Celebrating Christmas: Round One

Today we celebrated our first round of Christmas with Brandon, Jess and Jordyn! We had so much fun hanging out, eating pizza, opening gifts, decorating gingerbread men cookies and letting the kiddos play! Here are some pictures from our time together:

COURT DATE!!!

This morning we got a call from our agency saying that we have a court date of January 27th!!!!! We are thrilled with this news (along with a few other answered prayers) and hope you will mark your calendar and join us in praying for this day that our adoption might be finalized.

Another Family Formed

Take a peek here and see two beautiful children who officially became a part of their new family! Although we have never met the Seay's, we have been inspired by their journey and know you will be, too. We are using the same adoption agency as the Seay's, and their children live in the same orphanage as our daughter.

We are beyond thrilled for ya'll - Seay Family - and look forward to meeting your WHOLE family in the near future!

Knowing of Her

While we still have no news of a court date assignment, we did get a report today that our sweet Ellie T is growing, growing, growing! We had suspected that she hit a growth spurt after seeing 75+ pictures of her from our friends' trip to Africa in early November....but wow, she has grown!

She now weighs 18 pounds and is 27 1/2 inches long at 10 months of age. From what we can tell from the pictures, Ellie is also getting a bottom tooth, can sit up and looks as if she is learning the crawling stance (but no movement just yet)!

It's a little strange that I cannot track her exact growth or developmental milestones on a daily basis; with Garrett I had a great little calendar that we kept on the back of his closet door and each time something new or fun or big happened, we marked it. I pulled it out a few months ago and was amazed at how much I had forgotten about (sleepless nights do that to you).

And, I guess if I'm being honest, it really hasn't been awful or sad or anything of the like that I (we) am/are missing her "baby" stage. Sure, would we prefer to be with her from day one? Yes. Do we want her here now? Yes! But did we know going into this that we'd miss many "baby" milestones? Um, yes. Can I buy another calendar and track the second year of her life? Um, again, yes. There will be so many more "firsts" and "milestones" that we WILL get to witness and track and log onto a calendar.

I guess the bottom line is that it doesn't really matter what part of her life it is that we are missing....we just miss her. And want to close the gap between knowing of her and knowing her.