We are HOME!!!

We arrived in Kalamazoo last night at 10 something... When i first saw the boys i just started crying!!! They were so changed. Bigger than i remember. I wanted to just hold onto them forever!!! It was a magical homecoming. Jerry's parents were there with the boys of course and then several friend families!!! It was so wonderful to see everybody and they were all so excited to see Kimi and Maria! :) Maria of course clung to me... Kimi was her excited and charming self! I seriously can't even begin to explain all the feelings that were going on in me last night. When we loaded all the kids in their carseats and were ready to drive off, I realized we had ALL four of our kids in the SAME CAR!!!!!! oh my. We had a good ride home... nobody screamed. The girls fell asleep and Alex talked almost nonstop all the way home... 35 minutes or so. Poor Anthony... he tried to talk above Alex, but he finally settled for listening and adding "me too" once in a while! haha!

At the airport, Anthony was pretty quick to tell me that he wanted to GO HOME! The boys have been staying at grandma's and grandpa's and didn't even visit home except yesterday to bring all their stuff home. So they were getting home sick... as well as mama and dada sick! :) I couldn't agree with Anthony more!!!

When we got to the house... the girls were asleep so we had to wake them to bring them in... Kimi was fine of course. Maria... she hates to be awakened. so she is grumpy and doesn't want to be put down... however... surprisingly it didn't take her long and she was "running" around the house looking at everything... exploring! It was exciting... it was Alex all over again... once she looked around she was HOME. Settled. If that is even possible for a newly adopted child. But if you have had an adopted child like that you will understand what i mean. It just means they are comfortable and seem to know the travel and vegabond-ness is over. We showed them their room and i took some pictures of course. Then we all knelt and prayed in the girls room. We are so thankful that God has given us these FOUR children. The i made them all sit on the couch and take pictures together!!! Oh my word... i was pretty emotional the rest of the evening... well... we finally were all in bed at about 2 am. Everybody was pretty wound up and excited, even though all of us were dead tired!

So i realize that i haven't actually finished blogging the trip, but i will soon... the internet was just so stinkin' slow and we were sooo busy doing everything in China we had dreamed of for so long. But over the next couple of weeks i will finish the story! :) We will also be doing some serious photoshooting around here!!

Our first Christmas with girls!!! WOW!!! I can't even believe we no longer have a dossier sitting in some other country waiting for a child. Its kind of weird, really. We are pretty sure we are not done doing dossiers, but we will wait for God's "go!" There's an awful lot of little orphans left.