It's Official!! We're Approved!!

We have been busily working on getting all of our adoption paperwork turned in and updated and 

we are finally approved and online again with our agency LDS Family Services!! Feel free to check out our online profile by clicking HERE. 

Adoption has been the single greatest blessing in our lives and has shaped us in more ways than we can name. I've said this before and will say it again, I would not trade my experiences with adoption for anything. It has humbled, strengthened, uplifted, stretched and made us in to who we are today. We have learned to open our hearts to amazing birth families and have been blessed as our family has grown not just by 3 sweet children, but by many, many extended biological family members to our children. 

This will most likely be our last adoption. We are only able to go back through our agency again because of the failed placement we had last year. There are many families that are hoping to adopt and not so many children being placed for adoption, so LDSFS has now limited the number of children you can have in your family and go through them. We feel very blessed that we get to work with them one more time. Each of our 3 children's birth families found us through LDSFS. But statistics show that most adoptive families actually find their children through friends and family members who know someone experiencing an unplanned pregnancy. We don't know how this last little spirit will find our family, but we are praying that we will be guided together. We know that Our Father in Heaven is aware of our family. We have faith that things will work out exactly as they should. We can not wait to watch this miracle one more time in our family.

If you or anyone you know is experiencing an unplanned pregnancy, please feel free to pass on our information. Our family blog, our adoption blog (link on the side bar), or our agency profile (link also on the sidebar). Also our email is: hema.becky@gmail.com and we would love to talk to anyone about adoption. 

We are eternally grateful for your love and support! 

Cora Lately....

Sweet Cora is getting bigger every day! She has 11 teeth now (3 molars) and one more molar about to cut through. 

You can see her big chompers in this picture pretty good!

She is mostly sweet, snugly and playful, but occasionally she will bite one of us for no apparent reason.

 She is also obsessed with hair right now. She loves to lay next to me or Vela and rub our hair on her face. 

Cora is pretty much always smiling!

Cora had her 15 month checkup and here are her stats:

Height: 31.75 inches - 86%

Weight: 21.8 lbs - 33%

Head: 45.25cm  29%

At her 15 month check up. She closes her eyes and laughs now when you say cheese! Pretty cute! 

Cora's sweet birth mama had a birthday recently. We are so grateful to have a open relationship with her.  We love Krychele so much! 

She loved the ribbons from Krychele's present! 

Cora and Krychele on Krychele's 18th Birthday! Two Beauties!!

Cora loves to play hide and seek! It is so cute she will suddenly disappear and then you go looking for her and find her wedged in between the wall and a book shelf or in the back of a closet. She will just sit there quietly for the longest time until you find her then she bursts into laughter and then runs and hides somewhere else. 

Hiding in Hema's closet.

Boo!!

Cora has just moved from two naps a day to one longer nap this past week. She is still the BEST sleeper at night and goes down at 8 pm and sleeps soundly until 7 am. 

She loves the water and loves to swim, take a bath or a shower. If she hears the water running in the house she comes on a dead run trying to remove her clothes and lifts one leg up and tries to get into the tub. It's pretty cute. She sometimes takes several baths in a day because it's easier to bathe her again rather then fight with her to stay out. Some battles just aren't worth fighting! 

Cora is the friendliest kid and loves everyone! She often walks up to total strangers and reaches up to be picked up or if someone is sitting on the ground she walks up and sits right on their laps. She especially loves babies and tries to hug and kiss every single baby she sees.  

She is at such a fun stage and even though I miss Hema and Vela while they are in school, it has been really fun having lots of one on one with my sweet little Coco!! 

Vela Lately...

Vela suddenly seems so grown up. maybe it is because Hema is at school all day and isn't here to do stuff for her, but suddenly it seems like she can do everything herself! It makes me happy and sad at the same time!!

She is loving preschool. The past few days they are learning about colors. We dressed her to match the color they were learning. 

Red

Yellow... I should have turned her so the sun wasn't right in her eyes!!

Black

Brown... that's a color that was hard to find in her closet!

Blue - Luckily Halle gave Vela this cute blue dress. The only other blue thing in her closet was jeans and she refused to wear them! 

I could go on through all the colors, but you get the idea. Did you notice she wasn't wearing pants in any of the pictures? Princess Vela is definitely a girly-girl! 
Vela is getting so tall! She is way taller than all the other kids in her preschool class, especially taller than the boys!
She is such a sweet big sister. Cora lately shadows Vela everywhere and loves to go over and hug and cuddle and kiss her. It is so sweet to see those 2 girls together.
Vela has moved into her own bedroom. For a while we moved her bed into Hema's room because she was scared to sleep on her own. Now she loves her room. She has a big bookcase full of kids books and sits for hours at a time looking at them.

Vela is such a good helper around the house and loves to help me cook, clean or do just about anything.
Vela recently learned how to wink and loves to walk around winking at everyone!

We love Vela so very much and are so grateful she is part of our family! 

Recent Random Catchup Pictures

I have a ton of recent random pictures I seem not to have time to post lately....

So here is a quick catch up of some of them:

Everyone had dentist appointments and no one had any cavities! That is always good news!

Hema seems to actually enjoy the dentist now.

Last time Vela wouldn't even open her mouth. This time she did perfect! So proud of her! 

We also took the kids to get haircuts before school started up. We went to Cookie Cutters. The kids thought it was so much fun there and wished they  could have tried out every single fun chair. 

Hema was relieved that a boy was cutting his hair. Here is his before long fluffy hair!

Vela was please she didn't have to have the boy cut her hair. The girl tried to convince me how cute Vela would look with lots of layers in her hair. I said NO WAY! Just a trim please!

AFTER! This picture seriously cracks me up! Vela wanted to look like a princess so the girl did this "crown braid." It was so funny! Hema and I couldn't stop laughing at the fact that she looks like a polygamist child bride! Disclaimer: We may live in Lehi, Utah - but we are in NO WAY associated with any polygamists! That is just a princess crown okay! :)

When Hema's birth grandparents visited for his birthday the brought all the stuff to make a variation of this craft from the Friend magazine. We made them for FHE the following Monday and the kids thought it was so much fun! A lot of the stuff came right out of their garden! She also had us substitute chicken salad instead of the cottage cheese, cute and yummy!  

Hema with one of his bugs. 

He really likes olives more than tomatoes, so he invented this bug.

We recently went bowling as a family. The last time we went (several months ago) the kids thought it was boring and refused to even bowl the second game we had paid for. This time they loved it and begged for a second game!

Hema is really getting the hang of it. 

I love this picture of Vela mid air - cheering herself on! She would roll the ball and it would seriously take 20 seconds to get to the end of the lane. Hema and I would say, "It's not going to make it..." and finally it would slowly hit the pins and knock a surprising number down. It was so funny. They whole time as  we waited for the ball to hit the pins she was jumping and dancing! It was pretty cute! 

Cora just mostly cheered everyone on and looked adorable! 

Had to take a picture of this! Honestly the 1st time ever that I beat Hema! Whoo Hoo!

I think we were the only family left in Utah county that hadn't bought Tragalga/ Seven Peaks passes. They finally dropped the prices really low last weekend and we bought them. The Lehi Trafalga is about 5 minutes from our house so we've already been there lots! 

Hema and Vela love this ride. But right before we left some dorky kid that was about 17 with a mo hawk soaked them mercilessly. Really?!?! They were both in tears on the way tot he car. 

So fun!

Rides, rides, rides!

Vela rode this ride no less than 20 times in a row. She laughed hysterically every single time! 

We also went to Seven Peaks Salt Lake (the old Raging Waters) on Saturday after Hema's football game. I don't have a single picture because I only had my new camera and was too scared that it would get stolen to take it in.  The water parks are closed for the year but we hope to hit them up a lot all summer next year. 

Life is like a... football game...

(Hema enjoying some fruit at halftime)

This is a bit late, but last Saturday little Hema's team beat their opponent 21-0 (game #2). You've never seen such a hardworking, hard hitting bunch of 1st & 2nd graders... as long as a butterfly or a jet doesn't fly by to distract them... but hey... they are just a bunch of kids...right?! Half of the time they aren't sure what they are doing and the other half they seem to run like a well oiled machine. Little Hema has his moments of brilliance and then those occasional brain lapses. I know it probably frustrates the other coaches, but when these moments happen all I do is smile or laugh out loud (depending on the enormity of the error), shake my head, give him some words of encouragement and motivation, and then pat him on the helmet and send him on his way. I do have my moments though, but it is usually not about football... I think. It seems to be those moments when he is staring off into the distance, standing and watching the little girls soccer team practicing while the guy he is suppose to tackle runs past him, or when he is teaching one of his team mates "Miss Sue" (a patty cake kind of game... that I now regret teaching him) in the middle of our drills. So... I guess it does have something to do with football. But you know what? I wouldn't trade it for the world. Loving every minute of it. 

Here are some nice photos my wife took of our little guy in action.

Football is nothing without cheerleaders... and of course they don't care one ounce about the game...  just cell phones, jewelry, and looking cute.

And here is a shot of my angel... who likes to watch things from this vantage point but unfortunately can't during games because dad is running around on the sidelines.

Football Rocks!!!  -- Big Hema