Christmas Caroling

Thursday night our family went out to some dear friends place and went for a hayride and Christmas caroling.  Kayleigh and Michael continue to get more and more excited with the season as we get closer to Christmas, and as this is their first one as family with us, we're making sure we do it up right.  The tree got set up right after Thanksgiving (because you can't set it up before, it's not right....) and the yard is all lit up at night. 

Christmas caroling was a lot of fun, they're still working on reading English fast enough to hop to a song on the songsheet and sing along, but seemed to have a great time with it anyways :)  Back to our friends house afterwards for hot chocolate and cookies and time to chat.  Our friend Stephanie gave Kayleigh a wonderful picture with the caption of "He answered by setting me free".  How appropriate it is for orphans who have not family or future and face the captivity of likely failure in their lives, and the freedom they have gained to have a family, love and future through adoption.  We still meet up with people who have not met them yet (they're getting better about not being totally shy....:) and it is so awesome for people who have prayed for and supported our adoption journey to get to see the reality of what they took part in, the freedom to live a life.

We also got to enjoy a special treat as a person we had met at the beginning of our adoption trip in Ukraine.  The meeting was so definitely random to us but planned in God's eyes, as this person called a contact in the town we stayed in most of the trip to keep an eye on his American friends while we were there.  Through that random meeting in Kyiv, we ended up with a church family, many friends we continue to keep in touch with to this day, and our favorite cafe!  Our family was so blessed by this!

We still know little of their life back in Ukraine other than a few things that Kayleigh has shared, other than it was bad.  We are truly blessed that they are our family now, and love watching God unfold their new life for them here :)