Back to our Regularly Scheduled Posts...

Now that things have settled down a little from all the excitement, I am going to try to put some pictures on here of the boys from the summer! My my my, am I behind!

By the way, we have received our Letters of Confirmation for the girls and we should have travel approval in about 4 weeks, so travel (Lord willing) in about 6 weeks. Yay!!! also... we still have our fabulous motorhome for sale... hint... hint.




The first weekend in June we went to Nebraska for my Grandparents 60th wedding anniversary party It was just a close family dinner at a banquet hall. It was very nice and so much fun just to spend some time there... Grandpa took the boys fishing first thing the next day! The boys all LOVED it, as you can see from the pics!


Anthony got to go first, since he was the youngest...

Then Alex... and finally Colin, after they got a small lesson... the boys still screamed like "sissies" when the fish came flying at them from the water!!! It was soooo funny to watch. heeheee! They were all scared of the fish touching them. silly nuts!







When we got back to the house... we found Erica taking a nap... on the floor.

The next morning... Grandpa took Jerry and the boys for a quick ride on the boat... before the lunch!

Of course, first thing when we got to the hall we had to take photos... of everyone who came... This is my mom and 3 of my siblings... one brother is missing. Heather, Mom, Billy, Christel, April from left to right.

Not sure what happened to grandpa and Anthony in this one... but everyone else looks happy. hahaha! These are 4 of their 6 great-grand-children.

On the way back to the house for Dessert we had to stop at the playground for a few minutes of goofing-off!
so cute!!!

Then a special little photo-shoot in the side yard at Grandma and Grandpa's! These four are so hilarious together... haha the two blond ones belong to my youngest sister, April... Heather's kids, who are in high school, couldn't come.





A little choking and poking...

Beautiful girl...




Then Anthony zonked... out in the grass...

Meanwhile, Jerry was scanning and inputting all kind of info into the "Family Tree" This is just one of hundreds of photos that he scanned in over the weekend! He was TIRED when he was done!!


The rest of the month was not quite as exciting, i guess as all that packed into 4 days! (other than our referral of Maria, of course!)

We spent a lot of time working on the gardens and maintaining equipment and cleaning the shop. Jerry made the boys some "blocks" with left over wood he had, and they built an amazing tower, that i was quite impressed with!

Alex learned how to look and work like a man all of a sudden!!! oh my!!! so cute and he was dying to try the power-washer a little!

Anthony got to ride in the Takeuchi, which he calls the uchi-uchi.




Of course we had pop-ice a few times...


I will put my gardening pictures in another post very soon... i can hardly wait to show off all our plants and produce! Although i will admit, i haven't taken as many pictures of it this summer with all the excitement surrounding the girls referrals and stuff... but i still have a bunch to share!

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!

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.

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.

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!

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!!!

Amazingly Fast!!!!

Our Letter of Confirmation is already here in the USA!!! Our agency will be mailing it to us to sign and send back!! After that we will receive Travel Approval in about 6-8 weeks. Then we travel 2-4 weeks after that!!! WOOHOOOOOO!!! China here we come!!!!!

So we have a very intense/long story going on surrounding China, and I only posted it on My China Blog. It is a long story and it is my personal journal about our China Adoption. But it is one HUGE prayer request. And it is going to be an AMAZING story, no doubt! But there are many unknowns and possible heart break in the future so it was hard for me to decide to share it with everyone. I am sure some people are going to criticize us, but we don't care, we are doing what God is calling us to do. I can not wait to find out what He has in store for our family! We would appreciate prayers from you all for our daughters to get home to us as soon as possible!!

We Have PA!!!

On Friday, July 2 we received our Pre-Approval for Baby Jia Yi!!! In just 5 days!!! Yay!!! I guess that means that China has acknowledged that we have requested her and so far are ok with us getting her. I am sure that now they will have to go over all our documents and make sure that they really think that we are ok for Jia! The Letter of Confirmation (LOC) could be a few weeks to a couple months away. I have noticed that a lot of people call it an LOA so I guess it is also a Letter of Acceptance or Approval or Affirmation, maybe? We are waiting for our updated Homestudy to approve us for "Special Needs" children and then we can send that in to USCIS (basically Homeland Security) so that the US can approve us (once again) to bring orphans into the US.

Since we received our match with Jia Yi, we have been working on preparing for a fund raiser sale. We are planning it for August 5, 6 and 8th. The 8th will be our LID-versary of 4 years in China. Won't that be neat when we have all our funds raised as a celebration!!!? We of course will be advertising a bunch and fasting and praying a lot for someone to come and purchase our Motorhome, the Baja1000 ready race quad and whatever else it will take to bring Baby Jia Yi home! My friend Bonnie's youngest kids have offered to bring over their Lemonade stand and sell Lemonade and cookies (i think), We are selling tons of books from our library and boxes of scrapbook supplies... I have only kept my absolute favorite items. I am making homemade cards to sell to. We should have all your normal items like clothes, toys, and probably some tools, antique furniture (our first donation, from Jerry's parents), crystal dishes and hopefully some garden produce as well. If you have any other ideas of things we could make to sell or if anyone has anything they would like to donate to the "Cause" we would LOVE it and be forever grateful!!!

This adoption stuff is not cheap and since we started this journey to a daughter in China the estimated cost has gone up by at least eight thousand dollars! Goodness! But seriously the money is not a problem for God to take care of... its our hearts that seem to be the problems these days... so many people have said to me that they would love to adopt but it is just too much money... kind of a bad excuse, since everything is God's in the first place. And what is a little money in exchange for a child growing up in a family and learning to love Jesus like we do!? The Bible tells us to take care of the Orphans and the Widows... God has put it heavily on OUR hearts and we are obeying... and couldn't be happier about it. Alex and Anthony are the most amazing little boys I could ever ask for. I wouldn't want to imagine life without them. They are MY children through and through!!!

Today the boys went with grandma and grandpa and some of their cousins to a water park... Anthony's first time... it will be neat to see what he thought of it! I know Alex loves it, he is such a fish!!! Anthony was sure NOT worried about driving away from me today in G & G's motorhome for their day trip! So cute! Next week they will both be heading to TN for a week long "vacation" at their cousins' house in said motorhome! Goodness... i will be kid-less for a week!!! Jerry will be home then and we have Tissiana and Travis coming up for a visit this weekend so they weill get us all to themselves for a few days... that has not happened in a long time!!! Scrapbooking... here we come with no little boy interruptions! I think the guys are going to go on a little quad-ing excursion for a couple days even. We will miss the boys, but it will be refreshing not to have the responsibility of them. wow! It will be Anthony's first time away from us overnight. They'll be getting practice for when we go to China!

Hopefully i can get some pictures posted from the last month of the boys soon. I have some cute ones. Maybe we will have other exciting news to share about Kimi, like an update and new pictures.

Jia Yi Wei

Jia Yi Wei

will soon be

Maria Noelle!!!

We can not believe that after 5.5 years we have finally seen our first baby Girl!! Her file is securely "locked" for us and we have applied to China for her. We now wait for our Pre-Approval (PA), after that a Letter of Confirmation (LOC) and finally Travel Approval (TA). This should all last 2-4 months-ish, if you know what i mean! haha!

Her Chinese name: Jia (Beautiful) Yi (Happy) Wei (Brilliant/Valuable) Wei is the name that all children from her orphanage are given (think Last name), Jia is the name that all the girls there are given and Yi is her personalized name. So far we know the other two names describe her... we are just waiting to see if she will be happy! We hope so!!

She is in Tianjin City Children's Welfare Institute. Tianjin is in the NorthEast near Beijing.Tianjin is one of 4 Municipalities in China... Basically it is Classified as a City and it is the size of a small province... I mean 12 million people live there and there are Counties within this "City"! Some of the babies live in Foster Homes, but as far as we know Maria does not.

She was born December 15, 2008... so she is just one year younger than Anthony!!! He was born on the 16th! go figure... Maybe someday i will get a Spring baby! haha! Our whole family's birthdays are in the winter! So she is about 18 months old right now... but the info we have on her is from 11 months old! So we have requested an update, but we may hire someone to call and get an update. Because apparently CCAA doesn't always like to get updates done.

She was about 15 lbs and 28 inches tall. Kind of small. When I talked to our International Adoption Doctor, she classified her as "Failure to Thrive". Guess why she is listed on the Special Needs Waiting Child list... the diagnosis... Lagging Motor Development!!!!! What!!? And she was on the list for over a month and no one snatched her up!!!! I can't believe it! Alex and Anthony both had worse things on their medical reports! Hopefully the update will tell us more about what she is able to do at this age. She was not standing or walking or sitting at 11 months, but was crawling so that must be why they classified her as SN. Who knows!

Apparently she is a deep sleeper, sucks her finger, she crawls, uses her index finger and thumb to pick things up, laughs out loud, responds to facial expressions of adults, active and closest to a caregiver. There are some other things, she knows her name and responds... can hear and see. Her favorite toy is a rattle and is happy playing with toys. She had 2 teeth. Loves juice! Holds her milk bottle TIGHTLY! (that sounds like the boys) Her hands are "powerful" the report says! haha!

It also says that she will fall asleep in her caretaker's arms after drinking her bottle... so it sounds like someone has time for her! Oh! I hope so! She cries when she is hungry... Sounds like she is a lot about food, like the boys were. We can deal with that!

I almost forgot... I joined a yahoo group that advocates for the special needs children on this list... I was browsing through the pictures last week and saw Jia... The first thing i said to myself was "she is wearing the boys' pjs!" Alex had a pair of these pjs and then Anthony wore them! Alex says that we will have to get her some girl ones. She definitely should fit in around here... with all these tool pjs!

We are praying for another little girl that was on the list who was missing an entire arm... If they would let us, we would get both of them!! But we are told only one at a time!! We hope she will find a family VERY soon! Update on her... she has a family!

No Match...

So apparently this list was full of boys. I hope that a lot of them find homes soon!!! Our Agency said that this was a really hard matching process this time... problems with the website and not sure what else... when i was chatting with Lindsay i was in the grocery store and the cell phone was being sketchy so i couldn't understand everything she was telling me, but i think i got the idea anyways. So they were unable to find us a match this time. There's always the "off" chance that Kimi will come back on the list after being "looked" at by another family, but i am not counting on that! New lists usually come out every month and a half or so... I hope the agency was at least able to match some of the others waiting on the list. She told me about a little girl that did not meet our match requirements that has both arms and legs that are deformed... Lindsay thought that she was a little beyond what we thought we could take on at the moment, and she was right, but i am glad that she mentioned her to me... we are going to pray for this little one to get a family soon... it makes me so sad to think of this baby being ready for a family and not getting one right away to help her! If we had more money available right now we might consider her, but as it is, we are going to have a sale to raise money to go.

So... its not like we aren't used to waiting...

By the End of This YEAR!!!?

Finally some news to share about our China adoption. Today I posted this on my China blog, but for those of you who don't read that one, i thought i would cross post. :)

FREAKING OUT!!! (in a good way!!)

In August, we will have been logged in for 4 years!! Which means we started the process to adopt a baby girl a year and a half before... We were in process with Kazakhstan for a year to adopt Alex and Kimi when Kaz changed some rules about adopting unrelated children at the same time... so we applied to China and good grief has it been a long time coming...

I don't regret any of it, because we now have Anthony and will have the "Kimi" that God planned for us. As well as so many of the other great things that have come from this long wait. Many of you know that for us... when God calls us to adopt we jump on it! And in the last couple weeks we have been "hearing" God call us to finally switch to the Waiting Child program with China. Many people call it the Special Needs program, but i have not liked the response that i usually get when i say it. We filled out a form last week listing special needs that we will consider if given the opportunity. Some of course are very minor, but some are not so much... although none of them have life long health concerns. Missing limbs is an example... most likely she would be perfectly healthy otherwise. Then there are things as minor as a birthmark! For a few days i found myself quite consumed with the thought that her body might not be perfect and how that will affect her life and i worried about myself seeing her as special needs when she was my daughter... it is hard to explain, but then i think i settled with the fact that she will be "just" our Kimi!!!! FINALLY, after all this time.

Our Agency told me that they would call me before a new listing of Children were put on the CCAA's site. Our Agency, you see will log into that site and "MATCH" us with a child, then send over the info... two days later i saw on the RQ site that a new SN (special needs) list was to com out on the 22nd! Yay! Then when the Agency called to talk with me about it, Lyndsay said that they only have a few people right now waiting for matches and that most likely they will be able to match us, too... talk about my heart stopping... or leaping out of my chest... something!! Oh my word... i have been able to think of nothing else since (hardly)! The 22 in China is actually the night of the 21st here!!!!!!!!!!!!! So Monday night some one may be matching us with Kimi!!!! I can hardly breath!!!

THAT IS TONIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh my!!!! All day long, my heart has been freaking out!! I can hardly function! I just had to share with all my bloggy friends! Please Pray for God's hand to lead our "Match-Maker" tonight!!!! I can hardly breath normal! Good thing i have a ton of stuff to do today and really shouldn't even be blogging, but how can i resist!

Our Camping Trip to Mansfield...

So we took a trip to Missouri to Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds' Spring planting festival. We try to go every year and this was our 3rd year. We took the tent instead of the motorhome (less work) and more flexibility in where you can drive. Naturally it was rainy when we got there... although not as bad as some of the stuff we drove through on the way... we put the tent up very quick, if i say so my self and got every thing inside, beds, food, clothes. Then it started to rain harder... we ate some sandwiches and got into bed... it poured until we fell asleep.

In the morning it was beautiful and we had some sunshine. We went to visit the horses that the campsite owners have and had some breakfast... then the kids played a little outside, climbing the tree behind the tent and stuff... We also noticed these gross slugs slithering across our tent... i think we found 3 of them.


Of course we took a few photos! Couldn't resist!





Those cute little feet hanging down... He always wants to climb trees (We called him monkey when he was little because he tried to climb up us) but we don't have any climbing tree around the house... all the limbs are 10 feet up or so. But this little tree was perfect! Even Anthony tried climbing a little and Jerry of course! haha! Oh! their pants were rolled up because the grass was still so wet and we didn't want their pant legs to be soaking!


Finally we got in the truck and decided to drive around and explore and make our way to Len's house for a visit. (Len is the guy we are the soil distributor for) But on the way into town we had see a caboose at a park-like spot, so we decided to go see that first. They discovered this nest of eggs a few minutes after they got there! What beautiful eggs!!! The mommy bird was squaking and tweeting away, sitting on top of the caboose!!!

The boys played a bit on it, they pretended to drive of course and made all kinds of noise!

Then we started for a drive through countryside toward Len's. We took every back road we could find that was sort of headed in that direction... The poor gps, it kept rerouting us and i am sure if it could think would have thought we were idiots! But we found some beaustiful things along the way! They have these streams all over... and most of them are made so that if they get too full they just run over the roads, or they run over the road anyways... ha! But so lush, green and clean smelling, it was so refreshing exploring!

I don't think the boys could run out of rocks here to throw!!! But they would try if they were there longer! The water was sooooo clear! and beautiful!!

While Jerry and Alex explred an area that Anthony couldn't cross and i didn't want to go through the poison ivy... Anthony and i did a mini photo shoot. (are you surprised!?)

Dirty jeans and all...


Oh! and he threw some more rocks! he would poick them up on one side and throw them over the edge on the other side!! So funny! We were here a good 20 minutes and we never saw another car!


When Alex got back from exploring (and finding a dead armadillo) i made him pose for me too!!! Can't you believe it!!!?

He was thrilled...

This one is for April, my sister...



We saved a turtle form the road along the way and then we found these lazy cows... They looked so funny sitting down in the grass... their little ears sticking up...




The next day was the show... and it was perfect!!!! no rain... and sunshine and some clouds! Last year it rained all day... and had been raining all week... it was a MESS!!! But this year was great!!!


We need one of these old gadgets... you put the dried corn in and it takes all the kernals off when you crank the handle! We dried corn last year to make corn meal with... it is so sore on the fingers to get off the cob when it is dry!!! This thing was cool! We will have to keep our eyes open for one!

Then the guy demonstrating would dump the kernels in hear after blowing away the junk... and this would grind it into cornmeal. We use quite a bit of cornmeal at our house for some reason... we make corn bread a lot... everybody loves it and we can buy 25 pound bags of organic cornmeal locally... so this would be great to use.



Alex picked up the corn kernels from the ground at the previous display and put then in a bags... then he fed them to the chicken that they have. We met a family as we were waiting in line to enter and we saw them again over at the chicken section... so Alex shared his corn with the boy...

Anthony fed the grass to the chickens with the little girl of the family. These kids were so cute! I think they were Amish... the little girl kept trying to squeeze Anthony's cheeks!


On our way home we saw this creepy cloud... it was moving so fast and it went right over and kept on blowing and keeping its shape...

Anthony was sleeping one of the times we stopped at a rest area on the way home.... Alex convinced Jerry to "play" with him for a few minutes at the rest area playground! so funny!
We bought a few seeds and met the Majerus Family that makes the Clyde's Garden planners. That was fun and they are such a beautiful (inside and out) family! We went to a few classes, one on composting, it was my favorite this year. Although we did learn in another class that there are about 450 named types of garlics in the world! goodness! we only have 5! We bought some purple basil and talked to the guy who we bought a bluebird house from our first year. We looked at ALLLL the chickens and were scared half to death by a crazy donkey!!! They are soooo loud! Alex liked to watch the blacksmith at work in his shop. We bought a couple rhubarb plants, some sweet potato starts and my favorite parsley called Forrest Green. I think we walked around every thing at least twice. It was a great day and over way too soon!!

Someday when we have ready the Little House on the Prarie books with the kids we will take them to Laura Ingalls Wilder's house... it is there in Mansfield and i am sure will be neat for the kids to see... when they care!

The trip went way too fast, though. We had to spread the tent back out when we got home so it could dry... we woke up at 3:30 in the morning... we just couldn't sleep... the boys were both sleeping with us and there was a train the kept coming by a few miles away, but we could hear it... so we whispered that we were ready to go... to we packed everything up in an hour in the dark!!! and Headed home!! We were some tired puppies when we got home... i mean what kind of freak wakes up at 3:30 in the morning to take down their tent... Us, i guess...

More Alex...

This kid!!!! Tonight as we sat eating salad out of the garden we were talking about the imax movie we just got in the mail about Texas.

me: mommy used to live in texas, you know...
Alex: and then you moved here?
daddy: mommy moved here to be with daddy, if mommy lived there and daddy here, it wouldn't work very well...
Alex: because you llooove mommy.
daddy: lots! You know some mommies and daddies live apart...
Alex: WHY!?
Daddy: well, sometimes satan makes some mommies and daddies not like each other but when that happens the Bible says to fast and pray.
Alex: what's fasting?
Me: uh, Alex you know what fasting it... you don't eat.
Alex: why can't i fast?
me: because you are too young!
Daddy: fasting helps your body heal and makes your mind clear so you can make good decisions.
Alex: Our government needs to fast because they are not making good choices!! We need to send them a letter and tell them that we have been praying for them to make right choices and they are not so they need to fast.

Alex went on to name names... I can't believe he remembers all these people's names!

Jerry and I were laughing so hard we could hardly breathe!!