Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I hope you all had a wonderful day. We are thankful for our many blessings: God's gift of his son for our salvation, our family, the ability to spend Thanksgiving with our grandparents, the fact that in a few short months Kai Wei and Sarah Grace should be HOME, a delicious Thanksgiving dinner, the technology that allows us to have video chats with the kids, a country where we are safe and free... We truly have many blessings.

There are so many others, however, who aren't as blessed, and I wanted to share this opportunity to be a blessing to them with you. Reece's Rainbow is an organization that helps children with Down syndrome be adopted. They sponsor children and help raise money for families who are in the process of adopting children with Down syndrome. This year, they are doing a Christmas fundraiser. Their goal is to raise $1,000 for each of the 85 children they are trying to find family's for. Visit their site, donate if you feel led, and pray for these children.



Many of them will be moved to mental institutions and receive very little care if they are not adopted. You can read about one family's journey to adopt Aleksa, a little girl with Down syndrome and get the code to put your own button link to Reece's Rainbow on the Cornish family's blog.

Another webchat!

We just finished our Skype conversation with Kai Wei AND Sarah Grace this time! What cuties! It was so fun to see Sarah Grace, and a bit of a surprise, because we weren't sure whether or not we would. It was also nice to see them together. This time I thought to take some screen shots while we were chatting, so I have photos to share! Look at their smiles. Aren't they beautiful?



We introduced the family cats this time, which made the kids smile, but Sarah Grace was a bit nervous about the dog. She asked why we wanted to have a dog. Hopefully she realized he was a friendly, mostly harmless puppy by the end of the conversation.

We got some good news during our conversation. Kai Wei's court hearing is on Wednesday! We're so excited about that, and he is too.

They said that Sarah Grace is adjusting well to life at Jonah House, and that she and Kai Wei are getting along pretty well.

It was fun to chat again tonight and learn a little more about the kids and see a bit more of their personalities shine through. Si Ya is a little monkey, (which I'd already gathered from my visit with her this summer) She loved making faces for the camera!
She wants to go roller skating when my parents go to Taiwan, she likes the color yellow, shrimp and apples. She wants a toy cell phone.

Kai Wei likes blue and prefers sweat pants to jeans. He remembers a lot of the things he has heard about our family or has seen in our photo album. He asked about our lake and knows that it is much colder here. He seems very interested in and excited by our animals. He seems easy-going and agreeable.
I just love to see his smile! He got his hair cut since the last time we talked to him.




我們 愛 你們 凱維 跟 思雅
We love you Kai Wei and Si Ya! We can't wait for you to come home.

WebCam Conference!

So it is so exciting! Tonight for the first time we saw our son and heard his voice! We had a video conference with Kai Wei via Skype. It was really fun. Almost the whole family was home. (But Jonathan who was very disappointed that he would be camping with scouts). Kai Wei was so happy and sweet. His English was great. He is very limited with what he can say, but we were impressed with his pronunciation. We think he will be very easy to understand.

We were ALL a bit nervous. But we all had fun too. In Taiwan Kai Wei's social worker was in the room with some other people and they were joking and laughing and helping to translate. And at our house we were all talking and saying hi and introducing him to each of us. He really seemed to like it when Timmy asked how old he was and then told him he was 17. He also liked the new puppy, Java and he said Daniel was cute and that he would pray for him on his birthday. (Which Daniel told him was next week). We are really excited to chat with him again.

We've also had some news on Sarah Grace. She is going to be moved to Jonah House next week! This was not anticipated. But we are hoping it turns out to be a good thing for her, Kai Wei and the whole family in general. I guess we may get a chance to speak with her in a future chat!

God is so good and tonight we thank him for technology that made this possible!

The importance of tones

I was at Chinese class on Saturday, and showed my Chinese teacher the picture of Sarah Grace. "This is Si Ya" I told her, and stopped, aware of the look of confusion on her face. I KNOW I say Si Ya wrong, that's one reason Sarah Grace won't be called Si Ya at home- when I was in Taiwan, she didn't even look up when I attempted saying her name, that's how wrong I had it. It's not a name that's easy for American mouths to pronounce. Kai Wei I can say well enough- at any rate, he knew I was talking to him when I used his name- I think the tones in his name are more natural to American pronunciation. What I didn't know was HOW wrong I had Si Ya. So, anyway, back to Chinese class. I fish out the characters for Si Ya, which I happened to have in my Chinese book, and her face lit up. "Oh, that's a beautiful name. You just have to be careful how you pronounce it. That's like. . . a ghost. With teeth (she pantomimes fangs coming out of her mouth)" A vampire? My poor little sister! Here we have been going around telling everyone her name is vampire or something to that effect!

I practiced a few times, and finally did pronounce Si Ya's beautiful name correctly, but unfortunately, I think I'm no longer saying it correctly. I'll have to practice again next time I have Chinese class.

Ｍaking 餃子 (Chinese dumplings)

Dough:
3 cups flour
about 1 cold water cup water
1/4 tsp salt
Mix flour and salt together. Slowly add water and stir until a smooth dough forms. Knead, then cover and let rest for at least 1/2 hour. Roll into 45-60 3 inch diameter thin circles.

Filling:
1 lb ground pork
2 cups Napa cabbage, chopped fine
2 green onions (scallions) chopped fine
2 slices of fresh ginger chopped fine
1 clove minced garlic
1 TBS soy sauce

好吃嗎？ 好吃！
Hao chi ma? Hao chi!
Are they good? Delicious!










Mix everything together. Put a spoonful of the meat mixture on each dumpling wrapper. Fold into a half circle and pinch the edges together. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and add in about half of the dumplings. Stir once and bring the water back up to a boil. When it is boiling again, add in 1 cup cold water. Wait for the water to begin boiling, than add a 2nd cup of cold water. When the water boils again add a 3rd cup of cold water. The next time the water boils the dumplings should be done. Serve the dumplings with dipping sauce made of soy sauce, rice vinegar, and sesame oil mixed to taste.

I modified the recipe from the one at the end of this article about a Chinese American family making dumplings together.

They say. . .

They say the wait gets harder after you get your referral. So far, that hasn't been true for me. Not knowing anything was hard. We had no idea how old the kids would be, we had no idea when we would receive their referral. We didn't know what they would look like, who would be older, when they would be home. Now, I KNOW who my meimei and didi are. I know their names, their ages, even a little bit about their personalities, their likes and dislikes, their fears. I can begin to imagine what it will be like when they are home. I can prepare for them. And that makes it so much better to me. I still don't know exactly when they'll be home, but at least we can give a range of several months as our estimate now instead of saying that we *hope* for a referral sometime before ...followed by an ever moving and increasingly distant date. I know that our wait time since referral should be somewhere between 1/2 and 1/3 over. These past 4 months have gone by quickly, now that our adoption seems real and not just an impossible dream.


So, I keep looking forward to the day they come home and I can see Kai Wei and Si Ya again in person. But meanwhile, the wait has gotten easier. There's forward momentum again (speaking of which, Sarah Grace's paperwork is back from TECO and ready to get sent back to Taiwan!) I know we are waiting for them and I know they are waiting for us. We'll hang in there. The pictures and updates and letters back and forth help us along, and, hopefully it won't feel much longer until we have more than photos to look at and more than hand-drawn pictures to make us smile.

Addendum to the post: :)
In case you were curious- Si Ya, Ssu Ya, Su Ya and any variation thereof and Sarah Grace are one and the same. When we got her referral it was spelled SSu Ya. The double "s" is from the Wade Giles form of Romanization (I think), and looked confusing to us, so we removed an "s" when writing it. After looking up the character for her name, I realized the pinyin spelling (and the closer pronunciation) for her name was actually Si Ya. Since Pinyin is the more standardized Romanization system used in the US, we switched to that spelling. And Sarah Grace, in case you hadn't guessed, is what we are naming her. (We'll keep Si Ya as her middle name. Kai Wei we're going to continue calling Kai Wei, though it might be shortened to Kai. We'll give him an American middle name.)

25 YEARS!

WOW! Dana and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary on Tuesday, October 9! It hardly seems possible. That is a LONG time to be married and how could we possibly be old enough to have been married that long ago?!

Our kids got us luggage for our upcoming trip to Taiwan which was fun and exciting. We're so thankful for the grace of God to get through 25 years and we hope he'll grant us 25 more! :-)