Big Weekend!!!

We had such a wonderful weekend with our good friends The Helms coming in from TX to visit and celebrate our baby Jalen's 2nd birthday!

Jalen and Jude had such a fun time together, this was the first time they actually got to play as Jalen has always been too young to really "play".  Jalen is still talking about "Juuude!" all the time and misses him very much!  This is a picture of our boys and their beanies, such cute lil boys we have!

After a b-day party, dinner, good time visiting, church on Sun and lunch, the Helms drove home and we headed up to Norman, OK to meet with our social worker for our first visit.  She has 2 adopted children from Korea herself and one on the way, just waiting in Korea for her to travel to bring him home next year, makes me feel great to have her as she can 100% empathize with all we go through!  Our home study visit is going to be this coming Saturday!!!  we're coming along and hope to get our dossier sent in before the year ends!  We also were meeting up with another ET adoptive family, The Lincks that I had done some paintings for.  Here are 2 of the 3, I forgot to take a picture of the big one that went with them.  We are very excited to meet up again, it is always so nice to have other people to talk to that truly understand and get all of this!

We then headed back home to attend our Sun evening "Chazown" studies at church, we are learning each week how to find our vision and make it happen.  We're pretty set on what our vision is, not just to get through this adoption but to continue our lives with living purposefully and creating a voice for the millions of orphans out there.  We are heading up a group/ministry at our church and are involving other churches and I will talk more about that later but it is all very exciting  and when I look back on what my life was like 1 year ago compared to today, I can't even imagine it.  It's like trying to remember what life was like before having kids, just seems like it would have been so empty and filled with time that was spent doing nothing and now everything we do has a purpose and it feels so good.  I will never go back and promise to continue my life living with purpose the make this world maybe that more of a better place!

LASTLY...

I would also like to plug my friend Lara's Giving Thanks Giveaway.  Go check it out and buy a slice of "pie" or a shirt and spread the word to win!  I have donated a custom canvas to her winner as well so if you like what you see above or what is posted on my Custom Canvas Website, then enter Lara's giveaway...it is for a GREAT cause!