Merry Christmas!

It is 2 days before Christmas and we are so happy to be winding down from shopping, Christmas pageant practice, work, and last minute errands. Emily turned 5 this week and we had a birthday party with many of her sweet friends and their parents (our sweet friends).

The day of her party we received a very nice surprise. For the past 4 years we assumed that Emily had lived in the orphanage her first 10 months. On Tuesday, through a series of online encounters I found out that she was actually in foster care from the time she was 2 months old until almost the day they brought her to our hotel room. A few days later we received 13 priceless pictures from the foster care agency. We laughed out loud when we saw this one. Doug said it looks like a pile of laundry with a head on top.

Emily at 2 months

Birthday girl!

Cooper turns 1 in a few days. A family from our agency left for Nanjing yesterday to adopt their daughter. They squeezed a small birthday gift in their suitcase for us. I sent a little toy that Grandma Whittenberg brought him when we thought he'd be home for Christmas...and pictures of our family. Crossing my fingers that they will see him and take a picture.

I've never taken a formal picture of the girls so last week my hairdresser, Jan put their hair all up and we put on their beautiful Christmas dresses. Off we went to the photographer for Christmas pictures. An hour later I had two rumpled girls and no pictures. We tried again today. Christmas Sunday, Dustin and Brianna are here, beautiful family picture, right? We ended up in Urgent Care waiting for Doug to pass a kidney stone. Still no pictures. Hoping for better luck tomorrow night. :-) Merry Christmas, everyone.

Da bai ma.

So now I'm in pre-school. Actually the girls are in Chinese school (pre-school class) and I go, too. I'm speaking Mandarin at about a 3-year-old level. Actually, most of the 3 year olds in the class, including my own, are doing much better than me. But, I know my colors, a few body parts, animal names, and several descriptive words like big (da) and small (xiao). So when I go to adopt Cooper I will have no problem at all saying "small elephant head" or "big red hair", etc. I feel confident that I will be able to get my way around and communicate effectively.

The hard part about Mandarin is the tones. There are four of them and a single word can mean four different things depending on the tone you use. For example, this weekend my friend Amy and I were looking at a book about horses with our girls (four between us). I pointed out a beautiful grey horse and we talked about how it looked like the horse I grew up with. Being very proud that I know how to say "big white horse" in Mandarin, I boldly said, "Da bai ma". But instead of using the third tone I used the first tone for "ma". So while I meant to say, "big white horse", I in fact said, "big white mother". Hmmmm. Interesting.

Whew! What a day.

Well, it was pouring down rain when we got up at 4 am to move the garage sale outside and hang signs. After a few deep breaths we figured out how to keep everything inside and by 7 the rain had stopped, signs were hung, and we had lots of shoppers! Shoppers were very friendly and many told us to "keep the change...for Cooper". The garage sale was a huge success and we are so grateful to Colin and Julie, Mike and Jenny, and Mandi for all your help this week.

This is how Emily and Grace got through the morning. :-)

We're doing the no-rain dance...

Our wonderful church has allowed us to have a really big garage sale on Saturday to raise money for our travel expenses. Dozens and dozens of people have donated stuff for us to sell -- so much stuff that tonight I got slightly concerned (ok, hysterically overwhelmed) that I won't get it all sorted and organized by Saturday.

What great friends we have.

Fran, who owns the daycare that meets in the church, told ALL her families. Karen, emailed everyone she could think of. Ellen told neighbors who asked a business that was closing to donate all the toys from their child care room...and they DID. Loads and loads of stuff have been dropped off at the front door of Desert Foothills UMC.

It has been so fun going through all the stuff. Mostly because my sweet and wonderful friends have been hanging out with me all week helping me tag every single item from the 10 year old "dehydrator/yogurt and beef jerkey maker" to the bag of vintage swing dancing costumes. Every coffee mug and wicker basket to the complete set of "Aurthur" VHS tapes (and I'm talking almost a hundred tapes. Someone REALLY loved Aurthur.)

Thank you Jenny, Mandi, Lorilee, Kristy, Hui, and Amy.

And now it's supposed to rain. It rains about 2 days a year in Arizona and Saturday is supposed to be one of them.

We'll keep you posted.