I stand corrected.

Here is a picture of my Daniel with his braces off!! In my last post I said that my youngest got his braces off. :) Oooops! :) I could say I accidently left off the word youngest "boy", but reality is I clearly think of Daniel still as my youngest. When I pull out dishes for supper, I still at times pull out only 6 place settings. I am a mother of 5 children! We are family of 7! I am so blessed. Here is picture of all 7 of us that we just took yesterday. Here is the Welling family!!

Full Day! What a day it was!!

My oldest has his license now!!

My youngest got his braces off today!! I don't have a picture of that yet!! Nathan received a 3rd place in an art show at school!!

Josh received a scholarship tonight at an awards ceremony for the career center!!

Renee let me rock her to sleep tonight!! These pictures were taken at the awards ceremony by a friend tonight!! Love, Love, Love them. Thanks Kim!!

Home for a month!

Well it has been a month and one week since we have been home. It is hard to believe that it is already a month and yet it seems like it should be longer than a month. There are several things I have wanted to blog about, but I have not taken the time to do it. April 24 was a big day for Renee. Well at least I think it was. It is the day she gave up her favorite Chinese word and started using the English word instead. Sad to know I will never hear her say that word again, yet happy and amazed at how quickly she is making the switch in language. Really, as I look back over the last week or so, besides a little babble that may be in Chinese, she is speaking English. I have lost count of the words she can say. So you want to know what the English word she is now saying instead of the Chinese? NO!!! :) :) Who would have ever thought that you would rejoice when your toddler started saying no! Yet, it is the day I realized she had made a switch and was communicating with us so much. It has been a word explosion ever since! One of our families favorite words that she is saying is our dogs name. She calls all dogs this and even called a horse on TV this name! Our dogs name is Roco and she calls him Goco! It sounds sorta like Geico which makes us think of the lizard and we tease Roco that he is a lizard now. Another funny thing happened yesterday when we went shopping. We were trying on shoes and I pointed at the shoe and said to look at the pretty bow. She has learned the word and knows where her elbow is, so when I said "bow" she said elbow and pointed at hers! I have a few pictures to post. Here she is eating with chopsticks. She loves to eat with them and anytime we have noodles we give them to her. We went to a Chinese resturant and she had a fork first. When we finally found the chopsticks and showed them to her, she quickly dropped the fork and reached for them. She is still a meat eater! As you will see in the picture, we are still working on veggies. We have to hold back some of the meat and tell her to eat the veggies and she can have more meat. She wants her meat, so most of the time she will reluctantly eat the veggies.

See the nice pile of veggies on the side of her tray! :) I am not a big fan of the little pig tails, but it was so hot a few days ago and she was so sweaty that I thought I would try it. It is cute, but one is sticking up in a strange way. Still thought you would enjoy seeing them.

Finally this last picture is posted for Kara! Remember this ball? How many years ago was it? You bought it for our Rene. When you bought it, we both hoped she would come soon and play with it. Never imagined it would be this long. This picture brings back so many memories of when you lived here. Just a reminder that we make plans and get ready for them, but we have no idea of the journey it will take to get there. At times the path brings sorrow and yet the sweet joy that comes is such a blessing from God! She is finally holding it!