My goodness, time is flying by these days.  Happy Thanksgiving!  And this year, we have much to be thankful for!

(The AWANA gang dressed up for Harvest Night.  Our new AWANA leaders are fairly exhausting me with all the theme nights, but the kids are having a ball!)

Since Verity’s arrival, we have been getting back into our groove with life and school, but there is precious little down time. I always forget how time consuming nursing a new baby is, but I do remember that these early months fly by too quickly.  All too soon, she’ll be wriggling to get off my lap and explore, so I am soaking in every minute of her while I can.

(First smiles!)

The end of October saw us dressing up an awful lot for people who don’t celebrate Halloween.  First, the kids had their annual “Favorite Bible Hero” night at AWANA.

(From left to right:Bea as Balaam’s donkey, Niko as David, Lewis as an Armor of God knight, Pippa as Esther, Coraline as Ruth, Romilly as Mephibosheth, Junie as Lydia, and Delia and Annis just jumping in the picture for fun.)

Then we found ourselves accidentally bound for the zoo on their Trick-or-Treat day, so the kids chose costumes for that, too.  I was particularly impressed with the Anna braid hat that Pippa improvised for Annis that morning!

On Halloween night, we were visited by these two rather unlikely trick-or-treaters: Honald Clump and Dillary Trinton.  They brought us candy – so we let them in. One of these years our kids are no longer going to be surprised by the “surprise visit” from Pop-pop and Debedee on Halloween, I think!

In early November the kids had several opportunities to volunteer with Operation Christmas Child.  First, they helped give out and collect shoeboxes at Chick-Fil-A, then they helped out at our church’s collection center.

And that’s what we’ve been up to.

But if you’ve made it this far and are still reading, you will now be rewarded with the biggest news of our November so far: our dossier was logged into China on November 8th!

Yes.  That means that we are adopting again!  In fact, we are quite far along in the process and hope to be traveling to bring home our new son in the Spring.

I have not been deliberately keeping secrets.  This adoption, unlike our others, has felt very tentative at each step. There have been so many times that it seemed like God might be closing the door only to open it again, that we are only now letting ourselves begin to trust that this is actually happening.

Although I am not allowed to share pictures publicly yet, you can get a sneak preview of our boy here on our Family Sponsorship page at Reece’s Rainbow, and learn a bit more about our new son by reading his little bio on the same site here.  We are so excited for him to join our family!

And with that, I now owe you a birth story and an adoption story.  But for now, I need to sleep while my baby is sleeping!