Superheroes

Here are our superheroes. They bring me their pillowcases and I staple them together to make capes. Then they "fly" around the house. I asked them to do a superhero pose and this is what I got.

Coralville Lake Camping

We went camping at Coralville Lake this past weekend with our dear friends the Hills. It is half way between our houses and so we met up for some outdoor fun. The kids had a great time wearing each other and the adults out. We feel so blessed to have such a close friendship with them and it was wonderful to catch up and see how much the kids have grown and changed. I miss them already!

Happy Birthday Naomi!

Our baby girl turned 3 today. I can't believe it. I asked her what she wanted for her birthday and she said "pink!". OK... So, I made her this pink cake and she got a new pink stroller. We started the day with chocolate chip pancakes, had a picnic in the park for lunch, and she went to get a haircut. We had her dinner and party planned for just the four of us. Isaiah threw up in between the dinner and the cake...all over the table. Happy Birthday baby!

Dossier Done!

Dossier: (Dos-ee-ey) n. The presentation of our family to the Chinese officials.

This is what we have been gathering for 8 months and today we mailed it to our agency! Here I am running out the door to the FedEx office. I have to admit that when we started this process I thought to myself "this will be a piece of cake! We are SO gonna get this done in record time." I had no idea that what all other parents of internationally adopted children know is that it is SO NOT a piece of cake. Anyway, needless to say this is a very happy day for us so we had to document it for Levi's adoption journey book. After visiting Cindy at FedEx and telling her all about Levi while sharing his picture and gushing all over the place I celebrated with some Reeses Cups. Now if all is well with the packet our agency will forward it to China on Friday. Then they will think about it for about 6 months...or something like that.

Vacation and Other Stuff

Well, we just got back from North Carolina for two weeks and we are glad to be home. It was wonderful to see family and spend time with them but we contracted a stomach bug before we left Dubuque and it has lasted until we arrived back home. We were humbled by the whole thing as we were reminded that there are many in the world that suffer from such illnesses every day and even die from them without access to clean water. Just yesterday I read in my World Vision magazine that diarrhea causes 1.8 million deaths among children each year. That is mind blowing to me and really puts things in perspective.

In other news, our adoption is moving right along thanks to a paperwork miracle. We messed up and failed to notice a very important piece of information in our one million page handbook for China adoption. Thanks to a dear friend in Dubuque and a courier in Washington DC who has friends at the Chinese Embassy we seem to be back on track. Hopefully we will be sending our load of paperwork to our agency to be mailed to China early next week. We just can't wait to meet our little guy.