Happy 2nd Birthday Will! (And 33rd for Mom!)

I will never have another birthday without remembering turning 30. While most people dreaded it, I was very excited. You have to be 30 before you send your paperwork to China to adopt. Unfortunately, after working on our paperwork for almost a year at that point, we were still waiting on our government to send something back before we could turn everything in. Needless to say, I spent the morning of my 30th birthday crying over paperwork instead of celebrating it. It was only a couple weeks later that our paperwork was on its way to China.

At the time, the wait was only about 10 months, so we had expected to have a baby by my 31st birthday. But 31 came and went. So did 32. A couple weeks after my 32nd birthday, I finally saw Will's picture for the first time. When I saw his birthday, it was further confirmation that he was my little boy.

I've always thought it was special that each July the family gets to gather for a birthday party for my nephew, my dad, and my brother-in-law. They all have birthdays within 5 days of each other. So when we found out Will's birthday was just 4 days before mine, I knew that another family birthday party was in order.

This year it was finally here. We celebrated Will's actual birthday on the 17th, but his party fell on my birthday. There is no one I would rather share a birthday with. It was definitely my best birthday ever because he was here to share it with me. Happy 2nd birthday to my wonderful little boy! Thanks to everyone who helped us celebrate. We wish we had room to invite more of our wonderful friends to share the day with us.

On the flip side, we will never celebrate Will's birthday when I don't say a prayer of thanks for his birth parents who helped create our wonderful little man. I imagine they must be good looking, funny, and smart (like he is!). Also brave and selfless, to give up their little boy who I truly believe they loved, so that he could get the help he needed to be healthy and have a family who could provide for him. In a country that does not have adoption plans in the form that we do in America, they left him in a very nice place where he could be found quickly and taken care of. We pray that someday we can meet in heaven and show our true appreciation.

And to everyone else with February birthdays (It seems to be a popular month!)...
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Prayer Request and Verse

Most importantly, a prayer request...please pray for our very good friend Doug. We won't go into detail for their privacy, but he is in the hospital and very sick. Please pray for his recovery and for his family who loves him very much.

Now for my next verse...
1 Corinthians 6:12
"Everything is permissible for me"—but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible for me"—but I will not be mastered by anything.

A Valentine for You!

Happy Valentine's Day from our family to yours! I hope that no matter what your love life situation, you find that something good happens to you today!

Here's a little trip down memory lane, especially for the single people out there (and a chuckle for the rest of you)...The last couple years before John became my forever Valentine, I decided that I deserved flowers on Valentine's Day just as much as the dating people. I made a promise to myself that I would by my own flowers on Valentine's as a reminder that even though I was sad on Valentine's Day and felt unloved, God still loved me. After all, God made the flowers, so He must want me to have some! Pathetic? Maybe. But it did brighten my day. Even though I will have been married for 7 years this summer, I still have a very sharp memory of what it felt like to be without a Valentine.

Even with a Valentine, today is not going to turn out quite like I had hoped. John is working ALL day and usually does not even get to come home for lunch on Saturdays. Will is sick, so there goes much, if any, chance of getting to surprise John at the store. But I'm just happy to have a wonderful husband that I love very much and who I know loves me. Happy Valentine's Day, John!

I hope that all of you, single or not, consider this your personal Valentine from Will. And if no one brings you flowers, remember that you have my blessing (and God's!) to go buy some for yourself! Happy Valentine's Day!

Dangerous Beauty

We count ourselves among the crazies--the ones who cheer on the ice and snow in hopes of being snowed in for several days, where the world around us will have to shut down and finally be still. It may be dangerous if you aren't very careful, but you cannot deny the beauty when everything is crisp and white. We are often jealous that we somehow always seem to fall just south of the boatloads of snow that others seem to get so frequently. This time we were in luck.



While others went without power, our little nook stayed nice and warm. Even our cheap pear trees, the only 2 left in the neighborhood, never lost a branch. Praise God! Our friends weren't all quite so lucky. We had some good friends stay with us a couple of days--slumber party style. Will was quite excited and, in typical playboy fashion, used the time to make a new girlfriend. He'd seen Hailey a few times before, but nothing bonds a young couple like spending quality time together. Check out his first kiss below...

My, they start young these days!

In spite of all the fun, we did miss out on a few things. It was actually too cold and icy to get out and sled and build snowmen. We would have made the old family go at it anyway except my husband is lucky enough to work at the only place in their area who wouldn't shut down. (Apparently someone in Indiana, where all the stores were closed, got to make the decisions here.) It's just no fun without John!

But I did dress Will in 5 or so layers to slip around the house and take some pictures for a few minutes. I was itching to get out and take some "cool" ice pictures, but I own one of very few Jeeps that aren't actually 4x4s, so it was a little dangerous. Plus you can't really traipse through snow and tight places with an almost two year old who loves to run the other direction, so no great ice pictures this time. : ( But maybe we will get lucky again. Winter is not over yet!

My 3rd Set of Verses

For this reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Peter 1:5-8

The part that really stood out to me this time was "in increasing measure." I may have some of those things, but they are not always increasing. My hope is that in memorizing what I am to work on, I won't be so stagnant in my walk.

Happy Year of the Ox!!!

Fan Dancers

Today is officially the first day of Chinese New Year. Happy Year of the Ox! Over the next 15 days, we, and the Chinese people, will be celebrating. For us it means reading and watching more about China, Chinese crafts and decorations, and, of course, eating more Chinese! I LOVE holidays, so this is right up my alley. It is at times like this, however, that I feel especially inadequate to assume that because of me my child will understand anything about his birth country at all. It's kind of like telling someone what's in a recipe, without giving the exact measurements so they can't recreate it and it may end up tasting totally different all together.

Yesterday was our first official Chinese New Year celebration. We went to see a play at the Main Street branch of the library. Except for being a hair long for the children, the show was awesome! There were lots of dancers, singers, and our favorite--Kung Fu! Those of you who have never really seen Kung Fu, you've got to check it out. It was amazing! John use to have a roommate who was a Kung Fu World Champion. It's funny how God prepares you for the future.

We were also delighted to see our first live lion dance. Will was so taken with the drums that it took him quite a while to turn his head to realize there were even dragons.

2 lions fighting

At the end there was Chinese fashion show showcasing original costumes of some of the northeastern people groups of China. Will is from Inner Mongolia, which is pretty much up north in the middle, so some of the costumes were very similar to one we bought him. (We bought it a little big, so maybe you'll see it next year.) Chinese fashion shows are much more choreographed and dance-like than our fashion shows. The highlight of the fashion show was a girl who's headdress looked like it had a reindeer antler.

After dinner we headed to a Chinese restaurant and ate with our friends who have a beautiful little girl from China.

"Big" Will


"Small" Will

There were about 80 of us there with the local Families with Children from China group. We were excited to run into another family we had traveled through China with. It was great to see how much their little girl and grown.

It's tradition to give gifts on Chinese New Year, especially red envelopes filled with money, so I got some red envelopes from a local party store for the kids. I filled them with fake Chinese money, a Chinese New Year pencil, Chinese clothing notepads, and panda stickers.

More Chinese New Year installments to come. Until then, Happy Year of the Ox!

A New Era

Those who know me well, know that I have never been a big fan of politics. I avoid watching the news because it's depressing. I figure if anything big enough happens that I need to know about, someone will tell me. So it is not so surprising that since Will's nap time had to fall during the presidential inauguration yesterday, we just slept through it, though we did manage to see a few highlights later.

I join many others who will pray for our new president, who definitely has his work cut out for him. I was very happy to hear that Rick Warren prayed for President Obama in Jesus name. I agree that it is exciting to see a new president, one who represents a dream for many, welcomed into office.

At the same time, I think it is extremely sad that President Bush left with his reputation tarnished. I, for one, never want to feel the pressure of being the president of our great nation. He had impossible circumstances to deal with during his entire administration. No matter what decisions he could have made, he would have been wrong in the eyes of many. Check out this eloquent post, Thank You, President Bush, that I found through a link on one of my friend's blogs. Let me finish by saying that I am proud it was President Bush who signed my son's certificate of citizenship and officially welcomed Will to America.