Chinese Baby Day at the Mall

Frannie and I went to meet our Hope for Children friends today at the mall to have their pictures taken with Santa. We ran into into two other families with Chinese babies. One of the moms looked very, very familiar to me and when I mentioned it, she said I looked familiar too. Funny that her daughter did not look familiar to me, but we never did figure it out ("church? school? neighborhood?"). So we all squeezed into the Santa area and got a pretty good picture! I was surprised that Frannie was a little scared of him and would NOT sit on his lap so I had to help. I'm pretty sure Ally and Frannie are looking for a good station on the radio in the above photo. What a blessing to have these friends.

Hope for Children

Dear Friends and Family: If you haven't had a chance, please take 10 minutes and watch a beautiful video about adopting. Maybe I'm just at a hormonal stage of my month, or maybe it's because we were in Guanghzou with the Tanzillos, but I got so weepy watching this video. You just have to go to the Home page of our adoption agency's website, go to the bottom and click on the video and watch:

www.hopeforchildren.org.

Frannie and Ally are in it too as a perk.

Enjoy! God bless! Merry Christmas!

Partying too Hard

Frannie had a great time at the Harkness party -- she got some good munchies, saw an old friend (Lisa -- well, Frannie met her as a new friend, but...) petted a cat (a first) and got to play with Ally! She CAN'T stop talking about Ally! She even pointed to her reflection that night in the bathroom and said "Ally." Hmmm. She woke up on Saturday and went to the tree farm with her new friend Danielle to cut down a tree! I noticed a cough starting the night before, but after the tree/hayride/goat-petting, she crashed. Poor kid had a fever and sounded like she was barking. She just wanted soup and to lie on Mom's chest and she is recouperating well.

Yippee, thanks to Donna

We got our grant money yesterday from DFCS -- who was it that called it a rebate check for adopting Frannie? Can't remember, but thanks to our dear friend Donna who told us about this grant, we got our check for $2K yesterday and a loan has been paid off. God is so good. First a tax credit and now this. God bless, Donna.

Fun Weekend

Frannie had a great time over the weekend -- we got to see Dad at work at the SEC Fanfare, meet some new people on the crew and Frannie, the superstar, was on tv once or twice. We then got to meet Shelby! Donna had called from Discover Mills and heck, since we were on our way home and that is sorta, kinda on the way, we stopped by and got to see the beauty. We have a busy few weeks ahead of us, getting ready for the big birthday celebration (we are trying very hard to keep the Christ in Christmas) and our impending trip to New York. Oh, and she has gotten over her fear of spaghetti sauce.