Sleeping in until......4:30am

Yes!!!! How weird is it to be excited that your kids slept in until 4:30am? We are stoked. They slept 8 hours (still not enough) and made it til 4:30. A 3 hour improvement over the past 2 nights. Praise God. It's currently 5:45am here (3:45pm the precious day in Houston).

Perhaps we can get them (and us) to sleep til 6:00 tomorrow??? Too optimistic?

In Ava news.... She is sleeping in our bed with us and man she is a wild woman. Rolling around like crazy in her sleep. In fact I'm laying in bed with her as I type this and she seems to be dreaming about break dancing. I'm looking forward to heading to Guanzhou tomorrow and hopefully getting a legit crib for her to sleep in.

Today is our last day in Hefei and we are heading to the zoo. Why don't we just come home you ask? We are waiting here for her passport, which we pick up tomorrow. Then we head to Guanzhou to take care of all the paperwork with the U.S. Consulate there. I'm sure I'll post pictures later today.

Ava is learning a lot

Ava can't walk, and hasn't ever eaten real food, but we are working on both like crazy right now.  Because of her cleft palate anything she eats might get shot out of her nose, so that is an adventure. It also has to be really small, so we are sticking to mashed banana and yogurt right now. The noodles at lunch (very small) were a moderate success. She is doing great, and we've had a lot of laughs today, much better than yesterday. Thank you for the prayers.  Keep praying for sleep normalization.

Ava is having a much better day!

Thanks for the prayers. Ava is having a great day!!!!  Much happier, much more engaged with all of us.  However, she hates the car!  I mean cries out of her mind the entire time we ride in a car anywhere. Good news, we are taking a 40 minute trip to the zoo tomorrow!

From the land of the crazy sleep schedule

It's 5:52am here. I've been awake for 3 hours. I think Alex has been awake for longer. We just finished watching. The rest of Mary Poppins from yesterday and part of Toy Story 3. Now they are coloring as we wait for Ava to wake up. Strangely, Ava has been up and down all night too. This scares me. I think i mentally need at least one kid to sleep normally so i don't feel totally out of sorts. We were able to keep the girls awake until 8pm last night but it didn't get us back on a nor,al schedule, obviously. However, I think it was a step in the right direction.

Ava hasn't been quite as fun and laugh a minute as she was in those first few hours. She has cried some, played some. She definitely checks everything out, she is very curious, but she doesn't seem all that interested in people. She rarely gives people much of her attention. She is more into things. While Jessica went to the store we did play with the always entertaining multi-colored cup stack last night and she interacted with me and the girls a little more. I'm sure her little brain is going through a lot with all this change, so please continue to pray that there would be a strong personal connection developing between her and all 4 of us.

Thank you again for all of the incredibly encouraging messages. It has been extremely meaningful to us. Also, I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly sing Jessica's praises for being so awesome during all of this. She is making this happen. Without her I would have already died from anxiety.

Later today we are going to visit Lord Bao's temple.

Also, happy iPad 3 announcement day for you tech geeks ( like me). Although, technically it's still tomorrow for you.

Day 2 with Ava

I'm too tired to go through today in great detail. We went swimming, Ava loved it. Alex puked in the pool. We successfully woke the girls from a 2 hour nap. We officially adopted Ava as far as the Chinese government is concerned. All girls are asleep before 8:00pm.

We got her!

It's been a wild time, and a bit challenging. The good news is Ava took to all of us immediately. She laughed and laughed with us off and on all day. We went to the grocery store and out to eat, and she was a champ. She played with the girls and played with us a ton. She seems very curious and very funny. She loves to have fun and giggle and laugh. She also seems very healthy, but we have a lot to learn about where she is developmentally. He can cruise, but probably not walk on her own yet. She loves to touch and scratch things, very tactile.

The bad news is we are trapped in some kind of bizarre sleep netherworld. Ava was supposed to nap for 2 hours at 1:00pm yesterday. We tried to put her down but she cried and cried and cried and cried. We couldn't let her cry it out in the crib because the crib the hotel provided has sides slow low that she jumped right out. Thankfully I was ready and caught her or she would have landed hard on her face! So she missed her nap.

Her bedtime is 7:00pm and we had her asleep in our bed by 7:30pm and she is still asleep. However, she wakes up and cries for 20 seconds about once an hour.

Our older girls on the other hand are in a totally different schedule. Yesterday they woke up at 1:30am. We couldn't get them to sleep, so they were just up. That came back to bite us yesterday afternoon when they put themselves down for a nap at 3:00pm!!! That nap lasted until about 2 hours ago (1:00am). Right now (3:00am) we are awake, I'm typing this, the girls are watching Mary Poppins, and Jessica is laying in bed with Ava. So we are basically functioning with 3 kids on 2 different sleep schedules. Jessica and I are very tired! Irrationally tired. Please pray we can all get on a semi-normal sleep schedule!!!!!!!!

This is us with Ava's foster mother and an orphanage worker.  The foster mother has a 6 year old at home as well.

Everyone is a helper!

I had her asleep like this for a few minutes, but she freaked when I tried to lay her down.

We have some better pictures and a ton of video, but I can't upload the video, and some of the pictures are in the other room, where she is sleeping.

2 more hours until Ava time!

This is a picture of Zoe and Alex anxiously waiting for Ava (and coloring to occupy themselves).

We have indeed been awake since 1:00am. It is currently 7:50am on Monday morning (5:50pm on Sunday in Houston). We are cleaning up and getting ready for them to bring her to our hotel room. Pretty bizarre that we are waiting in a hotel room for a child.

Thank you for all the comments, emails and mostly for all the prayers! Please pray for Ava to bond with us quickly. We are anticipating this being an issue. Unlike Zoe, Ava has been in foster care for almost a year, so she will be most likely missing her foster mother/parents. I'm sure this will be a traumatic experience for her, so pray that she would miraculously bond with all 4 of us, and quickly. We are also going to be on a steep learning curve with her diet. Her cleft palate will be a new challenge for us, so pray we get some good info from the orphanage director that brings her to us.

Finally, we won't be able to post a video of the big moment until we get home, but there will be pictures galore!

We have arrived in Hefei....Finally!

Wow!!!!!!!!

We were so tired on the flight from Shanghai to Hefei we all 4 crashed out.  I was asleep before we took off.  Best hour of sleep ever!

Current time in Hefei, China  = 11:34 pm.  Current time in Houston = 9:36am.

 Haven't figured out how to view/post on Facebook or Twitter yet, so someone may need to post links on my wall or something for that to work.

We just put the girls to bed.  All said and done, we left Jessica's parents house at 4:30am on Friday, and we arrived in our hotel room at roughly 8:45am on Saturday. For 28 hours of travelling I don't feel that bad.  Although we are super tired, I think I'll stay up for a little while and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..............

First stop....College Station?

We stopped for lunch on the way to Dallas at CFA.

Packing Light

We are traveling light because we will be hauling 3 kids through 6 different airports.

New pictures of Ava!

Here are 2 new pictures of our daughter Ava who is waiting in China for us to come and get her. We think we'll be traveling to China in March. Hoping to get confirmation on that soon.

Our adoption and God's Provision

So here is the long awaited followup to our announcement about adopting our third daughter from China.  We have indeed, decided to call her Ava, so barring any last minute changes of heart, that will be her name.

What follows is the story of how God has provided for all of our needs. I hope it encourages and amazes you.

International adoptions are expensive. Actually, all adoptions are expensive. I can’t personally speak to the specific expenses for any other kind of adoption. All we know is that for an American family to adopt from China through our agency, the cost comes out to roughly $22,000. This includes the travel costs for 2 people.  Since this amount is nearly half of our families annual income, just entertaining the idea of adopting is a matter of faith, or lunacy. Sometimes those two things are relatively similar.

When we started praying about it in the summer of 2010 we knew that the expense would be a big challenge.  Last Christmas we decided to definitely pursue adopting another girl from China. Soon after we made this decision we received some extra income that we weren’t counting on, that made paying for the first $11,000 in expenses totally doable!  That was awesome.

So in January of 2011 we (mostly Jessica) started doing paperwork, filling out forms, organizing all of our official documents, and all the rest of the stuff you have to do to adopt. By August, it was all finished and sent away, we were approved, and the whole process was...in process. 

By this point we had paid out roughly $11,000 in expenses.  We were in Colorado on a family vacation, and Jessica reminded me that we would have start paying for the rest of the expenses pretty soon (sometime in the next year) now that the paperwork was done. She was concerned about how we were going to come up with $11,000.  We had already talked about and looked into various options for ways to raise that amount, via an online fundraiser. Jessica was feeling burdened about the work to raise the money by certain deadlines. I was relatively laid back about it (I know, this sounds like a lie, but it’s true). I figured we have lots of friends and acquaintances that would be happy to donate to something like this, and we could get 100 people to give a 100 dollars, or some catchy idea like that. After discussing this for a day or two, we prayed about it.

It wasn’t a desperate prayer, or an urgent prayer, or even a very specific prayer.  It was simply a prayer acknowledging that we needed help, and we were open to any kind of solution God would provide. Including a solution we hadn’t considered.

The next day Jessica received an email from one of the staff at our church, Cindi Lomax, asking if we knew anyone who was adopting from China and might need help with the expenses.  Now, at this point, Cindi did not know we were adopting again. The only people who knew were our closest friends and our family. We kept it a secret for 8 months!!!!  Therefore, it was totally random that Cindi happened to send us that email. Yeah, random, totally, wink, wink.

Jessica responded to her immediately, letting her in on the secret that we were, in fact, adopting from China again. She had no way of knowing that we had just prayed about our expenses in the past 24 hours.

We exchanged a few emails with Cindi, where she was a bit cryptic. She was trying to figure out what the Lord was up to. She asked us to send her an email, sharing “our heart” in the adoption process.  After that she asked us to send a list of our remaining expenses, which totaled roughly $11,000.

Cindi responded, telling us that there was a family at our church that felt that God was specifically telling them to help someone bring a child home from China.  Our church has quite a few adoptive families, and a clear vision for helping families who want to adopt.

However, at the time, our church had an emphasis on adopting from Columbia. So, it was odd for Cindi to hear a family say that they felt like the Lord was clearly telling them to help someone adopt from China.

A little while later she informed us that the family who was looking to help someone bring a girl home from China would help us, and that they would cover ALL the remaining adoption expenses!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We had not dreamed or imagined that someone would be willing to be so generous, or that this would be the method by which God provided.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.  Ephesians 3:20-21

We have another daughter....almost!

We are very pleased to announce that we have been matched with a one year old girl in China!

Her name is  Ding Si Xiu - and she was born in Septermber of 2010.  She has a cleft lip and a cleft palate. The lip has already been repaired, and we will do what is necessary to repair the palate in the next few years when we bring her back to the USA!

We think we will name her Ava SiXiu Bonesteel, but that isn't in stone yet, more like wet cement.

As best we know, we will be travelling to China to bring her home sometime in March, but that could change as well.  

Pictures seen here
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We are thrilled to be matched with this little girl and our whole family is anxious and excited to travel to China and bring her home to be a part of our growing family!

Thank you so much for all of your prayers, love, encouraging words and support!

There is more to this story, and in the next few days I plan on writing it up so you can hear about God's work in our lives and his provision for bringing Ava to our family. 

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Big Announcement from the Bonesteel family

We are very excited and anxious to announce that we will be......

adopting another daughter from China!!!!

We have been working on the paperwork for the past 9 months, and we are officially logged in with the Chinese government agency that handles international adoptions. It’s been extremely difficult to keep this a secret, and some people in our family have been telling everyone they know (Zoe & Alex).

 Therefore, we decided to finally go public with this exciting news!

 Here are some answers to some questions we expect to receive….

1. Are you getting another girl?  Yes

2. When will you get her?  We don’t know. At least 6 months from now, probably longer, maybe a lot longer. We have no way of estimating or knowing until we get matched with a child.  However, once we do, we will be sure to broadcast it all over the web!

3. How old will she be?  We don’t know exactly, but definitely younger than our youngest daughter Alexandra (Alex turned 4 in June).

4. Will you guys go to China to get her?  Yes, eventually, and we are taking Zoe and Alex with us!

5. What will you name her?  We don’t know yet, but we are taking all of your hilarious suggestions in the comments.

Obviously we are very excited about this next stage in our family’s journey and we would covet your prayers for the whole process.  We are excited that the Lord lead us to  adoption and we can’t wait to meet our newest little one.