gotten some comments from people at work like, "You already have three kids. Why do you think you need another one?" I guess we don't "need" another one, but we want another one. We think that our home is a decent place for people to grow up. We both feel like it's something we should do, even though it's expensive and illogical. 

So there it is. 

Here's the picture we gave to the home study lady that says, "Hey, what cute little adoptive couple!"

And here's a picture of a cheese ball.

And here's Lucy losing a tooth.