Soon we will be doing another travelogue!

Tomorrow morning we leave for Branson, Missouri. Darcy and I both plan to keep a travelogue on our respective blogs, so be sure to check Darcy's blog out, too (there is a link for it in the side-bar...the billboard with a photo of Batgirl Darcy on it...just click on the billboard and you will be taken to her blog!).

Doug is looking forward to going on vacation, even though he will be missing his school Halloween party (which he has been talking about non-stop for over a month now). Maybe we will have to have our own "class party" at the hotel?! We are hoping that we will get to see the Chinese Acrobats in Branson again this year, too. Doug REMEMBERS Silver Dollar City (from last October)...he was telling me this morning that he wanted to ride the roller coaster and he wants to go on the mine ride where you shoot guns at targets. I remember the FIRST time we took Doug to Silver Dollar City....the band was scheduled to play there just a few weeks after Doug came home to us. He still didn't understand English and those were also the days before we began treating his inability to focus with medicine. Oh my! I remember how OVERSTIMULATED our little boy was the entire trip. He was in a constant FRENZY. He would see a ride up ahead and begin yanking on my arm, excitedly speaking non-stop, pointing and fairly shaking all over with excitement. I couldn't get him to think or talk or look at ANYTHING else...he would just fixate on the ride he saw up ahead and couldn't hear or see anything else. We would wait in line while he went nuts with anticipation. Then, the moment we stepped ONTO the ride (even before the ride began MOVING) he would fixate on the NEXT ride in sight and couldn't even absorb the present experience...just agonized over where he wanted to be NEXT. It was horrible. We could never catch up to where he wanted us to be! The next time we returned to Silver Dollar City the experience was so much different...so very much better. Ritalin is such a godsend.

I am really looking forward to this vacation. It is always wonderful just to all be together as a family...where-ever we go...but, Branson is such a special place to Grant (and now his children) that that makes this vacation even nicer. Darcy has been practicing her mandolin and plans on playing along with the band on a few numbers, as well as singing with them. I am trying to remember...I don't think she has ever played the mandolin with the band before...just banjo, if I remember correctly. So, this will be her mandolin debut. (Her daddy bought her a real mandolin when she was six or seven years old...but, it has only been recently that she has shown an interest in genuinely buckling down and practicing playing it. She does a really good job on "Shady Grove" and "Red Haired Boy". She is good at just picking out tunes by ear, too. Last week, she played "Happy Birthday" on her mandolin for me while the family sang to me.)

Totally unrelated subject: I added a new link in the side-bar this morning... Wei Long and Company. I have followed the adoption story of this little seven year old boy even before he had an adoptive family! He was one of the older children at the orphanage where Rayna came from (a small orphanage in a rural area of China...Ding Yuan). A British woman who adopted her youngest child from Ding Yuan Social Welfare Institute (Rayna's orphanage) about the same time we were adopting Rayna, began a Yahoo group site for other families with children from Ding Yuan. This amazing lady (Arlene Howard) also, subsequently began raising money for all sorts of improvement projects for the orphanage. In the years since then, she has spearheaded getting air-conditioning for the rooms the children are housed in, getting heaters for the building for winter time, getting playground equipment installed, getting bright murals painted on the bleak concrete interior walls, getting decent FORMULA provided for the infants, getting a FOSTER FAMILY program established for the special needs children who might not ever get adopted, and I could go on for several more paragraphs just listing the improvements she has made in the lives of the children who have followed in the footsteps of our own precious children. Anyway, one of Arlene's most heartfelt projects was to find homes for the older children. There were five or six girls at the orphanage who were 12-14 years old. Arlene set out to find families for them. I remember the 14 year old child wasn't even LISTED as available for adoption (the director of the orphanage assuming that she was too old for anyone to want). Arlene convinced the director to put through the paperwork to allow the girl to be listed and then she found a family to adopt her! I have really followed with interest the last couple of years the transition of these older girls into their new families. The stories have been heartwarming. One of the most recent children to catch the interest of the families in that Yahoo group was a little six year old boy named Wei Long. Every family that had the priviledge of visiting the orphanage (not all adoptive families are allowed to travel to the orphanage...in fact NONE were before Arlene began pouring so much help into the orphanage), anyway, every family that went to the orphanage in recent times would write in their posts about this little boy there named Wei Long. He would follow the new parents and their new babies around and invariably, he would capture their hearts. So, everyone was really excited when a family decided to adopt little Wei Long. I have read posts from his new family on the Yahoo site, but, just today, I learned that his mom has a blog site with pictures of him and some entries about their experience in China and back at home since then. You might want to pop over to that site and see this wonderful little guy!