Hanging out on a beautiful day

Today we spent the day with 3 other families from my "pledge class" (this is what I call the people who hosted at the same time as we did.) We've each brought home kids within the past six months and today was the first time we've been able to get together with all the kids (the last one just came home last week!) 3 of the kids are from the same orphanage and it was fun for them to get to see each other again and for the moms to just hang out by the pool and enjoy watching our kids play and reflecting back on the process that each of us took to bring home our children. The timeline, challenges, and process was different for everyone but our joys now are the same.

I love this picture - every kid on this bench is one or ours. Oh the fun we will have!


Jonathan and Lukas hanging out at their neighborhood pool. Lukas takes good care of him and Jonathan wants to live at their house so "my friend Lukas would be my brother."

Michael, Charity and Joseph refuel after swimming for awhile. Joseph has pretzels hanging out of his mouth. The kid can't hardly take a normal picture to save his life. He's a ham with very sensitive eyes so he's either being goofy or squinting!

This little cutie is Lucas - the last of the crew to arrive from Ukraine. He is such a joy and a little spitfire. God has placed him in the perfect family. It is amazing to see individual family traits coming out in these kids that were born several thousand miles away from their "forever families." God is so amazing!