Introducing Avery!!

We proudly introduce our new daughter to be Avery Gracyn.  She is two years old and resides in the Zhanjiang SWI Guangdong China.   We are waiting on our I800A approval and then our dossier will be on its way to China.  Then we wait to be logged in and then our official acceptance from China.  We hope to travel at the end of the year or first part of 2014.  We really want to meet her before her third birthday on March 2.  The first pictures are from last year and the rest are from this May.

Adoption Update

Since we began the adoption journey again back in January we basically have just been plugging along drudging through all the fun paperwork of compiling our dossier.  Our home study was finally completed last week.  We received it this past Tuesday and sent off our I800A application to the US Citizens and Immigration Services.  The approval of our I800A is the last thing we need before our dossier can make its way to China to be logged in at the CCCWA.  The I800A process has generally been taking about 40 days to complete.  Our official receipt date for the I800A is today, 5/31/13, so hopefully we can be DTC (dossier to China) by the end of July.  Then we wait for China to issue us a LID (log in date).  So no exciting news, but making progress.

3rd Birthday and Easter 2013

We celebrated Carsen's 3rd birthday yesterday.  He had a great time and enjoyed all his presents and his cake.  He continues to do well and make progress with his speech and overall catching.  He will be starting preschool on Tuesday and we are very excited.

We also celebrated Easter today at church and with families and friends.  It started off rainy and dreary, but turned out very nice.  Here are a few pics.

The Adventure Begins Again.

You may have noticed that the title of the blog has changed. We have have decided to take to plunge again. We are embarking on the crazy, nerve wracking, wonderful, amazing journey to bring our new daughter or son home. We have just recently began the process and will hopefully be getting started on our home study soon. I thought this Matthew West video of "One Less" was a fitting into to our second adoption, because hopefully sometime on 2014, there will be one less orphan and he or she will be our child.

One year a Family

It doesn't seem possible that we have been a family of three for an entire year already. It seems like yesterday that we were handed a very weak, delayed and scared little boy. He is simply amazing at times. He has come so far and he still has a ways to go, but he is a fairly typical 2 year old. He likes to run, tickle, snuggle and most of all play with the ipad. We have to begin to ration ipad time, because we believe it could quickly become an obsession. As I write we are on our first family vacation and Carsen is finally taking a real nap for the first time all week. Here are a few recent pics.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CARSEN!!

Today we celebrated Carsen's 2nd birthday and first birthday home.  He didn't really get the whole birthday thing, but we had fun anyway.  He of course enjoyed the eating and the balloons.  He just stared at eveyone when we all sang "Happy Birthday".  Cousin Emma assisted him in opening his presents.  We go for our 2 year old check up on Tueday, which will probably result in a visit to the ENT due to reoccurring ear infections.  We had our six month post placement visit a few weeks ago and it went really well, she was very impressed with his progressive over the past five months.  He continues to grow and do new things all the time.  We are very blessed!

Six Months as a Family!

Where has the time gone?  It seems like only yesterday that I thought that wonderful day in September would never arrive and now we have been a family for 6 months already.  It seems as if we have always had Carsen.  He is so amazing and I am so blessed to be his mommy.  He has come so far in that short amount of time.  He has gone from a very scared little boy to a happy, loving little boy.  He is now walking and almost running, climbing on the furniture and doing most things almost 2 year old little boys do.  We are just amazed at the progress he makes on an almost weekly basis.