I can't believe how the summer flew by! We spent the end of June and beginning of July in Wausau, Wisconsin visiting my family. While we were there, we attended a huge family reunion (my mom is one of 10 kids), we spent time at my family's lakehouse (it was a new purchase for my sisters this year), we went strawberry picking and we went to a hot air balloon festival. Below are several pictures of the kids from our time there.

ELLA

I can't believe that she'll be four next week. My little girl is growing up so fast!

ADLAI

Our little guy turned 2 a couple of weeks ago. He is such a silly and happy kid. He's usually content doing whatever his big sister is doing. HE IS STILL HEAVILY INFLUENCED BY EVERYTHING THAT ELLA LIKES!! As you can guess, his daddy isn't crazy about this.






Big boy bed

I have a funny story about Adlai. We are in the process of potty training him. We started right around his birthday and he has been doing great. However, if he is busy, he could care less when he has an accident. It doesn't bother him one bit if his underwear are wet and urine is dripping down his legs. (This bothered Ella so much that she was completely potty trained in 2 days.) So, I have resorted to using pull-ups at times. I was very anti pull-ups with Ella, but I still bought a pack for trips, etc. But, most of the package of pink Cinderella pull-ups was still left over. Why waste them, right? Although I bought some Buzz lightyear boy pull ups, Adlai often chooses to wear a Cinderella one.

Many people have assured me that this is normal and he'll turn out okay. So, I'm not worried. In fact, Case bought hime a plastic sword and I actually had to take it away because he was being much too agressive with it.

CUTE PICTURES
While we were in Wisconsin, I tried to get some photos of the kiddos together. However, they were being attacked by killer mosquitos during our mini unsuccessful phot shoot.



If you look closely, you can see the little bugger on Ella's thumb .. thus the look of terror!



Another mosquito is biting her arm in this photo.



Now she's mad, because she got blood on her pretty dress!

ADOPTION UPDATES - THE LATEST NEWS

What a process this has been! A draft of our homestudy is complete, our training is done, our pockets are empty AND we are officially on the waiting list to receive a referral to adopt a baby from Taiwan (as of August 5th). That's the good news. However, our agency is now quoting a wait time of 18 months for a referral of a baby boy and 2 years for a baby girl. (When we first started the process, the wait time was expected to be only 6 months for a boy.) This is not our agency's fault, however. The requirements to adopt a baby from China became very strict in May of this year and the wait time that China is quoting is 3 YEARS for a baby girl. Thus, there has been an enormous flood of people moving over to Taiwan's program. It looks like we won't be traveling to Taiwan to pick up our baby until at least 2009.