More about Kate's adoption

First of all to answer the questions girlspeaks asked... Yes, I will be going back to China. I am already so excited. China is one of my favorite places ever and I am so, so excited to return there. We are hoping that we will all be able to go back, and depending on when we go, maybe even Drew can come this time. AnnaClaire will definitely be going to China. We have discussed this for awhile and feel it's best that she come with us, whenever the time comes, as 1) it would be really hard to leave her for 2 weeks, 2) it would be really hard if we left for 2 weeks and came home with a new baby, and 3) she might even be a help to baby Kate (that they look like eachother and will be somewhat around the same age and stuff). About rooms... we aren't positive yet, but the nursery is really small, so there is no way both little girls can share that. Right now our plan is to move AnnaClaire into Drew's room and put Kate into the nursery. However, we do have awhile before we need to know all the room arrangements... We will definitely not be adding another nursery. I don't think there's even enough room to add onto our house anymore! ;)

Oh I also wanted to share how we came up with her name... We had quite a list of names. It consisted of
-Lilly
-Esther
-Evelyn
-Katherine (Kate/Katie)
-Elizabeth (Ellie)
-Rose
-Grace
and a few others

Back in April when we were talking about names, we thought we had decided on Lilly Katherine "Lilly Kate". Personally I was the one who said no more double names. I love double names but having 2 with double names would be a bit much. Or maybe it was more the fact that we have a family joke about having a "second family" it is bothered me that the little ones would both have double names and then we older ones would have single names. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it just kinda seperated us. Little things like that bug me. Anyway, Mom and I are basically the name deciders so we had pretty much decided that we would call her Lilly and Lilly Kate. Either/or. Well then we weren't sure if that's what we wanted to name her. Lilly is a beautiful naAtme, but there are sooooo many Lillys. So we started thinking about Katherine as a first name. It fit. We asked dad what he thought and he said he definitely liked Katherine. So we would have a Katherine. Katherine has been our choice since about May, but we had hardest time with middle names. We also weren't sure if she should be Kate or Katie. There seem to be a lot of Katies, but there are also a bunch of Kates. I guess that's just part of liking traditional names~most of them are very common. At first we were going to name her Katherine Faith and call her Katie. Then it was Katherine Rose. Then it was Katherine Grace. Our very favorite was Katherine Mei, though. We finally decided to consider Rose, Grace, Faith, and Mei. We thought we would wait to see her Chinese name. With AnnaClaire, her Chinese name was Chen Xun Hui, and her middle name is Chenhui. So the C is for Claire and Chenhui. We kinda wanted that same thing with our next little one. So we thought, well if her Chinese name has a G, she will be Katherine Grace G____. Same thing for Rose and Faith. Finally, if she had Mei, she would be Katherine Mei. So for quite a few months that was our plan. Finally we decided we needed to decide for sure what her name was. I know we have a lot of time, but we are the kind of people who want to know what we're going to name her. So finally we just decided to go on and name her what we liked best... Katherine Mei. If she has Mei in her Chinese name, great! If she doesn't, oh well. We will still use part of her Chinese name as her second middle name, but she will still be KMH no matter what. Oh and then it was the "Kate" or "Katie" thing. We love both of those, but we finally decided on Kate. We asked Dad what he thought and he said he loved it. Dad had always said Katherine, and he loves Mei for the middle name. Today Mom was talking to Drew and he's pretty tough on names ;) and he even said he loved the name Katherine Mei and is so excited! So she will be our little Kate. Also, Mei means beautiful.

If you have any questions about Kate's adoption, please feel free to ask and I'll be happy to answer them!


And lastly, here's some pictures from the weekend... decorating, first advent (and AC's first tastes of hot cocoa-new favorite word-, and christmas cookies!) and raking with her brand new little rake! Also, we just got the train around the tree, so I added a picture of that. The train is so cute and AnnaClaire loves to watch it go around and around our tree!