"God has blessed us, everyone one" Merry Christmas!

Merry, merry Christmas everyone! We are so very happy for how God has blessed our family!

Since about one week ago, Joy has fully embraced us. She has assigned "pet" names to almost everyone in the family. Daddy is "tiger", mom is "bird" (she says I talk too much to everyone), William is "panda", Charlton is "horse", Bradford is "monkey" and we don't quite have names for the "mei mei" yet (little sisters).

Joy is working so hard on her English, she almost gets disappointed when I don't sit down with her to work on it.

She keeps wanting to hear the story of how we decided to adopt her: "Why her and not another one in the picture?", "Why would we decide to adopt?". I want to wait for someone to help me translate; but she'll insist, "No mommy, I want to hear it from you in English".

We've had other interesting orientations in terms of who we are as a family. She wants to understand why I don't work. She wants to understand why we go to church. She wants to understand why Daddy has to go to work everyday. Yesterday I was trying to explain why we can't go to Baskin Robbins every day. We've had some doctor visits to check into her large appendectomy scar (she had an emergency appendectomy in August). She hates going to the doctor and wants ice cream after every visit. In fact, she'll look for any reason to have ice cream: we're shopping, she did her English, she got out of bed in the morning. I offered that we could go to the market, buy some ice cream and eat it at home. She said, "No mommy, I don't want to eat ice cream at home". I explained how we did not have enough money to go to Baskin Robbins everyday. She said how "Aunt Liping" had told her about us, that we are a wonderful mom and dad, and family; but that we don't have a lot of money. She said, "Mommy, I love Mommy, I love Daddy, I love Charlton, I love William, I love Bradford, I love Faith, I love Grace...I don't care about money".

We have had wonderful sweet and deep bonding.

We are so happy, the boys are saying..."Can we adopt again" :)