Wo Bu Ming Bai

This is the thing....the title of this post says "I don't understand" in Chinese....and I really don't understand. Here is the scenario....this morning I began to actually put things into our two giant suitcases. I rolled all clothing, I stuffed all toys in between the rolled clothing, I packed food (Pryce is going to definitely need that)....then I accomplished something that I have never been able to accomplish before in all of my traveling days, I actually zipped the giant suitcase (without having Ryan sit on it, you know, to smush everything down). It zipped beautifully, even allowing room to add extra things in the zip pocket on top. WELL, here is the next thing....I called Ryan upstairs to see my packing beauty all zipped, nothing poking out, etc.....he comes up the stairs, promptly puts our weight scale on the floor and proceeds to weigh the beautifully packed suitcase. IT WEIGHS 50lbs! AGGHHHH! No matter how beautifully packed the suitcase is, it can only weigh 44lbs (that is the Chinese way). I just don't understand.

Meanwhile, we told the boys that today they could be the parents and take charge of the house. They get to choose what we eat, what we do, what we don't do, etc. Well, Pryce has taken this to heart and every five minutes or so, he starts barking out orders for us to fold clothes, cook, make up his bed....unbelievable.....Colin (thank goodness) has taken pity on us and tries to help so we won't be punished for not doing all the work Pryce assigns.

Colin's birthday (and other things)

Well, as many of you know, it has been a wonderful crazy week at our house! In the midst of our adoption packing madness, we stopped to live in the moment and celebrate Colin's 8th birthday. What an exciting day! We started off the morning with our birthday tradition of cake for breakfast....then Colin opened his favorite gift of all time....a Nintendo DS. My favorite part of this is when he "sold" Pryce his old Gameboy Advance for 19 cents....amazing! I wish we could have found a deal like that. Then we celebrated with Colin's friends after school with a party at Monkey Joe's. Our party coordinator, Ethan, gave Colin's group the award for being the loudest party ever! Fun was had by all! At bedtime I told Colin about the night he was born....the craziness, the excitement and the joy of his birth! I love to tell the boys "their" stories. Anyway, we received some exciting news on MK yesterday as well. She has apparently been in foster care since November. She is an extrovert and energetic, she weighs almost 20 lbs and is 27 inches tall....she is very attached to her foster mother and does not like strangers....this will make for a very interesting Gotcha Day. Please pray for MK to feel peace with us! We are so excited to finally be meeting her and we just hate for her to be scared. Our Gotcha Day is scheduled for March 17 (St. Patrick's Day). We are very excited to be traveling with another family who is adopting from MK's province and orphanage. Their daughter is 2 weeks older than MK. They also have a 5 year old son so the boys will have a friend to join them on their journey. We are so excited!

Slight Change of Plans

We had a slight change of plans to our itinerary. We will now be leaving on the 11th instead of the 12th as planned! The flights we were looking at on the 12th were booked solid, so we had to move it up a day. I've made changes to the itinerary listed below to reflect the changes.

By the way, today is Colin's 8th birthday!!! There's lots of excitement in our home these days!