God is Good!

We had another neat encounter with the Lord today.  :-)  As much as we are looking forward to traveling to pick up our little peanuts, there are a few details that are a bit tricky.  One is that Travis is in school, and this summer will most likely be one of his more difficult semesters (pharmacology).  He only goes to school on Thursdays, and as we've looked at the "typical" trip, it looks like we'll be gone just over two weeks, but missing three Thursdays which equals three full days of class.   We committed to praying that God would somehow work out this minor detail, as he is on a three year track with a set group of people that take all their classes together.  In other words, there is no opportunity to take the class later.

Today at school, they had a meeting regarding the upcoming summer semester.  As it turns out, for the first two weeks (in May) they will be meeting for two days each week.  After that (when we should be traveling) the rest of the class will ALL be ONLINE!!!!  Only God could orchestrate something like that.  :-)

These two are the same age for 5 days each year 
and they love it!!

In other news, we celebrated Caleb and Mason's birthdays at the end of January and told them that they are going to get to travel with us to China.  They are thrilled!  We gave them each a new camera and a backpack with some snacks, a travel bible, hand sanitizer, and a book for the plane.

With their "boarding passes" :-)

We also settled on names!  Reed Daniel Hao and Grace Katherine Mei.  

Reed means "blessed", which we are praying that God will bless his little life, Daniel is after Daniel in the Bible (and all of our boys are named after a great man in the Bible), and Hao is his current Chinese middle name.  It means "precious".  :-)  

This adoption journey and our adoption into God's family is all a result of His grace, and so Grace seemed like the perfect name for our little girl.  Katherine is my middle name, and Mei means "beautiful"; Mei Mei is little sister.  Mae happens to be my Grandmother's (also a Laura) middle name.

Packing up the boxes together!

We had a great time last week putting together care packages for them, and we had to prayerfully consider what to send!  They had to fit into a shoebox sized box and could not weigh more than 4 pounds. 

I wound up making little tabby blankets that my friend Heather taught me how to do, and we sprayed each with my perfume and Travis' cologne.  We also made little photo albums of our family and included a picture of our house.  Our agency had sent us the chinese characters for "Mama" "Dada" "Big Brother" and so on.

We put in a disposable camera for each, candies for the nannies, a little alligator for Reed, and a little Asian blanket doll for Grace that I had picked up on clearance months ago at Kohls.  We also sprayed both of those with our perfume and cologne!  We had one recordable story book I had gotten at a garage sale brand new (thanks Sam Alvarado!) that we recorded for Grace.  Because of the facility she is in, we are quite confident that it will be played for her.  We considered buying one for Reed, but they are quite pricy and we weren't sure he would ever see it.  Instead we sent a little hanging giraffe, with the hopes that someone will hang it on his crib.

Off to China they went on Monday, and we were told it would take about two weeks for them to arrive.  Praying they make it into our little ones precious hands quickly!