A Visit to China!

Hi everyone!  Once again, it's been a long time since we've been on the ol' blog!  My last update was around Christmastime of 2017.  Since then, TongJie has had his bone graft surgery (March 2018), where bone from his hip was grafted into the gap in his gumline, and he recently got braces on his top teeth late this winter.  He just finished 2nd grade, which is hard to believe!  He loves writing and math and is really getting quite impressive at math in particular.  He finished out the school year studying animals at school and he chose the bald eagle to focus on for his end of the year project.  I couldn't resist making him a bald eagle tie to wear for his presentation.

Equally hard to believe, Ezekiel just finished pre-kindergarten and will be starting kindergarten in the fall!  Ezekiel loves school and can't wait to be a kindergartner.  He is still working on being a dual-media reader: reading in both braille and print.  He is an amazing reader for his age, especially considering his visual impairment.  He can read large print quite well, and is slowly improving at reading braille.  I also took an online braille class over the winter and I'm trying to learn it along with him so I'll be able to keep up with what he's doing.  He is using a CCTV (a very large-screened video magnifier) at home over the summer and loves to use it for reading books in print. 

TongJie likes to read to Ezekiel, which is always sweet to see, and Ezekiel loves being read to.

Jeff and I just finished out our school years of teaching as well.  Our family's big news right now is that we're going to China!  We are going to be participating in a "Heritage Tour," which is a guided tour specifically for families with children who are adopted from China.  We will be traveling with a group of other families and we're looking forward to seeing the Great Wall, Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City, Terracotta Warriors, and the Dujiangyan Panda Base among lots of other things.  We will be ending our trip by visiting the Zhejiang Province, where TongJie is from, and spending time in the city he is from (Wenzhou City), visiting his orphanage, and spending our last day in Hangzhou, which is the capital city of the province.  Our plan is to return again to China in a few years to spend some time in Ezekiel's province and hopefully visit his orphanage as well.  It would have been too long of a trip to try to do everything this time around, and we think Ezekiel will be able to get more out of a visit to his province when he's a little older.

I'm writing up this quick blog post late at night on the eve of our big trip so that's all for now.  We leave tomorrow and will arrive in Beijing on Sunday afternoon China time.  I plan to update our blog as much as possible during our trip so anyone who wants to follow along can see what we're up to.  That's all for now, and next time I post something we should be in Beijing!