Love is Leading Us Back to China!

We all have dreams.  When I was a little girl, my dream was to have a big family.  I told my mother often that I would have 13 kids.  She would always respond with a giggle and say, "we'll see about that after you have your first child."  I'm not sure why I chose '13', but most likely because 13 seemed like a big but realistic number.  Now, I can assure you that we will not have 13 children, BUT, I can promise you that we will have five!  At 40 years old, five is a big but realistic number.  In just two days, our family will travel to China to adopt our newest little Springer.  SHE will complete our "big" family!

On Wednesday, Bryan and I, along with our children, my mother and my father-in-law, will board our flight and travel 24 hours to our daughters' homeland of China.  The months of documentation and preparation all come down to this very momentous week in September.  You can imagine the excitement by all in our house, but especially by Evie.  Not only is she gaining a new baby sister, but also this is her first visit back to China since she became a Springer in 2013.  She cannot wait!  In fact, she was practicing her Mandarin tonight at dinner.  Of course, that was limited to "ni hao", "zai jian", "xie xie" and "wo jiao Evie".   When Grammy expressed that she just wants to know how to say, "where is the bathroom" in Mandarin, the room went silent.  Yup!  Grammy, back to drawing diagrams in the middle of a giant Chinese Walmart.  Ay ay ay!  

Tomorrow, we will continue with prep work: packing and running the last few errands.  Our children will gather as much work as their teachers will give them to take to China.  I will do a last check of required documents to travel.   After two baseball practices and a normal night of homework, we'll finally sit down for dinner, and when we do, we will practice one extra special Mandarin phrase: Wo ai ni, Poppy!