Happy New Year!

Yesterday we celebrated the Year of the Golden Pig with Madison Families with Children from China - what fun! Madison Hope Chinese School and Madison Lakeside Chinese School had their students perform traditional Chinese dances: the youngest dancer was 4 years old - so precious! Also a Kung Fu group did a Lion Dance - very loud and exciting!

Getting ready to go...I haven't worn my squeaky shoes in SO long - woo hoooooo!!!
We arrived early to help decorate.
This little girl, Kaylei, is 9 years old. She was 17 months old when she was brought home from China, the same age Josie is now. She "babysat" Josie while mommy decorated.



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Josie kept going up to all the little girls and looking at them trying to make friends. She recently started putting her hands on her hips all the time, and she kept doing it yesterday- so cute!










Madison Lakeside Dancers

The sleeping lions

Watching the Lion Dance with daddy

More new friends

With my friend Ruby and her mom Sarah.

I love balloons! Early in the afternoon, one popped really loud in my hands!!! I cried, but in a few minutes I was back playing with them again. All in all, I had a great time playing for hours, making lots of new friends, and enjoying all the loud music and noise- I love excitement!

Time to go home....Mommy set me on the table while she gathered her stuff, and she thought I looked like a little centerpeice so she took a picture.

Badger Fun - Last Hockey Game

BRRRRRR........!

While I was making my coffee this morning I looked out the window at the thermometer and it read -18 degrees. That's right: NEGATIVE EIGHTEEN DEGREES!!!! We are not in Virginia anymore! There has been a wind chill advisory in effect since 3 am Saturday morning until Tuesday at 10:00 am. With the wind chill it is even colder than what the air temperature reads. Thankfully, we are blessed with a warm home and hot running water! We even have a nice stone fireplace. It was a nice weekend just the three of us. I normally run errands with Josie on Saturday morning so Jim can get some extra rest, but instead I ran the errands on Friday (even though it was already zero degrees outside, it was only going to get colder over the weekend!) So Saturday morning I took Josie into the basement to play so Jim wouldn't hear us. He actually couldn't sleep so at 8:00 we were all hanging out in the basement. Jim made his world famous chili (two versions - one spicy and one super-spicy) and I made pasties (ended up with 32 pasties and 2 pasty pies.) We just enjoyed one another's company and Jim did a LOT of housework.

Tonight we are meeting with our social worker for Josie's "6 month chekc-up". (There is just one more, at 12 months post placement. We submit 16 photographs each time!) The social worker wil write a report on how Josie is doing and send it to the Chinese governmental office that handles adoptions, and also to her orphanage. We will also be sending the orphanage updates about Josie, as well as donations for those children who are still there.

Hope to post some pics but having tech troubles, so soon I will. Hope all is well with our friends and family around the world! (By the way my brother Matt's wife had a baby boy last week! Little Isaac has three older sisters, aged 6, 8 and almost 10 years old. Mommy has lots of helpers!! You've seen their pictures on previous posts.)



This picture is from our re-adoption hearing, when Josie's adoption was finalized in the U.S.A. in September. We received her social security number in December, and we have two more hoops to jump through (filing forms with CIS, formerly INS) which should take about 6 months and then she will be a U.S. citizen.