One Last Missing Piece

Halie woke up today, and the first thing she asked was if she could call Grandma and Jasmine. Then she said, "Maybe we should wait a little while so Grandma can drink her coffee." So cute!
We did get to talk to Grandma Nancy for quite a while today, and Halie did not want to get off of the phone. We had lots of tears when the call was done, and then more at bedtime. Part of me would give anything to know what is going on in her head, and then again, part of me knows it would absolutely break my heart!
She was asking a lot when Jasmine could come stay with us. It breaks my heart. We have tried telling her that we are waiting for the paper, waiting for our caseworker to say it is okay, waiting for God's timing...I really wish we had a solid answer. When Halie and Brice moved in with us, August 17th, we were sure that Jasmine would be following shortly. We never intended for them to be separated this long. It is so sad.
I will be making lots of phone calls tomorrow. When it starts to affect the kids, that's when I get upset. It's not just me being impatient, it's truly fighting for these kids. They are dealing with such loss already, and this just compounds it.
I am really struggling with whether this is God's timing or if I need to be a squeaky wheel. I just don't feel like patience is the answer right now.
We have been waiting to do so many things to celebrate our family growing, but we have had to go ahead with some of them for Halie and Brice's sake. This weekend we began redecorating the bedrooms. Since we did some room shuffling, we wanted to make each child feel some ownership over their rooms, so they each got to pick out some wall decorations and a special poster- Halie and Wren chose princesses, Chloe chose a cute kitten, Carter chose Iron Man, and Brice chose Toy Story. We will all be able to help Jasmine pick out her special decorations as soon as she gets here.

Another big event was buying new bikes for Halie and Brice. Although we have lots of bikes for the daycare kids to ride, our other kids do have their own special bikes, and I wanted the same for all the kids.

On Friday we had a big family "snuggle night" on the couch. We watched Camp Rock 2 on the Disney channel and Daddy bought the soundtrack at Wal-Mart, so we are all singing the songs constantly. It's funny because no matter where we are in the house or what we are all doing, someone is humming a line from one of the songs!
Halie and Brice are becoming computer experts. They always want to play games, and now they can get to their favorite websites and start games all by themselves. It's amazing how quickly kids pick up on how to do that! They also know where the volume buttons are, so we often have games blasting through the house. Why is it that the "volume up" button is found more easily than the "volume down" button?

We miss you Miss Jasmine! We are praying for you every night and thinking about you constantly!