Let the catch-up begin

It has been awhile since I have updated my blog- YIKES! That is not like me :) So, I am backing up and covering some of our big end of summer events. Life is super busy these days, but really great! OK- on to the pictures, since that is all people care about!

Here is the princess on her actual birthday. She got a new pink and purple bike for her big day and she LOVES it!

Timmy and Emma have the sweetest relationship. They fight like cats and dogs 50% of the time and are completely in love the other 50%. They were having a serious conversation on the front porch.

Emma was getting some birthday kisses from her big brothers.

This is one of my favorite pictures. It makes me laugh every time I look at it! Our future is so bright... we gotta wear shades!

This summer, our wonderful agency hosted a reunion picnic. This gives families a chance to reunite with those they traveled with to China. We traveled alone, but we still wanted to go. Here we are with Betty, our coordinator. She did everything for us! She answered all our questions, walked us through every step and planned our entire trip. She is one of the very special people that brought Emma Grace to our family. She is an important part of Emma's journey home!!

Here I am with a very special family (well, 2 of the members of the family!) Janet and her family have 4 children, 3 adopted from Ch*na. Soon after we were matched with Emma and I found out she was living at PHF, I remembered a family posting on our yahoo site about their experience with PHF. I contacted Janet about her experience with PHF and that is how our "adoption friendship" started! She offered words of encouragement and advice through our journey (her son had cleft lip/palate as well). In this picture, Janet and I are holding our two treasures from PHF or shepherd's field children's village.

The adoption community is connected through this wonderful blog/email world. Right before we left for Ch*na, Betty called me and said that a family was very interested in the file of Lexi, a child living at PHF, and she wanted to know if I could get pictures and video while I was there. Of course I would! She also asked for my permission to give my email to the family interested in adopting her. While I was in Ch*na, and staying at PHF, a sweet lady emailed me and said that they had locked her file and were interested in any information we could give her. So, we spent some time with sweet Lexi, loving her, kissing her, taking her picture and video.

The Brady family just got home with this sweet little girl and her name is now Susi. My friend, Janet (in the picture above) also just got home from Ch*na where they adopted their 4th child. These 2 wonderful families got to meet each other and actually travel together! Isn't a small world? We are all connected in some way!