Girls at the Zoo

Here are the gifts from my incredible Secret Buddy. Thank you Secret Buddy. All of the kids have enthusiastically been wearing their Red Thread bracelets. I can't wait to place a photo in that adorable frame,wrap our child in that towel and fill that album with photos! Thank you too for the recent gift. I will post a photo soon. One week this summer, the boys had a basketball camp. It was a half-day camp for Joseph and Edward and Danny was able to work as a Jr. Counselor. It was a great experience for him. The kids were in grades 1-4. On the last morning, the girls and I went to a zoo in the same town. One special thing at the zoo was the white lion. Jenise loved how everything in the zoo was made of recycled material--including the bench they are sitting on. The girls enjoyed the bubble machine and the mist tent more than anything else:) I definitely need to go back and fix the lighting on this picture...I just thought it was cute--hope you can see them:) The darkness was bugging me so I added some light. I have a bad habit of overcorrecting but at least now you can see them...well, you can see Jenise. If only that hat were slightly higher:)

We Are Here...

Sorry it has been so long since I last posted. I honestly did not think that much time had gone by. I told myself I would post before the kids were back in school and they are back tomorrow so I am posting tonight:) These are scatterings from our summer. I finally took the card out of our camera and uploaded/downloaded photos. We have the girls at the zoo(more to come), the boys after basketball camp, fishing at our family reunion and Danny finally caught a fish, JiaLi getting a ride from Grandma and JiaLi with Mama Pug and her other Gramma. We have had such a great summer. Secret Buddy thanks for the gifts, I will be posting them. The kids all wear their Red Thread Bracelets religiously. I just love it. Thanks for everything. So what's going on with our adoption? Not something I really like to talk about. I get nervous. With JiaLi, we told immediate family but really didn't come out and tell people(although with all the references, many knew)until we had everything over there. Now with Vietnam, I haven't said anything yet but now I will. We withdrew. We did not feel far enough along in the process and did not want to lose more money. We were researching other countries and came to a decision that we agreed upon. We are adopting from right here. We applied and had a visit the end of July with a Social Worker and now we need to take a 10-week, 1-night per week class and we are hoping to get into one for September and then go from there. We'll see. I miss you all and I am going to try to get caught up this week on everyone's blogs:)