Adorable pictures

I have to share a link to some adorable pictures my very talented friend took of Ezra:

Go to:

http://www.lyndseylewphotography.com/

then choose the website, and select the Clients tab. Our password is ezra.

Let me know what you think.

Ella's friend Erik recently learned to ride his bike without training wheels. So, she decided that it was time for her training wheels to come off too! She's one determined little girl!

EZRA ANTHONY

We are excited to announce that Ezra was born on Thursday March 27, 2008. He weighed 7lbs 3oz and was 20 inches long.

No baby yet ...

But, he will be evicted soon if he doesn't come on his own! I got really spoiled with Ella and Adlai coming so early!

In the meantime, here are a couple of fun photos from last week. We had a small snow storm on Sunday night & it was finally the kind of snow that was great for building a snowman. But, this snowman's life was short-lived!

Monday morning Snowman:

and 48 hours later:

Just Waiting .....

Our new baby is almost here and I'm impatiently waiting. In the meantime, I thought that I had better get on top of updating this site!

For those of you who didn't even know that we were pregnant again, please forgive me. I have been awful about staying in touch. We found out that we were pregnant just days before we were officially put on the waiting list for our adoption. (It was a big suprise!) We are still on the waiting list, but we're putting that on hold for a little while.

When I found out I was pregnant, I started seeing a new doctor and he found that I have a couple of blood clotting disorders which could have contributed to a lot of my miscarriages. I have something called Factor II and I'm homozygous for MTHFR. So, I have been giving myself injections of Heparin (a blood thinner) in my stomach twice each day. The injections have made for a very long pregnancy!

Here are a couple of pictures that Case took of my pregnant belly. (I've touched up most of them with Photoshop, but Case wanted me to included an untouched one to show the battle scars from giving myself the heparin injections.)

37 weeks pregnant

Ella & Mom and Adlai & Mom

Here's the untouched photo. YIKES!

Some Recent Pictures of the Kids

NEW Updates - FINALLY!

Fall has arrived and the kids have been having a lot of fun. (Although our backs are aching from all of the raking.)

Trick-or-Treating Around the World

The university in town had an event called Trick-or-Treating Around the World. The offices at the student center went all out and decorated their rooms. The kids were able to trick-or-treat in Disney World, Hollywood, Paris, Japan, China, Antartica, Italy, Finland and more. What a safe way to have some funny .. and without all the "spookiness" associated with Halloween.




Woody and Bullseye from Toy Story

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.

ADOPTION UPDATES - WE'RE MOVING FORWARD:

We had our first homestudy appointment yesterday. So far, so good. Our social worker spent about two hours at our house asking us questions related to our motivation for adopting. She also briefly toured of our house. And to think, we spent all weekend getting our house ready for her first visit. We knew that it was probably going to be like this .. but having a social worker come to your home is definitely motivation to get the things that we've wanted to get done for years. She was glad that she was the source of our motivation, but she insisted that we don't need to worry about having our house clean for her next visits.

We have two more visits next week, then hopefully our social worker can get our homestudy written up quickly. As soon as we submit a draft of our homestudy to our agency, we are officially on the waiting list for a referral! How exciting!

IS THERE ANY HOPE FOR OUR SON??

Adlai LOVES to imitate his sister. I think that it's hillarious, but Case isn't so thrilled. I'm supposed to be buying a Rambo outfit for him as I write this.

It is so fun to watch Ella and Adlai play together. They certainly are best buddies! Even with Ella's strong influence, it has been fun to see how differently God created girls and boys. Adlai often carries around his baby (like his sister) but he also insists on carrying his John Deere tractor too.

The other day I found Adlai playing in the yard with his toy dinosaurs. He was acting out that these toy dinosaurs were fighting and eating eachother up. I never taught him how to play like that. He's all boy!

Case's Genes are the Dominant Genes in this family:

This is a picture of Case (no it's not Adlai) when he was about 1 year old.

Ella posing for the Camera:

ADOPTION UPDATES

We have completed the overwhelming process of collecting all of the necessary paperwork to start our homestudy. The homestudy is the process where a social worker visits our home (the state of Colorado requires three separate visits), examines our home and interviews us. He/she then writes up a long report that is submitted to our agency and to the orphanage in Taiwan. Hopefully we will be able to get our homestudy started this week.

We have been fingerprinted, have had background checks run on us, we've provided our complete financial history, we have completed detailed questionairres about our life history (thankfully the state of Colorado allows us to do this in place of writing and autobiography), we've had physicals performed for our whole family, we've had to go through training, we've had to provide copies of every significant document we have (birth certificates, passports, marriage liscense, tax returns, etc.), we've provided proof of health insurance for our adopted child & proof of employment, we've written a dear birthmother letter (which the birthmother in Taiwan may see), and we have put together a scrapbook of our family. We've already spent thousands of dollars and we're not even close to being finished (the entire adoption will cost us about $25,000). Sometimes the whole process is so overwhelming. I've struggled with not growing bitter over all that is required of us. But, we are confident that this is where God is leading us, so I'm willing to coninue providing what is required.

As soon as we get a draft of our homestudy into our agency we will officially be on the waiting list for our child. How exciting!! At that point we expect the wait for a referral to be close to 12 months.

P.S. If anyone has any unique fundraising ideas for our adoption let me know. We won't have to pay most of the money until after we get a referral, so we have a little while to raise some money.

MEMORIAL DAY IN TEXAS

We spent the past week in Texas with our friend Fondly and her son Erik. She has a great slideshow of our trip on her blog. Check it out at:

www.wucooper.blogspot.com