Our Sweet Little Man!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes indeed, we have our little boy!  We went to the lobby at 9:30am this morning to meet our guide and go to the civil affairs office to meet David.  She called at 9:20 and explained that because of the huge rain storm there weren't any taxis so she was walking to our hotel and would be 20 minutes late.  When she arrived, she called the orphanage officer who was bringing David and made plans to bring him to our hotel instead.  After waiting another 20 minutes in the lobby, the orphanage officer called back and said we had to go to the Civil Affairs office after all.  Fortunately, we were able to find a taxi rather quickly.

About 10 minutes after we arrived, so did David.  The minute he walked in the door, he started wailing.  The orphanage official handed him to me and walked away into a back office.  David spent the next 30 minutes crying inconsolably while I held him and tried to ask a few questions to the officer who clearly knew very little about David.  But it doesn't really much matter at this point, we'll learn what we need to as we go.  Just before we left, I was able to interest David in a small book with pictures of animals.  He wasn't exactly happy, but he was willing to be distracted by it until we got in a taxi to head home.

On the ride home he started pointing out the window and talking.  He also devoured a couple of crackers, though he still wasn't interested in drinking anything.  When we got up to the room, I sat him on the bed and opened a package of small cookies.  That was definitely the right choice of activities as he started stuffing them into his mouth and smiling.

After a few minutes, we started playing a game where we would hand the crackers back and forth to each other and laugh about it.  He has such a cute and mischevious little smile!  He liked to pass the book back and forth as well.  Jeff came in with some fried rice and noodles and he ate about 3/4 of the rice and some noodles.  Yep, we have one more kid who can EAT.  After lunch was playing on the floor with some blocks.  He LOVED playing with Abba on the floor and was quite happy there for about an hour as we played and also filled out a bunch of paperwork with our guide.  About 2:15 I decided it was time to try a nap, so we kissed him and laid him in his crib.  I put a blanket over the side facing us so he would have a little less stimulation.  He talked to himself for maybe 5 minutes and then fell fast asleep.  He is currently sound asleep holding his book in one hand and his juice in the other.

Oh, and he peed and pooped in the toilet!!  Unfortunately I didn't realize his pants were overalls when I took him pee until it was too late, so they got a little wet. :)

The only two things that have been hard from the day were learning that he was returned from his foster family to his orphanage before we came to get him, and seeing his face all scratched up from another little boy in the orphanage who attacked him. :(  But his face will heal and from this point on he will never have to experience being separated from his family!

We are all so thankful and happy to have David here with us!  He is doing such a great job and we are loving watching little bits of his personality slowly emerge.  The orphange officer said he could say "baba" "mama" and maybe a couple of other words, but he has been talking away to us.  He even started counting with me!  We have the cutest and most amazing little boy in all of China!  I'm sorry for the poor quality of the pictures, we can only post iphone pictures at the moment.  I'll make a whole collage of good ones when I get home.

                                                   
                                                     Right when he was first handed to me

                                                               Our first family photo

                                                             Our official family photo

                                                Doesn't this sad little face break your heart?!

                                                      Reading the animal book with mama

                                              Starting to come out of his shell a little in the car

                                                                Devouring his rice!

                                                            There's my happy little man!!

Day 1 - arrive in Zhengzhou

We left our apartment at 8:30 this morning, and arrived in Zhengzhou at 11:45am.  Don't hate me all of you who travel from the States! :)

It was actually a really refreshing and relaxing day.  No small kids to be in charge of.  We could nap, read, take a walk, whatever our hearts desired with no need to worry about whether the kids would like it or not.

We meet our guide in the hotel lobby at 9:30 tomorrow morning to go to the office to get David!  We thought it would be in the afternoon, but we'll get him I'd guess sometime between 10-12.  Jeff forgot to bring the cord that attaches the camera to the computer for downloading pictures, but we've got an iphone.  Sorry the picture quality won't be all that great, but at least there will be some pictures!

Can't wait to update you all tomorrow when we have David in our arms!

On our way!!!!!

Cannot believe the day is finally here, but we are leaving in a little over an hour for the airport to go get our son!!  Miriam asked yesterday if I was SURE all the paperwork was really done - guess it's not any easier for her to believe it is finally time either.

We spend today in Zhengzhou and then tomorrow the orphanage officer will bring David to us!  Tuesday we finalize the adoption with lots of paperwork, and we're not sure yet what we will do on Wednesday besides pick up David's passport at some point.  We are of course hoping for a way to see Guang Ming, but will just have to wait until we meet the orphanage officer to talk about what that might look like.  My plan is to try to update the blog with pictures and info each day, so hope you all enjoy the journey with us!

Our New Son!!

Ok, we officially received our Pre approval today from the Chinese government for our adoption of Guang Ming! This means they have accepted our request to process our adoption for him. At the end of it all, they will give us a second final approval, but Guang Ming is officially going to be our son and we can let the world know!

A couple of weeks ago, we discovered that David's foster home was being sponsored by Bethany Christian Services. We were invited by them to begin to sponsor his foster home ourselves through their program. We of course said yes! As we began our sponsorship, we were able to view all of the bi-annual reports that the foster family wrote since they began their work as foster parents in 2009. Through those reports, we learned that David had been living with this same family since he was 7 months old! And in addition to that, he had been living there nearly all of that time with Guang Ming as his foster brother. We knew Guang Ming had been a foster brother to him when he was younger from our early orphanage report, but we assumed they had been split up over a year ago. When we learned that they had remained together and that Guang Ming was a loving and caring big brother to David, it created in our hearts a desire to see Guang Ming find a loving home of his own.

At first we thought our role could be as an advocate for him to help him find a family. We sent out emails and contacted some friends who we thought might be interested in adopting him. What I was NOT expecting was for Jeff to come home last Thursday night and talk about how God had been working in his heart to change his understanding of what it means to adopt and in that process cause him to seriously consider adopting Guang Ming ourselves! At the end of the evening, Jeff said, "I think God is offering us an invitation to make Guang Ming our son. It's not a command, but it's an invitation to step into the adventure of redeeming this little boy's life". Well, I for one have learned that when God is the one doing the inviting, the only sane answer to give is yes. :) So that's what we did, and as of today we are officially starting our journey to bring Guang Ming home.

We are fortunately able to re-use most of the paperwork that we had to gather for David's adoption. We are hoping that in a couple of months all of the updates we need will be complete and everything will be submitted to China. From that point, it is about a 4-5 month wait for China to go through their process. In other words, we are likely going to be able to bring Guang Ming home sometime this summer! We don't know yet if we will be able to meet him while we are on our trip to adopt David, but we sure hope so!

Here are some more pictures of our handsome little man! He is 3 years old (born August of 2008), and he was born with his left eye shut. Don't really know much more than that about his medical background, but he is a smart and loving little man who is really curious about the world around him and loves playing with other children. His foster family says he asks "what is that?" about nearly everything. :)

I'll leave you with the conversation I had with Miriam when we asked her about adopting Guang Ming.

Me: Miriam, how would you feel if we brought David's foster brother Guang Ming home and made him a new brother as well? How would you feel about having two new brothers?

Miriam: Good! I like that! (then a considerable pause) It also makes me feel a little confused.

Me: I can understand that! What makes you feel confused?

Miriam: Well, I just don't think most people do things like this!

Me: (with a great deal of laughter) You are absolutely right baby girl! Most people do not do things like this. Aren't we SO BLESSED that we get to love TWO brothers when most families don't even get to love one??

Miriam: Yes! (I can't even tell you how much I love that kid!)

More pictures of our boys together! These pictures are from this past spring

This is Elijah's favorite picture. He is always asking to see "chick gege (big brother)"

Guang Ming in September

Look at this handsome little man!!!

New Pictures!!!

Courtesy of our boy's foster home, we have new pictures!! We are not yet officially allowed to "announce" and post pictures of our newest family member, but for those of you in the know, I bet you'll be able to spot him. :)

This is the last time you'll ever have to wear pink, I promise :)

Halloween

Ok, so I know I'm a little late on the Halloween post, but I've been a little distracted lately. We bought our plane tickets and are headed to get our little boy on the 27th!! A little sad to not have him for Thanksgiving, but happy to know everything is falling in place and he will be home SOON!!

So this year we were riding in the car, and I asked Miriam what she wanted to be for Halloween (secretly chanting under my breath, "say princess, say princess" because I figured that costume would be easy). Without a minutes hesitation she says "a crow!". So I stammer out something about how maybe she could wear black tights and a black shirt and I could try to find her some feathers, but she just said, "I just want to be a crow!".

Upon arrival at home, I was looking around our living room and spied some decorative scarecrows lying around, and intuition from on high hit me. I turned to Miriam, pointed to the scarecrow, and asked, "is that what you want to be!" "Yes!" she says, "like I said, a crow!" Well I was more than a little relieved that I wasn't going to have to pay for therapy 10 years from now to uncover why my 3 year old wanted to be a large black bird for Halloween. So we happily went shopping for the right accessories to turn my baby girl into the world's cutest scarecrow.

And Elijah, you ask? Well....ummm...ok see the thing is that he's barely two so he doesn't really care and it took a lot longer to figure out Miriam's costume so....well....ok so he wore a pair of batman pajamas and Jeff safety pinned some black material to the back to make a cape. But he's the cutest little batman-pj-wearing little boy I've ever seen! There might be a therapy bill in the future for him.

Our neighborhood friends invited us over for a little Halloween party, and they did an AMAZING job decorating their home, making themed treats, and generally letting the kids have a great time. Then we went trick-or-treating to the 4 apartments of our friends in the neighborhood.

Here are my sweet kiddos looking absolutely adorable!

Please ignore Elijah's demon eyes, I forgot to format it first

Ok, seriously, cutest scarecrow ever!

Jeff showing off his awesome carving skills with a June pumpkin

Miriam with the spider cupcake she made. I would have taken a picture of Elijah's, but well he wasn't interested in decorating once he got handed something covered in frosting.

Loving On Some Kiddos

Every week on our way to church, we pass by what we refer to as the "car wash street". Alongside the edge of a canal, there are a strip of makeshift homes and stores that are all in the car wash business. There is a factory across the canal that employs some of the men, but many of the families try to make enough to eat through their car wash business.

Behind the car wash store fronts, there is a maze of one-room cement homes. Trash is literally everywhere, as the government doesn't provide trash services to them. I have yet to see a bathroom, but I can't imagine that it actually has true plumbing. In fact, I haven't seen running water in any of the "homes" that I have been in. They are comprised of a bed, a small dresser, and a table for the most part. Some of the roofs are sheets of tin held down with bricks around the edges.

So as I mentioned, we drive by this place every week, and it has been growing in our hearts for a while now that we would love to be able to do something to help the families and children we see as we go by. So last Saturday we made our first trip to visit. We stopped to get our car washed, and as we did, Elijah and Miriam ran back to the area where people live and started making friends. Especially Elijah. We call him our goodwill ambassador, because he loves everyone and everyone loves him. We spent maybe 45 minutes there, just talking with some people and letting our kids make some new friends. One little boy in particular, his name is Niuniu, became good buds with Elijah. They followed each other around everywhere.

At the end of our time, some of the families asked if we would help teach some English to their kids, so we made arrangements to come back yesterday. We showed up with some simple English teaching props and a pan of chocolate chip cookie bars. Much to our surprise, not one of the probably 15 kids would even touch the bars, much less eat them. Lesson learned: next time bring fruit. :) It was pretty chaotic and I'm not sure many of the kids learned anything, but we enjoyed continuing to build relationships. Miriam finally got an "in" with some of the other little girls and was running up and down the alleys yelling happily with them. Little Niuniu was our most diligent student and liked telling Miriam and Elijah the Chinese names for things.

Our plan is to go back again next week. We have no idea where things are going to go from here. Maybe nowhere. Or maybe there will be a door opened for us that we don't see yet. All we know is that we have a burden to serve and love this little community, and are praying that God would open up a way for that to happen if that's His plan. I'll let you know.

The kids with Niuniu (not the most flattering look for either of mine, but Niuniu is a doll :))

Some views of the area