Busy Sunday

Jade and I went with Dad to church this morning. It was a lovely service and the kids put on a nativity play during it which I thought was very nice. Jade really enjoyed it too. The pastor is lovely and very interesting to talk to. He is Canadian with a German and French Canadian background. I took a photo of Dad and him after the service.



We then dropped Dad back at the house and went to meet Jade's penpal Leah who is also adopted from China and is 10. We spent a few hours chatting with her and her mother at a Burger King. There seem to be quite a lot of older adoptees here in CT. Some are even in their 20s and at college and many are in their mid-teens. It is quite a different situation to Australia where more than 3/4 of China adoptees are pre-schoolers and younger.



I've also made contact again with another family who have a 13 year old son from China who was exchanging emails with Jarrah a couple of years ago. Somehow the boys lost contact but now they are going to start to email each other again.

Jade and I got home about 4:30. Poor Paul had been working all day weeding and chopping down self-sown saplings in the garden as well as cleaning up after the washing machine flood in the cellar. Jarrah was helping him too. I felt so guilty leaving them to do all that work. But that is the sort of thing he loves to do--at least the yard work part. Dad has already organised for someone to come and chop up and take away all the cuttings.





We'd all been so busy that we almost forgot that the kids were going to go ice skating in the evening. We remembered just in time and all piled into the car to go over to the skating rink at Hamden High. The kids skated for about 1.5 hours and had a great time. The rink was bright and clean and beautiful--a far cry from the dingy old rink in Melbourne. We've certainly crammed in a lot this trip but there never seems to be enough time.