Urumqi Reunion 2008! (missing our beloved friend Gillian!!)

Luke (Xin Tian Bo), Tonito (Xin Zhu), Drew (Xin Suo)

Here I am FINALLY posting pictures from our weekend in Missouri with Tonito's 2 buddies from Urumqi! You may remember that there were 4 CHI families that travelled at the same time to adopt 4 awesome kiddos: Drew , Luke, Tonito, and Gillian (Sha Sha). Cutie-pie Gillian and her wonderful family live in Florida and obviously couldn't drive in for the weekend, so I think next time we need to all meet in the warm FL sunshine to include all 4 of the kids!

Relaxing on the beautiful deck over looking the river

while the kids play in the hot tub!

We drove down on Friday, and what was supposed to be a 7 hour trip took more like 10 hours because we got devastating news in the car on the way. Our buyer's financing fell through and they were no longer able to purchase our house. Our realtor told us this at 5:20, and at 6pm our option period was over (to back out of our contract on the house we were buying). So we quickly called Houston and told them our financing fell through and we would not be able to buy the house. Boooooooo. Our movers were scheduled for Wednesday and we were set to go- can you believe this? We couldn't. We had to print, sign, and fax various documents to different people and so we luckily found a hotel that had a conference room you could rent (actually the first one's servers was down so we had to get back on the highway and look for another one!). Anyway, many bathroom breaks later we finally arrived in Doniphan, MO to the beautiful house of Kim's parents who graciously let us stay there for the weekend. The kids started to play with each other right away- it was like we had just seen each other! Tonito was just in heaven playing with everyone. It is so fun to see them giggle and run around together. We set up sleeping bags and they all started in the room together (although in the morning it was only Tonito and Drew as the other kids had drifted back to their parents:).



In the morning the kids got wild jumping on the air mattress, played in the hot tub for a while (with Drew helping Tonito to get on and off the benches), and explored the back yard. They loved Drew's new puppy Copper, whose paws didn't touch the ground the whole weekend being passed between Lily and Vivi.



We rode on the boat up and down the river and admired the beautiful scenery- it was so relaxing and totally helped us forget about our house problems. The kids rode in the "vroom vroom" as Drew likes to call it:


Drew's good friends came for the day and fit right in- 8 kids around the same age having fun outside (missing from thie picture are Lily and Maya):


In the afternoon the kids filled the pinata that Karen brought, and had a blast beating it open. For dinner Scott made Boston butt in his smoker- yum!!!!! I'm normally not an enormous meat eater, but I could have eaten just meat for dinner. The smokiness and the tender meat, yum. We had corn on the cob, salad, potatoes- thank you so much Kim for feeding all of us with such delicious food!! After dinner the kids collected firewood and we had s'mores for dessert! Vivi and Tonito LOVE s'mores (who doesn't?) and kept sneaking marshmellows out of the bags. Like Karen and Kim mentioned on their blogs- not one injury even though we were in pitch blackness next to the drop-down to the swiftly moving river. After I read that Karen wrote that---why didn't I worry about that until right now!?? :) Thank goodness we had a fantastic and safe weekend!

I took a million pictures, and Kim sent me another million:), so I had to post a lot because there were so many good ones!! Here's a sample of our weekend...