Coming To America (tomorrow)

Happy Birthday to Aunt Katie!!! We love you!!

Shortly after learning our plane seat assignments are across the aisle from each other, we were practicing our "hammock position" with Kirby. I think she likes it!

Levi and Kirby. Levi was adopted by a wonderful family just before his 14th birthday and is a great young man.

Dad giving Kirby a pedicure

Kirby and I have a game we play - we lean our heads from side to side and follow each other laughing

Mission Accomplished - All the paperwork is now complete, new friends for life have been made, tourist sites have been seen, gifts have been bought, weird food tasted and tried. The last thing to do is bring our princess home so everyone can see how beautiful she is and how blessed we are. We leave the hotel at 5am in the morning and if we remain on schedule we should be rolling in our driveway 33 hrs later. If you picked up that this is a prayer request - you would be correct. Thank You!

As precious and cute as Kirby is, she is making up for lost time being in an orphanage. She has gone from not being able to sit up by herself less than 10 days ago, too crawling any where she wants and trying to pull up on everything. She is a "wiggle worm" like we have never seen. The funnest thing and also a concern for anyone on the plane with us all day tomorrow, is she has discovered how to sequel at the top of her lungs just cause she can and its new. I did bring hear plugs and I'm thinking I may be able to fund the trip by selling them to our neighbors on the plane..... It will be an adventure for sure. We are rejoicing this morning because we were able to get seat assignments on our flight next to each other; up until now we were not even on the same row. A direct answer to prayer - thank you Jesus!

Yesterday we piled onto a bus with many of the other families who are adopting from AWAA and headed across town (actually a huge city) to the American Embassy where we declared all of the information we had provided to the US government concerning our adoption was true and accurate. It was a very nice feeling to be on American "soil" even if it was 8,000 miles from home. All U.S. adoptions for all of China are processed through this one office and we were there with many other families from other agencies, about 100 total. Each family sat with their child trying to recognize the child's Chinese name as this is the way they called us up to sign our final declaration of accuracy. Then came over the loud speaker "Zhuang Lu You", and Kat and I looked at each other and said "is that us - it could have been ??" We looked around to see if anyone else was responding to the call. Our Chinese is as bad now as when we began the trip. Nobody moved so we went to the window and sure enough the nice lady had a picture of Kirby and asked to see our passports and sign the form and return to our seats. It happened so quick, Kat said it didn't give her enough time to cry that would come in a few more minutes when a deputy secretary came out an lead us in an oath and congratulate us on what we were doing. She went on to recognize the adoptees who have August birthdays and tell us some stats on what their office has processed over the last 3-4 years. Several of the adoptees were slightly under the age of 14 which is the maximum age children can be adopted and she emphasized the significance of their adoption. Overall it was a fitting time to celebrate the finality of our adoption and made us very thankful and humble God has trusted us to be Kirby's parents. 

We look forward to "coming to America" and seeing each of you as soon as we can.

God is Faithful,

David, Kat and Kirby