Two Exciting Pictures

This first shot is The Old Plantation-the house I grew up in.  My great grandfather built it in the late 1800s-you can tell that because we still had elm trees here in NH then.  The barn really was enormous, and was attached to the house by what we called "the back room", an old version of the modern mud room and under the same roof as the wood shed.  The house had five bedrooms upstairs and the formal dining room had been made into my parents' bedroom downstairs.  Good thing, since there were 11 of us kids.  The roof in the back left would be the sap house.  Our other outbuildings included a two stall garage, long garage (four stalls), chicken coop, blacksmith shop, and wagon shed.  My parents thought they might open it as a museum one day, but the barn burned when I was 12, taking the house with it (the house was still standing, but not salvageable).  The double bay in the front corner was the living room and above it was the bedroom that I shared with my sister at that time.  Our windows opened to the southwest and we could listen to the water rushing over the dam all night while we slept.  I think that's why I love the sound of the ocean as if I had been born on it.

So that is the old, and here is the new.  Below is our first photo of our daughter, Min.  Her file calls her Mindy and already I call her my Mindygirl.  She is turning six next week and she has club feet that have gone untreated, so she can stand, jump and walk, but on her ankles, and of course with pain.  After she comes home it will probably take about a year of castings before she can stand straight on her soles and walk without any assistance.  She is a peanut-the size of our average three year old at the time of her file when she was just over five.  So I'm planning to get a jogger when we go to China so that we can get around with something big enough for her to sit in comfortably and with three big wheels that can get around easily-anyone who has tried to use a stroller in China knows how crazy that is.

Anyway, this is an exciting time and I'll probably be consumed with fundraising efforts for the next several months.