catching up

Well I see it's been awhile since I posted so here goes. School started today, all 7 girls are in school all day so that is a blessing. We spent our summer coping with a horribly hot summer, so hot that the pool usually was not even used! All of the girls attended home schooled summer school and we heard no complaints this year so all went very well! We ended the summer with a trip to Myrtle Beach by way of Lexington horse park, a boot shop advertising 10,000 pair of boots in stock!, the beach, a over night in Charlotte for Penny to visit her China foster sister, a stop a few hours from there to meet long time internet friends, then through Atlanta, GA to see a company that I work with, then thank goodness we drove straight through that Saturday and got home.

Our school year has started, it will be a fall of starts - our son gets married to a lovely young lady Chelsea who will bring us a cute as a bug grand-daughter Gabbie. Oct. 20th Judy will enter The Children's Hospital in St. Louis to have a halo set and we will take her that same day to The Shriners Hospital where she will be a patient for a month having traction to lengthen the spine and relax the muscles to make the Scoliosis surgery easier which takes place back at the Children's Hospital on or around Nov 15th. One of us will always be with her during this time so i will use the term long distance parenting .... After the surgery she will be in the hospital for another 5-7 days and then return home to recover for a couple months before returning to school. The Dr. said we should expect her to gain almost 6 inches in height.

We are also adopting again, a girl nicknamed Cloud. She is 12 and from Loudi China. We hope to have her home before summer 2012.

Claude and I decided to have a pond put in to the south of the house. They are here tomorrow to hopefully finish it up in about 5-7 days. This will be a great compliment to our property we feel and give us hours of enjoyment fishing for "that big one". Alex and I walked the creek last Sunday searching for great treasure, the weather was fantastic, and we enjoyed each others company talking the whole time we were wading thru about a mile. No treasures except the time we spent together. We plan on starting next time where the Spoon river and Indian Creek join about a mile farther down.

Hopefully we will have just the same sort of a wonderful day.

We are asked constantly about adoption-we are going to put another tab on this blog so we can have adoption explained, and to offer advise of situations we have went through...hopefully this will help any and all that are even thinking of adoption. That will happen soon I hope. Thanks for checking in, The Coats Family