Saturday, April 23, 2011

Jake's learning new skills

We enrolled Jake in a Soo Bahk Do Moo Duk Kwan martial arts class. He's been to 3 classes so far and seems to be enjoying it.
Last week, just happened to be their shim sa (testing) and Jake knew enough to get an orange stripe on his belt.

He also broke a plastic board with his foot. It is a board that breaks if you kick it right, and they can put it back together for the next kid, but Jake did kick it right and broke it. It took him a couple of tries, and when he broke it he seemed surprised but then he smiled big.

Here he is showing off his new stripe.



And here he is recreating his powerful kick.



Look out Chuck Norris!

Sunday, April 17, 2011

3 years ago ... it all changed

Three years ago today (April 17) our world changed.

We were in JCPenney buying some last-minute things for our trip to Chicago for the East Meets West conference when my cell phone rang. It was Great Wall, and they had a "kiddo" whose file they wanted us to take a look at. Since we were in town, we hurried over to work and checked the e-mail.

This was one of the first photos we saw.



From that moment on, we knew we had found our son. Who couldn't fall in love with that face? Luckily for us one of the guest speakers at the conference was an international adoption doctor who had adopted 4 girls from China. He reviewed our file and we decided to go for it.

Three years later life is definitely good.