It's Birthday Time Again!

Emily turned 3 on July 20. We had all sorts of fun with birthday cakes all the way from America!


Then she also got to play with some of her new toys.


Aubrey got to have a real cake too, since all she got for her birthday 2 weeks ago was a rice krispy treat she could not even eat.






Aubrey feels robbed that she did not get icing on her cupcake! But she was easier to clean up!


Just Emily sporting the birthday hat.

Aubrey's 1st Birthday

Hard to believe that Aubrey is already 1 year old!


She is trying to contain her excitement about turning one, without showing all of her new teeth!






But, being able to wear the birthday hat finally got a smile out of her!

Just some random pics

How could this possibly be a comfortable sleeping position?

Finding a bakery

We recently found a bakery nearby. The owners gave Emily a free sample of the goodies, but then she had more energy to burn.


You have to love sugar. I mean how can it taste bad, really?




Better to dance the sugar off in the street than on the bus!

Emily practicing the guitar

My parents took this snapshot with their computer during a Skype video call. You can see that we all love Skype!

I just read these statistics over at takeyourvitaminz.blogspot.com It's unimaginable.

"According to United Nations Human Development, United Nations International Children’s Emergency and Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey, today there are an estimated 5 million orphaned and vulnerable children in Ethiopia; 800,000 of them are AIDS orphans. The country’s cities and villages are overwhelmed; Addis Ababa alone has more than 100,000 orphans. The system is overtaxed, and sadly, new orphanages are not the answer."

Today's post there also says, "Men create orphanages for children, but God created children for families."

A Friday afternoon in the park

We went to "Forest Park" to enjoy an afternoon with friends. It is almost 10,000 acres of nice places to walk, sit, and enjoy some fresh air. We'll be going back soon I'm sure.

We think it's good news...

So, the California Department of Justice mailed our completed background checks back to us... without taking issue that the fingerprints were opened (by them). We are so thankful for that, and especially that we don't have to waste time redoing anything!

The only strange thing is that one of ours is signed by an official, and one is not signed, just a typed in name at the end of the letter. We aren't sure if they just forgot to sign it, or if it doesn't need signed. ?? We'll send it to our adoption agency and see what happens!

Thanks for supporting us along this journey! We'll continue to let you know what we find out.

Lest you entertain the slightest idea that the girls may be suffering here....

Emily obviously loves her bed above all beds. The wall decals are vinyl stickers that both grandmas have sent to decorate her room with. Super fun!

So, do I go forward then?

I think I'll pass this time

Ox's foot muscle

We can count on one hand the number of times we've eaten ground beef in the year we've lived here. It is only sold at one location, and not prepackaged. So I was looking at the "deli fresh" area of THE supermarket and thought it looked okay that day. After the 5 workers helping me confirmed that it was ground beef, I got 2 kilos. The meat was weighed and slapped with a pricing sticker that said in English "Ox's foot muscle". At least they're honest about what they ground up?? Which actually leaves me wondering if ground beef in the US has feet muscles in it?

With a lot of doctoring, the hamburgers tasted great!

Cross your proverbial fingers

In one small piece of paperwork that we are waiting on to complete our dossier for Ethiopia, there's a snag.

It's in the mail now, and we want to ask you to pray that it gets processed correctly.

A few weeks ago, we sent our offically done (and officially sealed) fingerprints to the CA Dept of Justice to process our background checks. They opened the official seal, but then returned them to us saying we needed to include the embassy's address. The background check results were to be sent to our adoption agency, so we don't know why they wanted that.

Our adoption agency called the CA DOJ, and asked what they wanted exactly. They said they wanted the address of the Ethiopian embassy in Ethiopia. This is impossible of course (as countries do not have an embassy on their own soil). After our adoption agency convinced them that this makes no sense, we are mailing the fingerprints back to them.

Now, the deal is.... we wonder if they will not accept the fingerprints (since they themselves opened the seal). We won't know til the mail arrives in a few days. Please lift up this situation with us. If they won't accept the fingerprints without being in an officially sealed un-tampered with envelope, we will have to buy plane tickets for the family and go try to do our fingerprints again.... only to be unsure of whether the same thing may happen again (if opened by a different CADOJ worker).

Who would've thought California would give us more trouble than foreign governments!

For your inconvenience...