July 6, 2006

We are happy to share with everyone the pictures of the newest member of our family!

Little Hou Dong Guo currently resides at the Chengdu Social Welfare Institute in Sechuan, China. His birthday is October 26, 2004 so he is almost two years old!

We have sent off our letter of intent and understand that we will need to wait 2-3 months for our travel notice and then we will travel 2-4 weeks after that. We are thinking that this will put us in China perhaps in October.

Little Brother is part of the waiting child program, meaning that he has a special need. He was born with a condition called bilateral microtia/atresia, which means his ears did not form completely and his ear canals are closed. His nannies at the orphanage report that he can hear. We know that with his condition that he must have some hearing loss and we know that many kids with this condition can have their hearing restored to near normal with a bone conduction or bone anchored hearing aid. I will talk more about this in later posts. I have been fortunate to have some wonderful people who have steered us in the right direction and it turns out we are in close proximity to some excellent doctors who specialize in Little Brother's condition!

I will post more tomorrow - it is getting late!