Announcing our precious daughter!!!

After 3 years of waiting, we have a beautiful little girl! Her name is Zheng Ping An and she is living in a foster care in Henan, China. Her birthday is May 13 and she is about to turn 2 years old. We can not wait to hold her in our arms!! We hope to travel in May or June. We would love to be with her for her birthday, but we realize that we may not get to travel that soon.

Happy Valentine's Day & Chinese New Year!!

Wow!! It has been a really long time since my last post. I guess that just shows how busy we are during the school year! Today we are celebrating Chinese New Year and Valentine's Day together. We are planning a big Chinese dinner for tonight. Yesterday we went to a Chinese grocery store to get some of the ingredients. Today the boys and I made paper lanterns to hang around the kitchen, and we will have a big heart shaped cookie for dessert tonight. I plan to use some of the dishes and recipes that my parents used when I was growing up. My mom and dad loved to get into the kitchen together to make big Chinese dinners, so I guess Mike and I are carrying on that tradition. We also went to the Chinese New Year celebration last weekend for adoptive families and students from our local university. We met a graduate student who would like to help us when we are finally home from China with Anna Grace. Her parents still live in China, so I think she will be able to help with any language barriers that we might have in the first few weeks home.
There is no "news" on the adoption yet, other than we seem to be getting very close. We have no idea how close we are to getting "the call," but we are very hopeful that it will come soon. Anna Grace's bedroom is coming along nicely. Mike made a beautiful cabinet to store her toys, and he also made an adorable doll house. He still wants to build a table for tea parties, and I have several more little projects in mind that will help to complete the room.
Xin nian yu kuai! Happy Chinese New Year!

Our Escaping Pets!

Okay. One would think that I might be talking about one of our two dogs or our cat, but I am talking about Cole's fish and Alex's hamster. First, Cole has this little minnow that we caught down at the neighborhood lake last spring. He has been keeping Fishstick (who my Aunt Betty-Jo claims is a female fish) in a vase on his dresser ever since then. I had no idea that she would live this long. I was changing the water the other day and Fishstick jumped out and slid down the drain of the kitchen sink! Mike quickly started taking apart the pipes under the sink. However, Fishstick was not in the pipe. I used a flashlight to look down the drain from the top, and she was stuck on a little tiny ledge just below the drain in the sink. We ran some water through the drain, and we were able to get her back safely in her vase.

Alex's escaping hamster is another story. Leia has a really cool cage with lots of tubes that disassemble for easy cleaning. But she has figured out how to detach the plastic lid and open the wire door, and she likes to escape nightly. The thing is that she will manage to disassemble her cage, spend the night running around, and then return to her cage by morning with a collection of little "treasures" that she has found. Unfortunately, some of these little "treasures" that she has collected have been the buckles to Alex's L.L. Bean monogrammed book bag (not cheap). My mom suggested that we put her cage in the bathtub so that she would be stuck in a closed in area if she escaped again. So we did that for several nights, but then she made a jump from the cage to the faucet and managed to turn on the water! When Mike went to wake the boys up for school, he found Leia back in top nest of her cage asleep with over an inch of water in the tub and a steady drip of water coming out of the faucet. We finally decided that the hamster was going to have to get a new cage. My mom helped us out by purchasing a new glass cage with a latching lid that does not have all of the tubes and detachable features. Leia is very bored, but we try to get her out every day for a run in her ball.

Our Labor Day Weekend Camping Trip

We spent the weekend camping in the mountains in our pop-up. The campground had a lot of activities for the kids including a water slide, fishing, a jumping pillow, and lots of places to ride bikes. However, the camp sites were extremely close together and the place was crawling with people. When we first arrived, we quickly found that if we opened our camper, it was going to actually touch the camper in the site behind us!! The people in the office were nice enough to let us move over one site. Our closest neighbors for the weekend had 3 boys, so our boys made instant friends. We had planned to go tubing down the river, but it drizzled rain most of the day on Sunday, and it never seemed warm enough to get into the middle of a cold river. Mike and the boys spent most of Sunday trying to catch the huge trout that were stocked in one of the campground lakes. In fact, Mike caught one fish Sunday morning before the rest of us even woke up. Later in the day, there were several groups around the lake who were catching whole stringers full of fish while other groups of fishermen (like my little fishermen) could not even get a bite. Mike even switched over to several different types of bait, but nothing worked. Still, we had a great weekend. Now, we are home, and the camper and car are cleaned out, and we are busy trying play catch-up with getting ready to start the week.

The Wait...

Our agency has matched 10 more special needs children to families this week! Slowly but surely, we are inching closer to the top of the list to get our referral.
As I was out walking tonight, I reflected on the time that we have waited so far. Mike and I have talked about adopting a child even before we were married. We did not know if we would do a domestic adoption and an international adoption, but we knew that we wanted to give a home to a child that needed one. Cole and Alex were born, and we still felt that our family was not complete.
It was November of 2007 when I started to feel an extremely strong pull towards adopting a child from China. Mike was worried that the boys were too young to bring in another child, but we discovered that after all of the paperwork was complete, we would still have a year or two to wait. I just had this urgent feeling that we needed to get our paperwork gathered (it is a very long, tedious process) and off to China. We really felt that God was telling us that we had a daughter in China. It took us until April of 2007 to get all of our paperwork sent off to China and then the real wait began.
However, in the fall of 2007 I kept having this nagging feeling that something was wrong. I kept feeling like we missed something or that God was trying to tell me something. We talked about the special needs program and even ordered the packet of special needs paperwork from our agency. I remember one day at work feeling really sad with this feeling that our daughter was sick or had some kind of health problem. When the special needs packet arrived, Mike and I carefully read over all of the special needs that we might consider, but every single one of them scared the heck out of us. We talked about the possibility of a heart condition, but we got too scared and filed the papers away in the adoption box in the closet.
Fast forward to April of 2008. I was sitting at the computer on the last day of my spring break. We were just about to hit our 1 year anniversary of officially waiting for our daughter, and I kept coming across blogs and websites with little Chinese girls with heart defects. Every single picture of every single little girl seemed to feel like it was my daughter looking back at me. I called Mike at work and said we needed to talk. I remember he asked if we could talk when he got home and I said, "No, we need to talk now!" We talked for a little while and by the time he got home from work he was also convinced that our daughter has a heart condition. We finally made the decision to talk to our doctors and our social worker and then turn in our medical checklist to officially enter the waiting child program. I remember feeling the same sense of relief that I felt when we made the decision to go forward with the adoption. It was like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders that we were back on the right path.
Now, as we edge closer and closer to getting our referral, we pray that God will give us the wisdom to know when we get our referral that it is the right referral for us. We do not want to take on more than we can handle. We pray that the doctors will give us the right information and that the decision to accept the referral will come easily.

First Day of School

Sorry it has been so long since I last posted. Now that school is back in and I am working every day, our lives are so much more hectic! Cole and Alex started a new school this year due to re-zoning in our county. They like their teachers and new classrooms. Unfortunately, neither one of them knew any of the kids in their classes, but they make friends easily. My students this year are really sweet, but it is a big group. I am already worried about leaving my students when we are traveling and I am at home with the baby for a while. Today we have cousins coming in from out of state. We are planning to take all of the kids to the pool. I guess I need to starting getting ready!

Progress in Anna Grace's Room

We finally have carpet in the baby's room!! Over the last 6 months or so, Mike has worked on painting the room a pretty green color. The ceiling is a really pale pink that matches the duvet-cover. We have a white chandelier hanging from the pink ceiling, and Mike also painted cherry trees in bloom on two walls. The furniture is my antique bedroom set from when I was a little girl. So far, the room has two fabrics. One is a print of an Asian garden in bloom with cherry trees. It has little girls dressed in traditional Asian clothing. The other print is a pink and green stripe that is on the bed skirt and curtains. We are planning to add a crib or toddler bed to the room later if we find out that she is too small for a big-girl bed.

We still have a lot to do. Mike is planning the build some white shelves into a play corner to house toys and books. I plan to buy white baskets with liners for the shelves. We also need a little table and chairs, chandelier shades, and some lamps. I had tears in my eyes yesterday as my mom and I finally opened the boxes that had the little Chinese baby dolls that have been sitting in the closet for so long. We still have a lot to do and buy, but I finally feel like we are making progress. I would love to have the room complete when we get her referral so that we can concentrate on getting ready to travel.

Cole and Alex start back to school this week so I will post first-day-of-school pictures soon.