Prayers answered!

Our immigration papers came in the mail and we got our LOA this week!! We are so excited! Our next step is TA- travel approval. Of course, every time we get another step through this whole process, there is a mound of paperwork to complete. I will work over spring break on getting our Visas to travel to China. We are thinking that we will travel in May if everything goes well. According to our agency, China should issue our TA in 2-4 weeks, but they are running really slowly right now. I know of several families who have waited more than 4 weeks already. I am praying that we will get our TA soon so that we can be there for Anna Grace's birthday.

We are getting ready for Easter weekend. Today we will have my family over and then we will go to Mike's family's house after church tomorrow. Cole & Alex are really excited about all of our plans.

We are praying for our little neighbor who is recovering from heart surgery. He is from the same province in China as Anna Grace, and he has only been home a few weeks. Little John Asher has had a really hard time of recovering after his surgery. You can check out the Beall family blog at http://www.bealladoptionjourney.blogspot.com/ .

More waiting!!

We are really hoping and praying that we will get our next set of approvals this week. Our next approval from China is the Letter of Acceptance (LOA) and there is a good chance that it will come in the next few days. But, it will do nothing without our next approval from the US government- our immigration approval. It is sitting on a desk in the immigration office waiting to be processed. Apparently, I messed up part of the form when I sent it in, so we are trying to get that all staightened out.

One of our neighbors lent us a crib that would match Anna Grace's room, so the boys helped to put it together. My mom has a friend who is making us a little pink blanket to put in her crib. We can not wait until our sweet little girl is here to play in her room and sleep in her crib that her big brothers helped to put together!

Care package is on the way to China!!

We finally get to send Anna Grace a care package! The boys and I have been working to put this together for a few weeks now. Cole & Alex helped pick out several toys, 2 pairs of pajamas, a toothbrush, and some little gifts for the foster family. Cole noticed that Anna Grace's referral papers said she likes to play with blocks, so he picked out a little block set for her. Alex read that her favorite activity is dancing, so he picked out a little stuffed toy that plays different music. We also put together a little photo album with pictures of the whole family and little labels in Chinese so that she can start to learn about her family. Now, we just pray that her package is delivered to her foster family, and they will start to prepare her. This may be the first notification that the foster family has that she has been matched with a permanent family. We pray that they will find comfort in knowing that she is going to a loving family.

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.