our new daughter

After 36 hours of travel, we arrived home on July 9th with our newly adopted daughter from Chin@.

Our lives will forever be changed in more ways than one. The trip was nothing like our first adoption trip. Not even close.

This trip was off the charts crazy exciting! It was more stressful, and more challenging – with many new adventures thrown in! Spending hours and hours in a couple of foreign domestic airports, and a train station, experiencing some time in the Chinese countryside, brushing our teeth outside by a water pump, sleeping on pallets, receiving my first centipede bite – and hopefully my last, experiencing an ice cold shower – because hot water just wasn’t available, eating plenty of strange foods – only because we were hungry enough, and having no access to clean drinking water. We discovered squatty potties are also communal “potty troughs”, and we spent a very long night in an orphanage, finding it ever so hard to leave so many children behind.

It also was the time we met our daughter before our actual gotcha day – who would have known it would have happened in the airport?!

Told ya! Off the charts exciting and heart-wrenching all rolled into one!

After an almost full month in Chin@.  H O M E  has never seemed sweeter.

Having our whole family together again has left me feeling SO thankful and blessed – despite all the new crazy!  I’ll be writing all about that later. But for now – let me introduce to you, our new daughter:

We’ve been home for almost two weeks now. Adie is adjusting well. She is well-loved, and she’s just trying to take it all in.  😊 She’s still learning who we are. It will take some time, especially with the language barrier. But she can have all the time her little heart needs. We will patiently wait.

Praise the Lord with us! In HIS time He makes things beautiful. We are overwhelmed once again, by the Lord’s faithfulness!

Welcome home, sweet Adie Mei.