Nothing starts your day better than ....

New pictures!! Yesterday we received pictures of Isaiah's birthday celebration and this morning we woke to some surprise pics from ICC's Christmas celebration.

Most of the birthday photos we received were pretty blurry, but the ones from Christmas were very clear!

Here is our little man with his birthday cake. We were told he had 32 babies and toddlers at his party!

These are the ones we received this morning ... they were taken just yesterday! This was the Christmas celebration on the ICC baby floor. They said Isaiah had a great time. If you look closely (i.e. zoom in and inspect every inch of him, like we do!), you can see 2 little teeth coming through!

We can hardly wait to get this sweetie in our arms! Come on March!

LOA!!!!

We woke to a wonderful email this morning from our agency - our LOA is on the way!! Day 62 - right at average!! We have several more steps to complete before we get our Travel Approval, if we continue to track with the average, we should be looking at getting our TA in early March and traveling mid-March or so. There are several holidays between now and then that might slow things slightly, but hopefully not by much!!

A great way to end the week!!

Happy Birthday sweet girl!!

Happy Birthday to our big 3 year old!! Here are a couple pictures of our big girl.

Happy Birthday sweet boy!

Today is Isaiah's 1st birthday. We actually celebrated last night, since China is 14 hours ahead of us. We went out for Chinese food, then came back and had a small cake and sang happy birthday him. We recorded it for him, just like we did for Anna on her 1st birthday.

There is a family in China right now that should be visiting Isaiah's SWI tomorrow. We are hopeful they will able to take pictures.

Here is the birthday care package we sent to him last week -  thanks to Aunt Julie, Uncle Brad and cousins for the cars, books and outfit & thanks to Nana and Grammie for the cake. We are also hopeful the SWI will send pictures of his party soon.

We are now really in the realm of possibility to get our LOA. I'm actually praying that we may even see it this week ... but we're trying not to get our hopes us (ha!). Today is day 59 of our LOA wait and the average wait people have had in the last month is 62 days ... not that I'm obsessing over this chart or anything!!

"In Process"

It's a small step, but any step is a step closer to our baby boy! Yesterday was day 47 of our wait for our LOA.

The process of getting our LOA goes in a couple of steps - 1st is dossier translation, which is where we were for 47 days and 2nd is "in process", which is where we are now! That means our dossier is now out of transation and basically just waiting for approval.

Currently the average wait for LOA is about 70 days ... our agency said last night that they expect it in the next month. Our prayer is to have our LOA by Christmas. That will put us on track for travel in March if all of the remaining steps keep with their average.

Last night we ordered Isaiah his birthday care package. He will turn 1 on Dec 12th. We should get pictures of him celebrating with the cake we sent. There is also another family getting ready to leave next week to bring their daughter home from Isaiah's SWI ... she is going to try to take pictures and maybe video for us while she is there!!

Last weekend we found Anna in Isaiah's room (which is a work in progress), she said she wanted to sleep next to "baby brother". She talks about him all the time and everytime we are shopping somewhere, she wants to buy 2 of everything - one for her and one for "baby brother".

So Thankful

God has blessed us greatly ... we are so thankful for all He has given us. Hope you all have a Happy Thanksgiving.

What a way to start the day!

We woke this morning to more pictures of Isaiah in our inbox!

We're trying to find out when they were taken, but we know the first one was when he was about 6 months old.



7 mths



8 mths



9 mths



  

9 mths



Halloween Pics

Anna was so excited to get dressed last night. She had been talking about being Tinkerbell for about 3 months now and couldn't wait to get her costume on.

"Edacious"

That is the word one of the care givers used to describe Isaiah in an update we just received!

Edacious defined: devouring or craving food in great quantities.

Our boy likes to eat. This is the 3rd report that we have heard about how he likes to eat! If you know Anna, you know our girl can eat too! Greg and I have joked that we might need a 2nd job to feed these two!

Besides being a good eater, our little Ning Ning was also described as a smart boy with a bright smile. His care givers say he gives them lots of happiness and the love him very much.

We sent him a care package and included with it a photo album of Greg, Anna and me. Here is one of the updated pictures that we received which shows him holding our photo album with his care giver telling him who we are ... very surreal for us to see!

This next one is a great shot of our boy rockin' the jean jacket and some MC Hammer pants! Too cute!

We feel so blessed to be able to get updates like this ... and, of course, they just make us want jump on a plane today!!

Two years ago ...

At 4:30 am on Oct. 21st, 2009, the phone rings, I sit straight up in bed and say, frantically "Greg, this is it"! It was the call we had been praying for ... our adoption coordinator says "sorry to wake you, but I have a file for you to review, I just emailed it to you". We rushed to our computer to open the email.

Her sweet little face was the first thing we saw, our hearts melted...

Now, here we are 2 years later and she is almost 3 years old and preparing to be a big sister. She talks about her baby brother all the time. This week she even started setting a place at the table for him as she sets our table for dinner each night. She always includes him in our prayer before dinner as well. And, every airplane she spots in the sky, she thinks is on its way to China to bring her baby brother home.

She even picked a pumpkin out for her brother earlier this month when we went to the pumpkin patch.

Son, Little Brother, Grandson, Nephew, Cousin ...

Meet Isaiah ...




We are thrilled to finally be able to introduce our son! On Sept. 29th at 9:44pm, our agency sent us an email saying they had a file for us to review. We opened it up to see the picture above! On Oct 1st we submitted our Letter of Intent (LOI) to adopt Isaiah Ning.

We had to wait until we had our Pre-Approval (PA) before publicly announcing ... hence the tease picture post several days ago! This morning we woke to find an email from our agency saying our PA had arrived!!

Here is a bit about our little NingNing (that is what his caregivers call him). He just turned 10 months old on Oct. 12 ... his birth date is 12/12/10 (Anna's is 12/14/08)!! He is in Hengyang City, Hunan and we were thrilled to learn that his orphanage is run by International China Concern (more to come about them later). He is described as active and lovely, likes to be cuddled, has a ready smile, quick in reaction, and if angry he cries loudly (just like his big sis!).

We were fortunate enough to get an update on him just this week and learned that he can crawl and say Ma Ma and Ba Ba. They also said that he doesn't want to sit on his own and will fall back on purpose - LOL!

We have several more steps in the process to complete before we will travel. Right now, it's looking like we'll be heading to China in March.

Here is an updated picture of him taken at the end of September during ICC's annual Walk the Wall fundraiser. Isn't he just precious!!


 

Then and Now

After I snapped a picture of Anna as she and Greg were heading out this morning, I remembered that I had taken a similar shot almost exactly a year ago. It's hard to believe how much she has changed in a year!!

A video by LWB about adopting a waiting child.

LID!

Our coordinator emailed us early this morning to let us know we are officially logged in! Our LID is 8/1/11 ... very quick turn around time from our DTC. Now all we do is wait and pray.

Here is a recent shot of the big-sister-to-be. She looks and talks like such a big girl these days. She's started beginning her sentences with the word "sometimes" and earlier this week I was getting ready to put her down for her nap and she ran back down the hallway to put a book away ... I thought she was stalling, so asked her to hurry back to her room where I was waiting and when she made her way back to me she simply said "Mama, Anna come back always". Too sweet!!