Christmas Present

Bottle of Tears

Across the blue planet.

To the other side of the world.

She sleeps in her 40 pound frame.

Dreaming of a magnificent ocean.

She stands beside it.With a bottle in her hand.

Inside are her tears.

She throws it into the waiting sea.

Every night the dream is the same.

Until,one night it floats under...A statue of hope,of liberty.

A hand reaches out embracing the bottle of tears,

comprehending, truly understanding...

Merry Christmas to my wonderful wife who comprehends and understands all the adopted children in waiting.
From: Tim Kerr

My Husband wrote this poem for me for Christmas and it touched my heart. I wanted to post it to share it and hopefully, the poem will open our eyes to the plight of the orphans. There are so many hurting children in the world. We can each do something to ease their suffering. Maybe something small like a sponsorship to help with food, clothing, and medical help...maybe something bigger like helping an adoptive family with the costs of the adoption, or something even bigger such as opening your heart and home to a child in need. Just a thought.

Because we can all do something.

Anna and Jordyn love to dance together and practice the dances for hours. This is their favorite dance.

Visiting with Family for the Holidays

Grandma Sharon Kerr

JonMarc Loves Christmas!

BFF

Cousin Sara, Anna, and Friend Sara

Look at all the pretty girls!

Merry Christmas From our Family to Yours! Anna, Amanda, Jordyn, Melanie, Noah, Tim, and JonMarc

I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas holiday and enjoys time with their family. I have been getting ready for Christmas. Shopping, shopping, and more shopping. Having a large family to buy for makes for alot of shopping!!! I have been doing very well by finding things on Ebay and other listings and saving ton's of money. We are on a tight budget this year and I am trying to save as much as possible. I am thinking of Jailynn more and more and wishing she could be with us this year. I am buying her Christmas presents and planning to keep the tree up until she comes home. That was also a request from Jordyn and Amanda. They are both so excited for her to come home.

Our tree is in a sad state though. Somehow the stand to the tree disappeared and the lights do not work. So we have a make shift stand which causes the tree to lean to the side no matter how hard we try to fix it. Also, Noah loves to rearrange the ornaments so the tree is not so beautiful this year. Oh well...at least we have a tree to decorate.

I am hoping to keep the focus on the Real reason for the season this year by displaying a nativity seen under our tree. I am still looking for one. We are also giving clothes and toys to a needy family from Tim's work. This really inspired my children and they gave up lot's of nice toys they do not play with and some they still love for the family. I want them to learn that giving feels so much better than just getting all the time.

Joey and Kym are home and staying with us temporarily. So we have four more people in our home which is hectic! They are working on getting jobs and Kym is planning to go to school starting in January. Having them here has been both challenging and rewarding but I know that it has been the right thing to do. We are having a positive influence on them and it will be special to spend Christmas with them here. Our family is growing in leaps and bounds with Joey and Kym and soon Jailynn. I am sure that they will have thier own place before we leave for China (that is the plan). Please pray for our family that we adjust to all the changes and that Joey and Kym find jobs and get into their own place soon.

Merry Christmas,

Melanie

New Update on Our Sweet Jailynn!!!!

Jailynn (red coat) and her friend Fung-Fung

Jailynn and Director Ding

Jailynn and her cake we sent her!

Pretty Jailynn!!!

What a wonderful and exciting email to get this morning. I woke up to find updated pictures and info on our sweet little Jailynn!! We sent her the cake on November 6th and requested photos of her. I am so happy that we got them. She looks healthy and adorable! I can't wait to hold her in my arms. Jordyn is so happy and excited to see her new pictures. We are still waiting for our LOA and then our travel approval. I think we will most likely travel in late January or early Febuary. Please pray that it will be soon and that God will continue to provide the money we need for the orphanage fee and travel expenses. We are trusting God that He will provide because we know these two sweet girls belong together. Here are the updates on Jailynn's stats:

We have obtained You Yu’s current measurements from the orphanage. (cm=centimeters, kg=kilograms)
Height: 112 cmWeight: 16.4 kg Head circumference: 48.5 cmChest circumference: 51 cmLength of foot: 18 cmNumber of teeth: 10 upper teeth, and 10 lower teeth

She is so tiny! She only weighs 36 lbs and she is 3ft 9in tall. We just absolutely can't wait to bring Jailynn home!

What I am Most Thankful For:

I am most thankful this Thanksgiving for my children, my family, my husband, my friends, playing with my children, having Noah with us, that we are all happy and healthy, that God has brought this family together and that we will have Jailynn home with us very soon! Happy Thanksgiving!

waiting...waiting

The news today is that we finally know that our LID is 10/7/2008. Our agency said that the wait time for the LOA has been around 90 days. That means we should have our LOA around the first week of January. Knowing this is great because I have felt like I was going crazy just waiting. Now, the realization is that the time may seem like forever waiting, but it will be here before I know it. Last night I had a dream that we had our travel approval and we were leaving for the airport, packed up and ready to go. Then, I lost my purse which had all our money in it and our passports. We had to turn around and go back to the resturaunt where we had just been. I interrupted everyones dinner and said "excuse me...but this is extremely immportant...i have to find my purse...we are leaving for China to adopt our daughter and if you are a CHristian pray that I find my purse." Then, I found my purse and a man gave me $100 for our trip. Next, I realized that I had not gotten our Visas or Jordyn's pasport or told our agency our travel plans and I was absolutely panicked. Well, lets just say that I woke happy that is was all a crazy dream and, I realize that I have alot of pent up anxiety for sure. Yes...i think my subconcious is working over tme to make sure I don't forget those little details. I am glad to know our LID. That is just an important date that gives some meaning that something is happening. Now, I'm thinking I need to really get busy saving money and fund raising. We still need the orphanage donation fee which is now $5,000.00 and our airfare money and travel expenses. I am just praying for God to meet our needs. So that is my update for now. I am so ready to bring little Jailynn home.

Jordyn and Amanda's Holloween costumes were so cute! Jordyn was Snow White and Amanda was a cat. They had fun trick-or-treating in our neighborhood with friends. Jordyn loved her Snow White dress so much that she wore it all weekend. I think she even wore it to church! I did manage to get her to take a bath and then she put it right back on. She was just beautiful. Amanda always loves to dress up as a cat. I think she has been a cat for at least 4 halloween holidays.

Kuddos to Dear Hubby!

I have to give kuddos and hugs to my Dear Hubby, Tim. Our washing machine broke about 2 weeks ago and I have had to laundry at my Mom's house on my days off work. I was glad to have her just a few houses down and do laundry at her house, but I needed to be able to do it at home. Tim and I considered buying a used washer or new, but did not wnat to have the extra expense. Tim started trouble shooting the washer and took it apart and to his suprise found a sock stuck in the motor or some important part. So he took the sock out (now we know the truth...it's the washer that eats all the missing socks!) and ordered a pump for the washer. As soon as the pump came he stayed up all night after coming home from work and fixed my washer! Yea!!! Now, I don't have an excuse not to do the laundry. Now my Hubby does not have the excuse that he cannot fix things when I need a handy man. He did a great job fixing my washing machine. I am so proud of my man. Awwwwe!

This is a recent picture of us at church. Jordyn loves going to church and loves her Bible class. Anna looks so pretty and she is such a lovely person. Anna has a strong relationship with God and I am so proud of her. She is a good influence on her friends and her little sisters and brother. Anna is very studious and has Bible studies with her friends. She lad 2 of her friends to know the Lord. I pray that she stays inocent and sweet.

Today we visited Dr. Dibs at Children's Hospital to have her review You Yu Jailynn's medical report from China. Dr. Dibs specializes in adoption medicine and has adopted a little girl from China herself. She was wonderful in explaining all the medical report to me and Tim. According to her review Jailynn's health lookd good and she is on target for her milestones and age appropriate development. There are a couple of concerns but we will not know anything for certain until we see her. I am glad we went because it just answered some unknown questions for me and makes everything seem more real. I am anxious to bring her home. Dr. Dibs was wonderful and I wish I had known about her for Jordyn. She is also going to write prescriptions for our trip to China. Well, that is all the news today.

Today was my Birthday. Overall it was a good day. Anna made me brownies and let me take a much needed nap today. She cleaned the kitchen for me and watched the kids. What a sweet daughter. That simple gesture made my day. My mother cooked supper for us the night before and made me a cheesecake. So much for my dieting this week!! My Dear Husband plans to take me out to dinner for a date. It will be nice to go out together alone. We have not been out on a date in a long time. My family is so sweet and my greatest gift.

My China Dolls...I Love this picture because it makes me think about what it will be like when we finally have Jailynn home with us. We will have two China Princesses running around! How much fun will that be?? The reality that we are going to China to bring Jailynn home is beginning to set in. At first it seemed unreal or like a dream and I was focused on the paper chase. Now, I am thinking more and more about meeting her, the reunion for both girls, and seeing them together. I am starting to feel the anticipation and excitement of bring her home. I am starting to get things together for her and get the room ready. She will share a room with Jordyn and Amanda. I am debating if I want to get bunk beds and a twin bed or have three twin beds in the room. Space is a little limited now that there will be three dressers as well. Hmmm....decisions...decisions. I bought another dresser this weekend for her clothes. I also happened upon the best garage sell ever and bought the cutest dresses and clothes for Jailynn. They are name brands from The Children's Place, Gymboree, and Baby Gap. Jordyn is so excited as the time is getting closer to bringing Jailynn home.

Yes...I admit it...my girls are spoiled! We ended up havinig not one but two birthday paries that week. My plan was to have the girls parties together to save money and time. A great idea as far as I was concerned. Not so for Amanda. She was happy at the chuckie cheese party but I learned later that she wanted her own party at the skating rink. I did not know this at the time so when I found out how she felt I decided to give her a special party at the skating rink. She was very happy and felt that she had the party she wanted. Amanda and Jordyn had a great time and they learned to skate. Jordyn had never been skating before so it was a new experience for her. She caught on quickly and Amanda was happy to skate with the support thing and play games.

This is a slide of Amanda's and Jordyn's birthday party at Chuckie Cheese. We had so much fun! Jordyn turned 9 yrs old and Amanda turned 10 year s old. Jordyn loved all her gifts espescialy her baby doll and panda bears. Amanda really loved her horse. She loves anything to do with horses. Andrea (my sister) was staying with us at the time for Hurricaine Ike. So she came to the birtday party with her two boys Elijah and Caleb. Nanna came with all her kids Micheal, Jeremy, Elizabeth, Cameron, and Justin. Everyone had a fun time playing games, eating cupcakes and pizza, and dancing with Chuckie.

We are finally DTC!!! (Dossier to China!) Hooray!

This means that our documents are on their way to China and we are closer to bringing Jailynn home. I am relived that we have made it over this hurdle. It has been a long time coming to get our paper work completed. Now, we wait for our Dossier to get logged in and for our LOA (Letter of Acceptance). After the LOA we will get our Travel Approval. This is the count down to China time. This process can take anywhere from 2.5-5 months depending on how quickly our Dossier is processed. I would love to bring Jailynn home by Christmas, but I am not sure if that will happen. It could be January or February before we travel. Next, we need to raise money to bring little Jailynn home. We have a portion of our travel money saved up but we still need at least 10,000 more to cove airfare, hotels, travel fees, and legal fees. The biggest expense is airfare. The children want to come with us again and it is very important that Jordyn travels with us. We are a close family so it would be very difficult and hard to leave them home for 2 weeks. Of course, the most important focus is to bring Jailynn home no matter what and that is my goal. I hope we can all go together and experience it together the way we did with Jordyn. It really bonded us all closer together, but we will have to wait and see. SO far my plans for fundraising involves working extra at a staffing agency and maybe have a bake sale in November. I am still looking for fundraising ideas. I can't wait to see Jailynn reunited with her forever sister Jordyn and her forever family.

We just got back from Austin and Houston. I am trying to get my Dossier all together. It is amazing how i forget the little things like...make copies and send with it, include the money orders needed, and oh...don't leave the original homestudy in the copy machine!!! Yes! I managed to do all those things. I made it to the UPS store and then had to leave to buy my money orders...I made copies but did not include them... and finally, I just had the gut feeling I should double check it and realized the homestudy was not in it! I panicked because I could not figure out what I could have possibly done with the most important document and then looked overat teh copy machine and noticed there was something left in it. My homestudy!!! I honestly do not know how to explain that type of craziness except that it feels like the hormones from pregnancy. When I was 9 months pregnant I had the pregnant brain fog and forgot to deposit my paycheck and locked my keys in my car too many times to count on the same day (no kidding).

Although I am happy that we got our Docs Certified at the SOS office, the bad news is that the Chinese Consulate was affected by Huricaine Ike and there is not any power available yet. So now we are waiting for the power to get back on. Hopefully, Monady the paower will be on. The storm was so destructive and devastating. We drove to Houston and saw so much devastation. The good news is that my sister's house is intact without any damage. That is a miracle because she lives righ on the Bay in SeaBrook. We took some pictures of what we saw first hand. I just hope and pray that Galvaston and Kema will be rebuilt quickly.

I am sending Jailynn a cake and note that we are working hard to come get her. I am very anxious to bring her home.

We Have our 171 Aproval!!

We just found out today that we have our 171 approval for Jailynn. It has taken a long time to finally get the approval. We waited about 2 months. Now we will complete our Dossier this week. Austin and Houston Here I come!! As soon as I get the 171 in the mail this week. I will drive to Austin and then Houston to get our paperwork Authenticated and Certified. Then, our Dossier will be complete and I will send it to our Agency next week! I am so happy to get this phase completed. I am so ready to bring Jailynn home and reunite her with her sister Jordyn! Then our family will be complete (for now) :)

Jordyn started the 2nd grade this year and she has the most wonderful teacher we could have asked for. Jordyn tries so hard and gets frustrated when she does not make a 100. She is still learning to read. She is so smart that I know she will be reading by Christmas. She already knows some words and can sound out the others. It will just take more time and practice.

Journey to Jordyn and Jailynn

The Kerr Family
Tim, Melanie, JonMarc, Jordyn, Amanda, and Anna

This is the story of how our family, once a mediocre and boring family, began a journey to find a long, lost daughter and became an exciting, adventurous, fun loving family, thus embarking upon their second adventure. The events must be told from the beginning so that is where I will start. I hope you are prepared to hear an amazing and miraculous tale full of unexpected twists and turns because that is how this story goes. So lets get started, shall we?

The beginning of our story began some 14 years ago when I married Timothy. He was a handsome and generous man and before I knew it I fell in love. (Ahhh...) So one day we watched TV together and saw a very informative documentary on the lost daughters of China. What we saw brought tears to our eyes and a commitment to one another that some day we would adopt a little girl from China and travel to bring her home. SO that is the how we started on our Journey to Jordyn and Jailynn. Little did we know that it would be 13 years later and we would bring home two beautiful daughters from our journey to middle earth (China if you must be so formal).

Now I need to tell the more interesting details of how we found Jordyn and Jailynn. We are still waiting to bring Jailynn home and we will soon travel to bring her home. We just cannot wait!!! We had made the commitment to adopt from China many, many moons ago and I had almost given up on that dream. We have been through many changes and trials together and the timing never seemed right. I also had to wait until I was 30 years old to adopt. I was 21 when Tim said that we would adopt from China someday. Someday seemed to never come. I had three beautiful children during the time we were waiting to find our daughter from China.Joey is my oldest son. He is 19 years old and has 2 beautiful babies. (Can you believe that I am a grandma? Well they call me MiMi because I am too young to be called Grandma!) Anna is 13 yrs old, Amanda is 9 yrs old, and JonMarc just turned 6 yrs old. So we lived our life and enjoyed the beautiful children that God blessed us with, watching them grow and mature. A day did not ever pass by that I was not thinking and wondering about our daughter in China. I wondered how old she would be when we found her, what did she look like? Was she safe and happy? Questions would fill my head so naturally I would busy myself and try not to think about her. When JonMarc was born in 2002, I was actually in the hospital thinking and wondering about our Daughter from China. I said a prayer asking that God would watch over her, keep her safe and healthy, and lead us to her in the right timing. So being a new Mom I enjoyed my bouncing baby boy and loved him very much. So time went by as it always does and we found ourselves living in South Dakota of all places! Actually, we loved our time in SD and we were very active in a church plant ministry. We served food to the needy, had church services in a boxing club, and reached out to the lower economic community. We had such good times. It was alot of hard work but I was truly happy during our outreaches and bible studies. We saw many miracles and people led to know the Lord. Anyway, our time in ministry came to an end for the time being and we moved back home to Texas!! Yeah...Texas! Go Cowboys!!! Sorry, had to throw that in there for fun. We love Texas and the Dallas Cowboys :).
After, we moved back home the adoption bug hit me and I was again thinking of our daughter form China. I thought that perhaps it was just an impossible dream that would never happen. How could we afford another child let alone the adoption costs seemed impossible. Then I read a letter from a precious 12 year old girl asking for a family and my heart melted. I showed the letter to Tim and Anna and Time suggested that we call about her and see if she was available. I called the Agency she was listed with and was told that another family was looking at her file. The adoption social worker asked if we would look at another child and we said yes. That was the bait that hooked us! One look at Jordyn's picture and we were in love! We knew she was the daughter we had been longing and waiting for. So we started our Journey to Jordyn in blind faith. We said yes we want her, sent in our application and application fees, and began the muddle through the red tape to bring her home. We had no idea how we could afford to pay all the adoption expenses, but we believed that God would provide for us. Boy....did He ever provide!!!! We saw so many miracles that helped the adoption come together that I must tell you about them to encourage you on your Journey. I thought that in order to adopt a child I had to have everything put together perfectly, be the perfect family, have all the money saved up in the bank ahead of time, and sign on the dotted line. If that was true, then Jordyn would not be here with us today and we would not be working towards bringing her sister home. God works in ways we cannot even imagine. If you think you are supposed to adopt then I say you are supposed to adopt and GO with God!!