Once Upon A Time...

There was this wild child and shy guy that went to their 20yr high school reunion. Fast forward a year later - married. OH... what a first year of fun we had. The shy guy tried and tried to teach the wild child how to load the dishwasher his way and clean the toilets his way, but she had other plans. I would describe myself as a 80's girl with a large dose of hippie...very intense about my beliefs and would die for what I love and believe. My husband is the what you see is what you get kind of guy. He is honest and loyal and my best buddy. We have two adopted kiddos (soon to be three), all from China and two are cleft palate kids. I can't remember going to bathroom alone or having a full nights sleep, but being a mom ROCKS!
Shy guy here - although there hasn't been a shy bone in my body for decades, she remembers that from school. Aside from that, we have a daughter - McKenna, who is 5 now. We adopted her through the regular processes and is from Changsha in the Hunan Province. She was just over a year old on Gotcha Day in July of 2005. Once we found that we could keep a child alive and having them can actually be fun, we decided to return to China again. We were diving into the paperwork for the next one when we started to discuss special needs children. We had visited McKenna's orphanage while we were there and saw many children there that were older or special children that had been waiting much longer to get a forever family. Then we were filling out the medical checklist for this when we came across the "gender" question. We looked at each other and the three choices - Male, Female, or Either. We checked "either" knowing it would be a girl because they had so many more than boys, or so we thought. Once we sent in our checklist, we were told we were number 159 on the list so we thought it would be a while before we had a referral. Twelve days later Nicole got a phone call - "Congratulations Mommy, it's a boy!". Tommy came home in May of 2007 and has had surgeries to correct his cleft palate. He was 19 months when he got him - he is 4 now and doing great. Later we came to find out that boys outnumber the girls in special needs because the girls usually get adopted first. Currently we are in process to bring home a 4 year old boy, also with cleft palate, who will be named Ian. We hope to travel in March or April 2010 to bring our boy home.
We have started this blog to help our family and friends follow our journey to Ian and the other crazy adventures of our family.