Merry Christmas to everyone!
We have officially arrived back in the South as of late summer this year. We never realized quite how much we actually sweat in the South until we lived out West for a few years running in the dry weather and not having to immediately change your drenched clothing because you felt like you had just been to a “smelly” water park in your street clothes. Ha! In fact, you could even place your running clothes back in the drawer because they were good for at least one more run. Needless to say, with a house full of 3 teenagers who sweat more than the average adult, not to mention the 2 younger kids and Marcus and I, we do A LOT more laundry! We finally purchased a house this year. But, it does feel nice to actually be able to paint the walls if we want to for the first time in years! The house we bought is 2000 square feet SMALLER than our previous ones so it is a tight squeeze, especially in light of our big news!
As many of you know, our youngest son, Tai, is adopted (we like the word “chosen” better) from Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. We had prayerfully considered for years adopting another child from Inner Mongolia and decided to see if we could find a child who was from Inner Mongolia in the same foster home program as Tai (New Day Foster Home) with similar special needs. Tough fit as there are very few children adopted out of Inner Mongolia! We were ultimately matched with a 2 year old little boy, Samuel, with shunted hydrocephalus and asthma. He is absolutely precious! We have received pictures and videos. He is a 100% active 2-year-old! Marcus and I hope we are not too old to chase a 2 year old around the house again. But, we better get ready! He is everywhere and he loves CARS like no other child I’ve ever seen. He walks around with a car in each hand all of the time. When he is not walking around with cars, he is toting around the penguin we gave him as his trusty mate. He speaks really good Chinese for a 2 year old- so we’ve been told……I guess I wouldn’t know because all 2 year old seem to speak Chinese…..right?! He is tall for his age and likely to pass all of us ultimately as his gene pool creates people like Yao Ming, the basketball player.
Well, the story does not end here. The agency after we had matched with Samuel asked us if we would consider his foster brother, Timothy. They sent pictures and a video as well. What’s that Tom Cruise movie where the girl says, “You had me at hello.” Well, they had us at the video! We were sunk (and so is our bank account as international adoptions are quite expensive)! Timothy has waited 5 years for a family to choose him. He is 5 ½ years old with sacral spina bifida and a right club foot. He can walk but does require an HKAFO brace (in layman terms- a brace from his hip to his foot on the right side). He is a brilliant 5 year old who can already count to 200 in Chinese and knows lots of pinyin (the Chinese written language). We figure he will also dominate in math and science with his Asian genes! He tells us he does not like sports, but likes to pick flowers instead! Sorry, Marcus…. He loves puzzles and Thomas the Tank choo-choo trains! His favorite food is tomatoes! What child chooses that as their favorite food- I guess a non-American who hasn’t been exposed to McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A quite yet? Maybe I will have a vegetable lover after all in the family! Haley tells me when she goes to college next year that vegetables are exiting her diet. She’s a meat-a-tarian! Timothy is the exact same size as Tai but on the thinner side. Samuel is ONLY 2 inches shorter than Tai or Timothy and his is 3-4 years younger than they are. Needless to say, we can dress them as triplets and get lots of questions from onlookers. We’ve not had twins or triplets before so we should play it up. Both Timothy and Samuel are at New Day Foster Home outside of Beijing. You can google it and see lots of pictures in their scrapbook section and on their blog page. We are so thankful that they will finally have a mother and a father, and likewise, we know we will truly be even more blessed as a family! Our journey to go to China to bring them home will be in late winter. We are so excited!
