Our Letter of Acceptance has arrived!!

We received in the mail today our LOA, letter of acceptance from China, so now we are able to take this and mail some applications off to the USCIS and then our agency will send our signed copy along with some other paperwork back to China and then we will await approval from USCIS and travel approval from China...so more waiting but another step closer and excited. We have to apply for our visas now and they told us to put October 5th as the date on there, we take this to mean that this is the earliest possible time we could travel...but of course it could be a little later, but it feels like we are getting to the home stretch. So we celebrated with chinese food! These pictures are not from our chinese food dinner, but our spaghetti dinner the night before. I don't know if you can see our daughters wonderful table manners, eating noodles straight from the bowl, she obviously hasn't passed etiquette class yet but she does enjoy her food:) And Sammy's great smile!

School has started!!!

Micah and Anna started school at Oak City Academy last week, along with their friend/brother J'marree. This is the school that Anna went to last year and we are blessed beyond measure for Micah and J'marree to be able to go this year. They are enjoying it so far and have made some wonderful new friends already as well as kept the old best friends from last year.

This is a picture from their first day of school with Ms. Wylie who is the assistant teacher for their class, she moved up from Anna's class last year so this was an added blessing, something familiar! On the homeschool note, we have Isaiah in 4th grade and we started last week as well with just math and reading. We will start full force next week and Isaiah has the opportunity to be a part of a classical conversations community that we will go to on friday's where he will be learning a ton of stuff that we will reinforce at home. Sammy is enjoying his classes in costume design, medieval warfare and culinary 101:) Will have to add a picture of these two later:) We are excited to be back into a routine, though not sure we will ever have a normal routine, this is our life and we are blessed and thankful beyond measure!

Our referral

We are so excited to share that we received a referral for our little girl on Anna's birthday July 24th, what a precious day to get a picture and small history of our second little girl. We now are waiting on something called our Letter or Acceptance from China that could take a couple months, but we of course are praying for sooner. She is in Foshan City, in the Guangdong Province which is a good location for travel because this is very close to the US embassy that we will have to go through to complete this process. Please pray for all the paperwork to be done quickly, for the logistics of travel, childcare and the rest of our funding to all come together. We can't wait to go get her!