reunion

Wow! Two posts so close together! What is happening here? Well, recently we had a little reunion of some of our kids who stayed at the same orphanage around the same time. We had a fun time with a cookout on Friday night and a visit to the zoo on Sat. It was really neat to meet the families, and babies that went home to them. We swapped traveling stories and reasons why we all adopted and from India in particular, it was nice to get to know them. I wondered how Sananda would react to get to see these kids again. She just started in playing with them like it was any other day. I hope we can do this again in the future and that more families can join in the activites. Since we met on India's Independence Day I had brought coloring pages of the Indian flag for the kids to fill in. The next day was Rakhi and I brought braclets and sweets to celebrate it, but we were at the zoo and I didn't think I was allowed to bring anything in so we never had the opportunity to do those activities together, it was a fun time being there anyway.

Comments on the photos:

1. Play ball!
2. Sananda showing her bangles that I brought home for her recently from my trip to India.
3.Sananda being cute!
4. Sananda's friend Anya
5. Sananda's friend Zane and his mommy having a laugh.
6. Sananda, Anya and David playing beside each other.
7. Sananda, Anya and David coloring India flag pictures.
8. Sananda's friend David
9. Photo in front of the elephants. The "elephants" seemed the popular place to take family photos that day.
10.Sananda was really hoping to touch a shark(my girl!)but never did it.

Hope you enjoyed!

The latest

Everytime I write on here it seems that I always say it has been so long since I have written on here. Well, I think this is truely the longest it has been. I guess I mostly wanted to keep it adoption related and have been too busy to post anyway.
Well, today I have news again and here is it...

Today we were invited to go to a ceremony for our daughter to receive her certificate of citizenship. This was the last piece of adoption work that we had to complete and it feels good to have it all done. Sananda has already been a U.S. citizen for awhile now, but it was nice to be at the event and for her to get the certificate. The town we went to for this was a long drive and after getting there the whole event took around 1 ½ hours. There were 32 countries represented with 72 people receiving their certificates. Some of the names called were international ones and the speaker even apologized in advance if she messed any of them up. I just did an article on another blog about naming an adoptive child and I had been thinking, as I said in the article, that Sananda’s name is easy to pronounce and there shall be no problem with our baby’s name. When the speaker called our little girl’s name we didn’t even know she said it because it was not recognizable at all, except she said our last name too. When no one else stood up to go to the front we looked at each other and thought, I guess she means us. We took Sananda to the front of the room and sure enough there was her certificate. The speaker was very nice and talked about how good it was that all of them , either through hard work, adoption, or from parents migrating , have become citizens. Someday Sananda will enjoy hearing about all of this, but today during the ceremony she wanted to do anything but pay attention. So much for a 2 year old getting into anything like that. After we left it was time to eat so we stopped at a really good restaurant to celebrate and then found an Indian grocery and grabbed some Indian sweets (barfi) for dessert.

About the photos above, we sat behind a lady and during the ceremony Sananda did not want to sit still for long. She kept squirming and twisting on my lap and she finally managed to kick the lady in the backside. I was so embarassed and apologized to her a couple of times. She was so sweet about it though and afterwards you can see her helping to hand the flag to our girl for her photo shoots. What a sweet lady! I am glad she is a citizen here!