Ai Lang's first glimpse of family!

Just woke up this morning to a surprise email from Gifts to China with Love (the care package service we used - highly recommend them!) with new pictures attached of our son with his gift. Here is my favorite one - of him "meeting" us for the first time!!!

Snow fun

After weeks of getting teasers, with only dustings of snow, we finally got a real snow last week. The kids (and mom and dad) had a blast playing in the snow, making a snow fort, snow angels, a snow man, snowball fights, and sledding.

Yesterday we went on our family tradition trek to pick out a Christmas tree. We drove up to the forest near the mountains, strapped on some snow shoes, and started hiking through the woods to find the perfect tree.

We even got a pretty good Christmas picture of the kids, bonus!

David, Joel, and Hannah leading the way.



Olivia and Josiah got a free ride in the sled - much easier than trying to walk in the deep snow!

Once we found our perfect tree, everyone had a turn with the saw to cut it down. Didn't take too long since the trunk on this one is super skinny!



Joel and Hannah carried it back to the car most of the way.

Joel helped David tie it on top of the van.

After finally getting the tree up in the stand (not an easy task at all with a really skinny trunk) we decorated the tree and Josiah got the honors of helping to put on the tree topper since this will be his first Christmas with his forever family!

New pictures!!

We sent a care package to Ai Lang on Monday through Gifts to China with Love (http://giftstochinawithlove.com/), which is a wonderful care package service that my friend Sheri runs with the help of Katherine in China. We just sent a pretty basic care package to introduce ourselves to Ai Lang and his caretakers at the orphanage, since they probably don't know yet that he has a family waiting for him. It included a letter to the people caring for him, some pictures of our family in a cute little board book, some candy for the nannies, a disposable camera (so we can develop the pictures when we pick him up), and a panda bear stuffed animal for Ai Lang.

Then this morning, we woke up to the surprise of some new pictures and updated measurements!! We were hoping we would get some new pictures, but didn't know if we would. Some orphanages don't like giving updates and we didn't know what this orphanage would do.

Here's the great pictures:

I love this picture, showing that he is sitting up by himself and playing with his feet!

Other good news: our homestudy is done! Right now, it is on it's way to our house. Then once we get it we will send it along with our I-800A application to USCIS (immigration services). Then we wait to get a letter with a fingerprinting appointment. So, we are still hoping to have all our dossier sent to China by the end of the year or early January.

A must read

I regularly read a few people's blogs who have a similar heart for the orphan. One is Ni Hao Y'all, and she wrote a post today that I would love for you to read. It exactly mirrors my thoughts on the matter. She has a gift for writing, so go read it! Here is the link: http://www.nihaoyall.com/2010/11/crazy.html

Orphan Sunday

As some of you already know, today is Orphan Sunday. It's a day to encourage the church to be there for the orphans around the world, to do something, not just talk about the problem. Our church watched the video provided by Cry of the Orphan. It included testimonies from Steven Curtis Chapman and Mark Shultz, among others. It was a very moving video, and I pray that more people will be encouraged to be Jesus's hands and feet for the orphans as a result.

Our family is also trying to do more for the needy in our community. Prior to adopting Josiah, we would often go to the local community center to help make lunches for the hungry of our city. We haven't gone very much in the past months and it was great to have the chance to go again this morning. They didn't need our help for making lunches today, so we were assigned the task of sorting out donated warm clothing that people would be able to take to keep warm this winter. An about 8 year old boy came up while we were sorting out the coats and told us that he was in the rain this morning without a coat and he was so excited to see all the warm clothing. Things like that really put things in perspective. There are so many people right in our midst that just need a few minutes of our time to show them God's love.

Josiah's surgery was a little over two weeks ago. His surgery went really well. It lasted over 3 hours but he was still able to go home that same day. The recovery for this surgery has overall been a lot easier than the palate repair. He didn't have to be on a special diet and didn't have to wear the arm restraints. The main tough thing has been cleaning the stitches multiple times a day, which must hurt a lot, cause Josiah screams like we are torturing him every time we do it. His nose isn't healing as fast as the lip, and I'm a little worried about some open wounds inside his nose. His lip was really swollen the first couple days, poor guy, it just looked so painful! Now the swelling is pretty much down and his lip is looking a lot better. Should be interesting to see how the scars heal up.

Not much going on with our adoption paperwork.... our homestudy is still not finalized.... Our social worker went on a much deserved vacation for two weeks, but came back and went to work on writing up our home study. Now it is waiting in the inbox of the person at our agency who reviews the homestudy. She is supposed to be coming back to work tomorrow after a couple weeks in China. So hopefully it will be reviewed quickly and then we can go onto the next step of our preliminary application with US immigration. Our hopes of having all our paperwork sent to China by the end of the year are diminishing, but it could still happen.

I'll leave you with a couple pictures from the past few weeks.

The kids hard at work carving and painting their pumpkins.

Josiah enjoyed painting his pumpkin too, despite only being a couple days after his surgery.

All dressed up and ready to fill up their buckets with LOTS of candy.

Josiah's first time trick-or-treating. After about two houses, he got the idea of what was going on and really got into running from house to house to get candy! He got to the point of not wanting me to go to the door with him, and wouldn't even let me hold his hand going up and down steps, which made me a little nervous because I didn't want him to fall on his newly healing lip!

Hannah and Joel started horseback riding this week. It is through this really cool non-profit organization that gives kids the chance to learn all about horses and best of all, it is FREE!

While we wait....

We are done with our home study visits as of 1 1/2 weeks ago, so now we are just waiting for our home study to be written up and then approved by our agency so we can go onto the next step of sending our I-800a application to immigration for their first approval. We are still hoping to have our dossier sent off to China by the end of the year.

But while we are waiting (which by the way, is really hard, especially when most of the waiting is completely out of my control!), I thought I would catch all of you up on the past couple months.

We went for a week long camping trip at the end of August, spending a few days at Sunset Bay and then met up with David's family at Honeyman State Park, near Florence, OR. We made lots of memories and just had a great time!

Beautiful does not even begin to describe this beach that we found.


All four kids and one big kid (David) got buried in the sand. One of us just "had" to take a picture!

Wouldn't be a trip to Honeyman without a run down the sand dunes!

Joel was so proud of getting up the nerve to hold this newt.

Hannah holding a crab, Olivia even held one too!

Joel and Hannah's first day of school. Joel is in 3rd grade and Hannah is in 1st. My, how time flies!


My little girl, Olivia, riding the bus for the first time. She goes to a speech group at a local developmental preschool one day a week.

Olivia turned 4!

Josiah turned 3!

Now Josiah is going to school too at a speech group. He goes on a different day than Olivia, cause he needs to work on communication in addition to articulation. Olivia communicates just fine (too good sometimes!) and just needs to work on articulation.

Hannah has been in soccer this Fall, and of course loves it. She is on a co-ed team and often runs circles around the boys. She is not afraid of being right in the middle of things!

We went to get pumpkins last weekend.

Josiah has surgery coming up on this Thursday at Shriner's hospital in Portland. He is going to have a nose and lip revision. It is supposed to be a day surgery, so hopefully if all goes well he will be home Thursday night. Please pray for him, for health, and for the surgery and recovery to go well.

Also, we found out last week that Olivia will need a hearing aid for her left ear. Her hole in that ear drum is causing hearing loss.

Thanks for your continued prayers for Ai Lang and for our paperwork to go quickly!

The whole story

April asked me to write out how I got from "our family is complete" to "lets adopt again". So here we go. Each life in this world is necessary, needed, and has value. Often however individuals do not treat each other in a way that exemplifies these values. As a result our perception of the world becomes negatively skewed. About three months ago I noticed April was reviewing the available adoption lists again and at that point I started to pray about if this was the best for our family. Honestly, the answer was no. I compiled a list of reasons why it was not the best choice for us, house is too small, we are spread thin emotionally, financially, school work, activities, etc... you know all those "reasons". We started as a family to be praying for a variety of kids who were in need of a forever family. Guess what, all four are being adopted and we continue to pray for more children. April approached me with a couple of kids, specifically a little guy by the name of Samuel. The part that surprised me was that he wasn't a cleft lip special needs..... I didn't expect the spiritual struggle this would cause me (so much for the "no" answer). Here was a little boy without legs. In the US this type of disability would be somewhat challenging, but in china it would mean he would end up in the streets. Thus entered into our discussion is "saving" a child from a bad life and is giving an opportunity the "right" reason to adopt? Good stuff, especially since, one of my "church" principles is to provide opportunity. Beliefs collide. Long story short, I got the impression to pray for one week about Samuel. Within the week, another family decided he was to part of their family.

Fast forward a month, and April and I started to review files together and discovered "Aiden" (we haven't picked out a name yet). First thing I did was hope on the internet and googled no arms... and discovered youtubes mariad of videos of people without arms who are highly functional. Then I listened to Nick Vujicic's message and website "No limbs, No limits". It was pretty impressive... but all those reasons not to.....then wouldn't you know...

I scheduled a meeting with my co-pastor to play the "devils advocate" and try to tell me why we shouldn't adopt. On the way there the song played which is basically about how you only have one life and what are you doing with it (turns out it is called "One life" by 33 Miles). Is your life all that it should be? You only have one chance, do you want to live it for yourself or for God? I didn't know the song so I went to their website and on the front page was a picture of Nick Vujicic..... Nick was planning to come to Bend on September 25 (April's birthday). Pfift. So much for human reasoning.

The Holy Spirit is a powerful aspect to our lives which we often leave out in our "enlightened" era. Hope. We need to provide hope to everyone in our lives. One... person... at.... a.... time.

Watch this.