Emily's 12th Gotcha Day!

We recently celebrated Emily's 12th Gotcha Day! I say it every year, but it really is amazing how quickly the years have gone since we adopted Emily. We are SO blessed to parent this child! Emily is beautiful, intelligent, funny, mature, articulate...well, just an amazing young lady.

There are 3 other families in Emily's travel group, and we all take turns hosting gotcha day weekends. This group of girls has become SO close and have dubbed themselves the "F4E's". This year's gotcha weekend was hosted by Natalie's family in Texas. After our arrival on Friday, the kids got busy playing the Wii and just hanging out together. On Saturday, we went to a fabulous shopping area in South Lake for a photo shoot (of course we squeezed in some shopping too since the girls are at "that" age!). :-) Dinner was at a Mongolian grill - where we all loaded meat and veggies of our choice into 2 bowls and watched as the chef cooked them on a hot, round stone in the middle of the room....pretty cool! We also celebrated with cake and presents later in the day. The parents really went all out for this year's gifts which included: a special custom necklace for each girl, shadowbox frames with a few photos from past reunions, and a photo frame with F4E tiles. Our gift to the girls was a photo book with pics from the past 12 years of gotcha days and China camp (the book ended up being 39 pages total and I also left a spot for this year's gotcha day photo). Before we left for the weekend, the girls wrote messages to one another in their books. (Note: I'm happy to share the contents of the book with other adoptive families, but don't want to post the slideshow here on the blog...just contact me privately if you'd like to view it.)