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I've got some catching up to do and some fun pictures of the last week, but tonight we updated Beckett's blog instead of this one. So, if you are interested in a quick re-cap of all of Beckett's major league baseball game experiences, hop on over to "The Slam" to check out his latest blog entry!

June 19, 2009~Home!

June 19th 2009 was the day we arrived at home with Will and we were re-united as a family! This is a fun picture of many of the people who were at the airport waiting for us that afternoon! There were signs, balloons and many family and friends there to support and welcome us home!
My sister worked it out with security to get Beckett and Helen to the gate, so they were the first ones we saw when we came off the plane with Will. We were able to have a few minutes with them so they could meet their baby brother before we headed out to see family and friends!

Here we were one year ago on June 19th.....(and if you know Sean very well at all, you know he did not want to wear matching shirts when we came home.....but he took one for the team and put it on at the last minute for pictures!)

And here we are today, June 19, 2010. (Notice no matching shirts!) :)

I thought it might be fun to take a family picture every year on June 19th. Just a good way to see how much the kids have grown! They really have all three changed so much this past year! I'm amazed at how quickly this year has gone! Looking forward to another year of fun and memories at the Harper Hullabaloo!

One Year!

One year ago on June 15th, 2009, we woke up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, walked down a little dirt road, through a certain red gate and held our precious baby boy for the first time! Here is a picture of that first moment that I held Will Tekalgn Harper!
Here is the picture of Sean as he held Will for the first time. I think he was about to kiss Will's cheek in this picture! So sweet! I loved that the special mothers had dressed Will in a red shirt and Sean had worn a red shirt as well!

June 15th will always be quite special for our family as we remember the gift that we were given just one year ago when we met Will for the first time! How will we celebrate? Well, I think that in the years to come, we will certainly talk about this day with Will. We will look at pictures. We will talk about and remember his birth family. We will talk about and remember the special people at Hannah's Hope. And we will continually praise God for His plan to knit our lives and our families together in such an amazing way! This year, we had the wonderful blessing of celebrating this one year home milestone with some very special people! When we traveled to Ethiopia last June, we met many amazing families and two of them were from Tennessee! Yes, Will was coming back to Tennessee with two other babies that he had been spending time with at Hannah's Hope! This past Saturday night, we attended a cook-out at the Johnson's home to celebrate our one year home with Lucy Lane and her family and Silas Lucht and his family! It was so great to be with these two families that we had been with just one year ago and had shared such a special week with! It was great to see Will, Lucy Lane and Silas together again! So here go the pictures of the evening.......

When you are one and a half years old, you don't really play with other kiddos....you just sort of play around them! So here are Silas and Will playing beside each other! That water table was a huge hit with our boys and they were soaked by the time the evening was over! They did do a great job taking turns on that yellow roller coaster car!

Here is a picture of Will and Lucy Lane playing beside each other at the water table! Their little buddy to the left is about their same age, and his family is traveling in about a week to bring home his baby brother from Ethiopia! It was so great to be with so many families who were at different places in their adoption journeys!

Lucy Lane and her brothers and sisters have some super fun toys! Will was all about this lawn mower!

He was also very much into this car! And he wasn't too interested in sharing, or being taken away from these wonderful toys to take pictures!

So when the mommas decided that we needed to get some pictures of these three buddies together, it just wasn't happening. Maybe we will learn that in the future, we should take the pictures at the beginning of our time together when everyone is fresh and happy! This picture just makes me laugh! Will was not getting out of the car, so Amber and Kristi set Silas and Lucy Lane in front of the car. LL either fell over, or just decided to lay down and Silas and Will were not interested in smiling, so pictures were pretty much a bust!

Kristi had this adorable cake made to celebrate one year home with our children. So cute and so thoughtful to include all three Ethiopian Tennessee friends! Loved it!

Now the real trick was to try to get a picture of them all with the cake. Again, I had taken Will away from the coolest toys ever and he was just not feeling the cake! He was momentarily captivated by the flame as Kristi tried to light the candle, but he really wanted to get back to the play lawn mower! I still love this picture! It just overwhelms me to think about the fact that these three children came from different parts of Ethiopia with very different life circumstances, that they were all born within about four weeks of each other, that they were all three brought to Hannah's Hope and that God placed these precious children with families who all live in the same state!

And here they are one more time with their mommas! Silas with Amber, Lucy Lane with Kristi and Will and me. They really are very happy, laid back kiddos.....it was just a very warm night with lots more fun stuff to be doing rather than taking pictures! And by the way, these sweeties do have wonderful daddies! Don't know why we didn't take a picture of them with their dads. Wait, maybe it was because they were over pictures!?!?

And did I mention all of the fun toys at the Johnson's home? Will wasn't the only one enjoying them! There are absolutely no pictures of Beckett and Helen from the cook-out because they were so busy having fun in the best backyard ever. That is Beckett on the far right on the trampoline. He had so much fun that he didn't even eat supper. Helen was probably on the zip line, or the swing set, or the see saw, or in the play house or.......so many fun things to do!

Thanks again to the Johnsons for hosting such a fun, memorable evening for our families to celebrate one year home with our children! It was a great night!

My heart is full. Full of love for all three of my precious children. Full of memories from that special day one year ago today.

Thanks be to God!

Fun In The Sun!

Just a quick update. Beckett and Helen have been attending VBS at a local church each morning this week and they are enjoying their time at "Saddle Ridge Ranch!" So much so, that Helen picked out a special cowgirl outfit to wear one day! She is really loving the music time and the dance motions that go with the songs! Will and I have had fun together during the mornings while they are at VBS and today I took Will to the University to take part in a hearing study done by their audiology department! He did so well!
On Tuesday afternoon, I took the kids to the splash pad to cool off! Will wasn't so sure about it. It took him a while to warm up to being sprayed with all of that water, but once he did, he really loved it! Love that belly!

Just a cute picture at the splash pad of Will and Beckett playing together!

We came home and got out our five dollar slip and slide. Carson, Noah and Turner joined our three for some backyard fun! Sunday night we had about 15 big kids on the slip and slide. We have certainly gotten our money's worth out of that piece of plastic!

Just trying to get a picture of all the Guldan/Harper kiddos! Love having these friends just next door! So fun to meet Carson at the fence and plan whose yard they want to play in!

What does Sean do on his day off?

Check out the volunteer in the red hat and the waders who is carrying a bucket! He thinks he is quite the celebrity now! (Nevermind that you would have never known it was him if I didn't tell you he was wearing a red hat!)If you have a couple of minutes, watch the video and find out about the work they are doing in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park to re-introduce brook trout into some of the streams. My fly-fishing husband spent last Friday volunteering his time to help in this effort. Don't think he didn't leave the park without moving on to another stream to try to catch some trout as well! :)

Will's First Haircut AND I Am Not My Hair!

It is hard to believe that we have been home with Will for almost one year! When we met him last June 15th, he had very little hair; just a little fuzz on the top of his head! His hair has really grown in the last year and he had never had a hair cut......until Friday. It was just time. Although we loved the long springy curls on top of his head, his hair has never grown in evenly and he has been getting so hot on these warm days! So last night, we took Will to get his first hair cut! Here he is sitting in the chair for his "before" picture.

Then daddy got in the chair and they put this funny cape around him. I think he was beginning to wonder what was about to happen!
Next, Chrysal got out these funny sounding clippers and started moving them toward his head. It wasn't looking good......

Is she putting those things on my head????

He was quite certain that he didn't like what was happening, but we were committed at this point! He had half of his hair cut and half was not. We had to continue! In this picture, Sean is trying to get him interested in his play cell phone....but he was not going for it. We tried another favorite....goldfish snack crackers....still a no go. He just wanted down. Wait for it....

Full melt down. It was not pretty.

Fortunately, the hair cut didn't take too long and once he was out of the chair and back in mommy's arms, he was all better! Now we just have to get used to our new little guy. He looks SO different without his big curls on top of his head!

I know he will be so much more comfortable in the summer heat, but he just looks so much BIGGER! Oh my! Absolutely adorable and precious in every way! So, I've been thinking of a song to put on my playlist to go along with a haircut. Found this song by India Aire and I LOVE it! Not only is it a happy, fun song, it just really spoke to me. I don't know why we place so much importance on our hairstyles, but I know it was something that I used to be totally obsessed with. My issues were different than those that African American women deal with, but I can totally identify with this song. I wasn't worried about jeri curls or relaxers, but I was obsessed with having "feathers" like Farrah and getting perms so my straight hair would be curly! Crazy. I'm sure one day Will will be figuring out how he wants to wear his own hair; will he want a fade, dread-locks, braids or an afro? Who knows? But I do pray that he will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is NOT his hair....that he is not his skin....that he is a child of God who is loved beyond measure and that is where he will find his identity!

DI

What is DI you might ask? Well, me too. I had never heard of it until my dear long-time friend, Trish called to say that she was in town last week for the Global Finals of DI. (Destination Imagination) So on Thursday, the kids and I headed downtown to the convention center to meet Trish and see what DI was all about. It was a bit overwhelming, I must admit! There were somewhere between 7 to 10 THOUSAND people (I've heard different totals) that were from all over the world who had come to Knoxville for this global competition. Trish is a teacher and has been involved with this program for the last several years and she is so excited about all the program has to offer for kids! We had a great time visiting with her, watching some of the competitions and even participating in the KEVA booth where Helen and Beckett built their own creations. Here is a picture of Helen with her KEVA plank creation.
Here is Beckett with his KEVA plank creation. Some of the structures that were being built were amazing! (including Beckett and Helen's!) They both earned a pin for building their structures. Pin trading at the DI competition was HUGE!

Will didn't build a KEVA creation. In fact, I had to keep him far away from the booth or I was afraid that some of the work that these kiddos had done would go crashing down! He was quite tired of being in his stroller and wanted to be moving! A 19 month old boy in the middle of thousands of people was a bit un-nerving....but we survived! I didn't take any pictures of Beckett and Helen's pins, but Trish made sure that they each got the Tennessee pins. All of the students attending the competition stayed on the UT campus and one of the neat things that they do is trade pins from all around the world. Each student brings pins from his/her own state or country and then they trade and try to build up their collection. The "pin trading" was going on everywhere and many students had hundreds of pins that they have collected over their years of DI competitions. To my knowledge, our county schools are not involved in DI, but I have heard that there are a couple of local homeschool teams. It appears to be an excellent program for students to learn and experience teamwork, creativity and problem solving! We will be checking into it! Thanks, Trish, for calling and inviting us to come see what DI was all about and also for stopping by on Sunday afternoon to visit more!

We had a pretty laid back Memorial Day weekend and enjoyed having Sean home an extra day! This week has seen the end of the baseball season with a loss in the first round of the tournament. Other excitement has included a front-end loader and a bobcat in our front yard digging up and replacing our water line. That was big fun for the boys because who doesn't love to watch big machines dig and move dirt??? And if you haven't checked out the Slam in a while.....you ought to link on over there and see a little video of Beckett and Will. It ought to make you smile! :)