Thankful hearts!

We just meet with our guide to go over our paperwork before meeting Kara in just a few short hours. She gave us the most amazing news! May gave us a translated copy of Kara's Finding Ad (an ad placed in the local paper asking for family to come forward to claim a child before he/she can be declared an orphan). According to the finding ad, Kara was found seven days after her birth,( a fact we already knew and we have always felt that her birth parents really wanted to keep her but discovered they could not take care of her cleft lip/palate needs thus the delay between her birth and finding day)outside of a popular hotel with 2 sets of clothing from her family, and 120 rmb or $20 to help send her to the Fuling Social Welfare Institue-a much nicer orphanage than the one Kara would have gone to in her local village/province! Our guide claimed that she had never seen this before and she has been working with families for 7 years! Our hearts are exploding with joy at the thought of Kara being so loved by her family and also heartbroken for their loss of this precious baby. We wish there was some way for us to express our thanks and love for them and we would want them to know how loved Kara is by not only her Mommy, Daddy, and brothers but by her extended family and so many friends. Emotions are running high today and I look forward to the day we can share this amazing story with our daughter so she will know she has always been loved!

Hello from Chongqing!

We made it to Chongqing last night around 9:15 and arrived at our hotel at 10:00. We are staying at the Le Meridian. A very nice hotel on the southern side of Chongqing. After a roughy night of sleep, we meet up with the King family from Alabama at breakfast. Our girls are both at the Fuling Socail Welfare Institute in the same room. We are really hoping that being together on this journey will help the girls transition from the orphanage to being with their forever families a bit easier. We are meeting up with our guide, May, in about 10 minutes to finish up some paperwork and then we will travel about 20 minutes to the Civil Affairs Office to meet Kara! I will try to post photos are soon as possible! Below are pictures of our room and a photo of us right before Gotcha Day!

Happy Easter from Hong Kong!

Happy Easter! We made it to Hong Kong around 7:50 pm after a LONG but smooth flight. Unfortunately, there was a terrible thunderstorm over Hong Kong and we were forced to circle the airport while other planes landed which was horrible for my motion sickness. Our plane was even struck by lightning! Yikes! We are staying at the Regal Airport Hotel which is very nice. We slept pretty well last night (except for Blake's snoring) but may need a nap in a bit. It's warm and muggy here today but we enjoyed a walk around the outside of the hotel. Our flight to Chongqing leaves at 6:00 tonight and we will arrive around 9:00 and we will meet Kara tomorrow morning or afternoon (Monday china time Sunday US time). Here are some pictures from,sat night and this morning around the hotel. There are some amazing mountains outside our hotel window but the overcast sky makes them hard to see in the pictures. Thanks for following along on our journey! Alex and Kaleb- we are so happy to be able to Face Time with you! Looks like you were having a great time coloring eggs with your cousins tonight and sounds like you had fun with Shane and Luke yesterday! Can you believe that Mom and Dad were watching Tom and Jerry on tv this morning?!? Kind of felt like being at home with you guys. Next time we talk we should have Kara! We love you boys and miss you to the moon and back infinity times!

What's in a Name?

I spent a long time looking for just the right title for our family blog.  It needed to be meaningful, short and sweet, and relatable.  I started thinking about how I got to where I am today and the journey that brought me here.  This got me thinking about the amazing man in my life.  When Blake and I were married we picked a rather unknown song for our first dance entitled, "To Get Me To You" by Lila McCann.  The song is about the journey you go through in life before you get to who you are meant to be and who you are meant to be with.  No matter what came before meeting Blake, I wouldn't change a thing because it got me to him.

This, of course, led me to think about the two magnificent little men I am so lucky to have call me Mom.  For those of you who know us, you know the journey to Alex and Kaleb's birth was tough , tedious, exhausting, troublesome, okay lets just say my pregnancy was the worst one my doctor has seen in his career (Sorry, Dr. Wellman!).  Our lives were changed in a minute at 7:00 and 7:01 on the night of May 1, 2004.  Our two beautiful, dark haired boys came into the world and I knew I would have gone through it all over again to get to these sweet boys.  Almost nine years later and they are my most precious gifts.

And now we are quickly coming to the end of our next adventure....We leave on Friday, March 29 to meet our beautiful Kara Elyse Le Rui in Chongqing, China!  This adoption has been a LONG time in the making.  But I now know that God has had this in His plan for our family and we just needed to wait until this child was born and ready for her forever family to come for her.  I would fill out the hundreds of papers, spend hours on end researching and gathering documents, and officially waiting for 12 months (from official start date to Gotcha Day) to get us to our daughter.

 
So here we are, one week from our flight to China and I am hoping to get this blogging thing down so you can travel along with us to China!  Thank you for your continued love, support, and prayers for our family!