1.5 Months Home

One and a half months home and everything is going beautifully! Jaco is just a total delight! It feels so totally natural and normal to have him as a member of our family. The more we get to know him the more I continue to be amazed how much he is just like his Dad! Usually we just go about our day as if he has always been here but every now and then I'll look over at him and it will all hit me~~ He's REALLY here!!! His smile always makes me smile. He is a quiet, cheerful, helpful, respectful, and intelligent young man. His brothers and sister all enjoy him too. Since he has been here I don't believe there has been a single argument or misunderstanding involving him with the other children. Luke is crazy about him but would never admit it. ;-) Jaco is so cute and sweet with him. Johnny RUNS to hug him when he gets home from school and talks his ear off!

Some of our adventures since he has been home includes~ a big welcome home party, a couple hikes, skating at a rink (which he did GREAT at), seeing a movie in the theater, shopping, family movie nights and more. He's shown himself to be a protective big brother on our adventures. It just warmed my heart even more to him when I would watch him stop to help his fallen little brothers up while skating, or when he grabbed Luke and saved him right before he stepped in front of a biker on our hike. Just a really sweet addition to the family!

We thank God for the gift of our new beautiful son. To be chosen to parent a "child" as wonderful as this is nothing short of humbling.

Newspaper Blitz

On the day that Jaco came home to us I talked with a Newspaper reporter that was interested in doing an article of our family. I thought they would just want to come to the airport and capture Jaco leaving the plane and joining his family. However, they wanted instead to come to our home. I thought this article would show up just in the 1 local paper but it has started popping up in newspapers all over the Bay area. One company owns 14 Bay area newspapers and it seems that they are putting the same article in several of their papers. There is no telling how many of them it will end up in. It's been funny to have people from different parts of the bay area come up to us or contact us and say "We saw you in our paper today". It's been fun to track it as much as we can. We've even heard from a friend that a link to our article was on MSNBC.com

We had seriously considered not doing the article but we wanted to do whatever we could to help keep anything connected to Haiti in the news so that people do not begin to move on with their lives and forget about their great need. So we prayed that God would use it for that purpose and so it's been fun to see how much He has mulitplied it far beyond what we expected!

Below is a link to one of the articles. In all of them the wording is the same but the photos change. So far we've seen the above photo, a photo of Kyle and Lovenie dancing around in the living room (to Kyle's horror), and one of me helping Jaco with some school work. I'm curious to know what other photos are showing up in the other papers as they took hundreds while here!

http://www.insidebayarea.com/search/ci_14438339?IADID=Search-www.insidebayarea.com-www.insidebayarea.com