The past several weeks have gone by in a blur!  How quickly time flies when you are having fun, and we ARE having fun here!  All the kids, including the newest three girls, have been a lot of fun lately!  Riley, Jessie, and Leah continue to become more at home and accepting of their place in this family.  English comprehension is very good and most of the English speaking is getting better day-by-day.  One of our pastors continually comments on how much he sees them improve every week when he has them in class on Wednesday nights.

So, you may ask, where exactly is the pain coming in?  Well, we have had a few painful situations starting with this!

That is Jessie getting her ears pierced!  Throughout the day all three of the new girls were instant that they were going to go get their ears pierced after dinner.  But, as dinner approached, Riley and Leah both backed out.  To her credit, Jessie stayed strong, got up into the chair, and had her ears done all by her lonesome.  And, boy, was she mad at how much it hurt!  But she was so very brave and is doing well.

The second event wasn’t as joyous.

I am not a radiologist, nor have I even played on on TV, but that looks like a bone that is broken.  To make matters worse, that is Caleb’s 1/2-arm!  He was climbing on something that he shouldn’t and got that arm wedged between a cement wall and a large braided steel cable while he was falling.  Broke his humorous in two.  OUCH!  You can see in the next picture that he wasn’t feeling much pain.

On second thought, maybe he WAS in a lot of pain.  That was two weeks ago.  The big issue that we ran into was that this type of break is usually immobilized by putting on a cast all the way to the wrist and bending that cast at the elbow to support the upper arm and shoulder.  That is a problem when you don’t HAVE a lower arm to support!  He spent the weekend in a fair amount of pain, but now is doing much better.  He went back to the orthopod yesterday and they fitted him with a brace which seems to be doing well.

After a week had gone by and Jessie had not died and her ears had not fallen off, Riley and Leah were ready to get theirs done and they gamely headed to the mall with the family!  Leah went first…

… followed by Riley.

Then all three girls showed their newly acquired adornments!

We let the girls call their China mom’s the other night, which went off without a hitch.  Even Jessie, who tends to get a little emotional after those calls was an emotional rock!

Our niece who was with us when we picked up Ali found this picture in her files and sent it over to us:

How much that little Jessie has changed in a few short years!

It is sad to think about how much of her life, and the others kid’s lives, by not having them in our home.  But we are blessed to experience all the rest of their lives with them!  And that is very exciting!!

This morning, mid-April, we woke up to this:

THAT is unacceptable!

This blog was pretty lazy in that I used all iPhone pictures.  Sorry.  Not the greatest quality.  But it does continue to give you a little glimpse into our life.  Tomorrow is Nick’s 16th birthday (get out!) and tonight we went to dinner at Five Guys.  Toward the end of our meal, a lovely young la dycame over and told us how much she wants a family like ours.  I wasn’t sure if she meant big, loud and unruly or just happy, loud and smiling.  Either way, we were glad she stopped and said something.  We are all, everyone one of us, blessed to be a part of this family and we enjoy the time that we spend together.

I hope that you are staying warm on this cold April day!  I will post again soon, hopefully with better pictures!

Cameron