For Nadia’s imagination and memory. These 2 things lead to constant laughing in our house.
For the new Child Ambassador’s that have just joined in Texas and their passion to help children around the world.
For KIDS HOPE USA and our 2nd year. I can’t believe we are entering our last 4 weeks for this school year.
For the faithfulness of my mentors, subs and prayer partners. It means the world to me that you care so much for the kids.
For playdates with friends. I am really glad that I am getting to know some of the women at my church better.
For the library. You can renew online and have books sent to your branch without getting off the couch. That’s how I like to see my tax dollars at work 🙂
For the fact that I DIDN’T break my toe last weekend. It looks ugly with the bruise, but at least I can walk with minimal pain.
For my CROCS being so roomy that they don’t hurt my swollen toe.
For cookies. No joke, I haven’t said it in a while.
Today I would like to be thankful for one thing that encompasses a lot of people. Friends!!! God has blessed me throughout my life with friends. I am grateful for all of them and for the time of my life that I had them. This week I have some friends going through some serious stuff. Serious challenges and heartaches. All of them don’t live very close to me, so I can’t just go give them a hug like I wish I could. I have done a lot of crying this week wishing I could help them. So I pray, for them and their families and all the things they are facing right now.
So if you have a friend you haven’t contacted in a while because life gets busy and WHOOSH the time flies by, give them a call. Or send them an email. Or even more unexpected…drop a handwritten note in the mail to let them know you are thinking of them.
As most of you know, we attended Global Chinese Education while in Beijing, so I won’t go into great detail again. They arranged everything for us from airport pick up and drop off to our apartment. They helped get our wireless Internet set up and took us on field trips and out to dinner. They arranged my tutor Kiki to come to the apartment each weekday and so on. I think that we were a new type of customer for them – a family with a small baby. And a baby adopted from China. Our time there was wonderful and so today’s TT is to share with you a wonderful program they started up a couple days before we left.
Lily from the school and her son joined us on our visit to New Day Foster Home. After going on the tour and speaking with one of the head guys, she went back and told everyone at the school about it. The school then decided to form a relationship with New Day, the first step was to order books for all the children and to arrange for the staff to go and visit New Day.
One day when I arrived at school to attend my Chinese painting class, Ethan, Lily and Nancy wanted to talk to me. They said that Mike and I had inspired them. They said that our adopting Nadia and our love for the Chinese children who still don’t have parents moved them to want to do something for orphans, and for other adoptive parents. So they launched their new program to offer free tuition to those adoptive parents and families who would like to come to Beijing and do the same kind of thing that we did.
I just think that this is so cool!!! Mike and I will definitely be going back to China sometime in the future – once Nadia is a little older, so that she can start on Chinese immersion classes of her own. And I think that a lot of families, who didn’t think they would be able to do what we did, might be able to now. That would be so awesome! To live in the culture where your child came from, even for a brief time is SO valuable. If you attend the school, you will not be in the middle of the touristy areas that you saw when on the adoption trip. You will be able to meet and interact with Chinese people going about their everyday life. And you can experience that life too.
For us it was an adventure, as neither Mike nor I had ever lived in any kind of urban setting. The apartments we lived in when we were first married where 2 levels, not 20 story buildings in the middle of the city. Using public transportation or walking everywhere was new for us too. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
For me it was so valuable to experience China in the time that Nadia was abandoned. Once she gets older and starts to question how and why she became part of our family, I think China is going to be a very different country (not saying that’s good or bad, just different). Capitalist ideas and their opening up to the world for the Olympics is changing China and its people. I am glad that we went now and were able to meet with and talk to people from the country where she was born. She is an American now and will be raised as an American, but we want her to know the language and people of the country where she was born, and therefore I feel this trip and future trips are important.
And if you do go, tell them we sent you 🙂
Edited 2012-8-20: It looks like this school may no longer exist. I’ve removed the dead link to it. -Mike
