Thinking of You Baby Girl!

To our sweet baby girl,

Wherever you are in the world today, you are on all of our minds. We love you so much and can't wait to meet you and hold you! We are learning new words every day in Mandarin so we can better communicate with you. So far we (including Canaan) have learned:

Hello
Goodbye
Thank you
I'm sorry
Yes
No
Brother
Sister
Are you hungry?
Are you thirsty?
Grandma
Grandpa
Mommy
Daddy

And most importantly... I love you!

Canaan talks about you and asks questions about you ALL the time. The other night he said out of nowhere, "my baby sister is going to be cute like I'm cute." Sweet... and oh so humble! Haha!

Last night he made this drawing of you (with no prompting). You're Daddy can't quite make it out, but I can see clearly your legs, feet, (at least one) eye, and a "big smile"! You'll have to excuse Canaan's face covered in yogurt! :)

With much love for you - who we've never met but we dream of every night,

Mommy,  Daddy, Canaan & Ezra

Doubt

It's easy in facing a long adoption process to have moments where doubt creeps in. Where you wonder if you're doing to right thing, if your ready, if you can handle this process... but I realize that those also tend to also be the moments where I've turned my gaze inward (or to the world of skeptics and negativity) instead of outward toward God. And... it's also when I've stopped thinking about all of this from our waiting child's perspective. I have to step back from my emotions sometimes and remember that this was laid out so clearly for us and God is in control. He knows what we can handle and is empowering and growing us to be able to handle what's next.

If your reading this (not many are!), please pray for us... and more importantly pray for the one who is waiting on us to fight this fight (and wait this wait) for her.

Getting things done!

Today on my list (besides house cleaning and grocery shopping) is getting 5 of our Ohio state certified documents out to the NY Chinese Consulate (via a courier service) to be authenticated, and sending our marriage license to the Indiana Secretary of State to be certified... again. Our first marriage license was issued at the end of 2012 and it's getting clear it will probably be too old by the time our dossier is in the hands of our agency. I'm hoping it's the only document we'll need to redo!!

We are praying praying PRAYING that our home study report might be finished this week. It would be the best birthday gift I could ask for. As of today we've been waiting 38 days for it. :(

Never Give Up

We're still waiting for our home study to be written.... waiting and waiting some more. The wait is part of our path to finding our little girl and bringing her home... and she's so worth every difficult minute.

This is the quote that pops into my head whenever I start feeling discouraged about how slooooowwww things can move in adoption. I love it!

My First Homemade Baby Dress

...or it could be a shirt if she's much bigger than I'm imagining! :)

I'm branching out from pirate pants and fabric guitar toys (which our dog distroyed... boo). :)

What to Expect When You're... Adopting

Yesterday I came across these really great articles on what to expect when adopting a child from China with regards to cleanliness and potty training. Great reads for anyone else on a China adoption journey!

Cleanliness
Potty Training

Mandarin Lessons at our Place!

Thanks to some free audio translation apps we've been learning how to say a few things in Mandarin! I've been surprised how into it Canaan is! He's been asking me "How do you say {this word} to my baby sister..." questions - 99.9% of the time my answer is "I have no. idea." Slowly we're learning a very small number of phrases. :) Yesterday Canaan asked, "How do you say, 'Stop hitting me Ezra!'?" Haha

Here's Canaan learning Mandarin on the iPad, and our little Mandarin playroom sign. It's our own interpretation of how we think things could be spelled with English characters, but it works for us!

I love how much Canaan talks about his baby sister and ask questions about her. I can't wait for the day when we can have our three babies finally all together!