Tuesday, August 24, 2010

We Have PA!!!


Our Pre-Approval (PA) was posted over the weekend and the CCAA actually called our Liaison in China over the weekend to tell her. YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It is OFFICIAL!!! we are going to be the parents of two girls!!! Travel approvals were received by our agency and one for our Maria was not among them, so we deduce that China will be holding our TA until they have Kimi's ready, too. That is good to know! Otherwise we we have been traveling within 2-3 weeks possibly!! That is so exciting to know that the process moves that fast! Its only been 2 months since our match with Maria! That's amazing!Link

From now on all our updates unless they are BIG NEWS will be on our China blog. There's already some new stuff over there... http://cookfamilyadventuresinchina.blogspot.com






There will be two LESS orphans in the world.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

The Big News!

So some of you know, if you went to our China blog, that we were requesting two, yes TWO little girls from China. Last week, China told us that we could lock the file for a second little girl!!! We are so excited, we can hardly believe it! We will have TWO daughters!!! So I wanted to share updated info. There have been a few changes... as in names.

Heng Ran YangSoon will be
KimberLei Anne

and

Jia Yi Wei
Soon will be
Maria Noelle

You can read about Maria (Jia Yi) here. Today i sent them both care packages and hope that we will get updated information soon. We can hardly wait to see how they have changed since the last updates. Maria's last update was in November of last year (9 months ago) and KimberLei's last update was one year and 10 months AGO!! She was only a year and a half old, now she is three and a half!




Kimi (Heng Ran) was born March 18, 2007 and was brought to the orphanage at 8 months old! It was then that they diagnosed her with "cerebral palsy ?" literally that is the diagnosis, with the question mark and all! Her reports don't exactly jive with cp but i guess we will see what is going on with her when we get there. The reports said when she arrived, she did nothing, no talking, no playing, her development was VERY much behind, after they arranged for someone to take care of her especially in the orphanage she improved and has become "an outgoing pretty girl." At one year and seven months she could say some words and could walk with help. She likes to go out doors for walks and smile, play games and listen to music, she likes to clap to music. She's apparently a "moderate sleeper." She was 33.5 inches tall and weighed only 21 pounds. SKINNY!!!! But she had 20 teeth! That's a lot of teeth! Although in another place it said she had 16 teeth. I am thinking the 16 is the right number.

Her Chinese name: Heng means without end and is a boy's name, it is her first name and what many children from that orphanage are also named.
Yang is her "last name" it means masculine, or poplar tree or to propagate... hummm.
Ran however is definitely a girl's name and is a Japanese name. It means Water Lily. How very appropriate! We love water lilies and have them growing in our water garden in front of the house.

She is from the Hunan Province, Hengyang City. and has lived there in Foster care for the last year and a half. But lived in the orphanage for 11 months before that. We are hopeful that we will get to visit her city, as typically adoptive parents stay in the larger city of Changsha. Although Hengyang is no small city, i read the other day that there are 7 MILLION people there! That is HUGE! We are looking forward to seeing Hunan, it looks BEAUTIFUL from the pictures we have seen! I can't wait to photograph.

There was certainly not as much info on her as on Maria's documents, but we are very happy about her and hope to put a smile on that VERY sad face! And some meat on her skinny little arms and legs!!! We also can't wait to see some hair! Goodness sakes!

I leave you with a couple more pictures of her.

Saturday, August 07, 2010

One More Day...


We have one more day for the sale! So far we have sold two thousand dollars!!! Praise God!!! What's crazier is we still have A LOT of stuff left... it hardly looks like anything's gone!!! just crazy!
We did have someone steal something the first morning! Something fairly expensive... $20 or so... we couldn't believe it! However... we're ok... we prayed for them.

So we are still praying for the sale of some of the bigger items! So please pray with us!

Tuesday, August 03, 2010

Countdown to Sale!!

2 DAYS until we open for sales! We are busy busy getting ready over here and have some GREAT stuff to sell! Tons of Antiques!! Furniture, a Motorhome, race quad, books, clothes, a 24ft swimming pool, tools, snow blower, and on and on!!! TONS of stuff! We are going to have a Lemonade stand with cookies, and we might even have some produce to sell! We are excited to see what God does with this sale!!!