In China, on June 1, they celebrate Children's Day.  Apparently it is a great deal like Christmas here, with lots of gifts and parties for the kiddos.  We had the great honor of celebrating Children's Day this year at the Houston Chinese Consulate.  All of the local adoption agencies got to invite some of their clients.  We were invited by Los Ninos since we were one of the families to most recently arrive home with a child.

At the celebration, the Consulate General spoke to the crowd about how happy she was that our children had families and how lucky were all were to have such wonderful children.  Then each of the adoption agency representatives spoke.  Next, they served us a Chinese buffet.  Finally, there were performances from some local Chinese dance school students. 

Lots of our friends from the adoption community were there.  We were especially happy to see Lauree and Jenna, from our travel group.  Jenna has grown so much and it was so wonderful to get to see Lauree again.  There is an amazing connection you make with some of the people you meet in this adoption process and we literally spent every day of our trip with Lauree, Jeff, Cade, and Jenna.  They will forever be an important part of our family history!

We also got to spend some time with the Los Ninos reps that we worked with on our adoption.  Jean Erichson, the founder of the agency, and Jason Heck, our case worker, were their with their family.  They had not met Grace since our return from China, they had only seen pictures, so it was lots of fun for us to chat with them.

We ducked out a little early from the celebration.  Now that Grace is walking and running every where it is a little hard to keep her in one spot for too long.  We look forward to many more Children's Day celebrations.  Grace is such a gift to our family so she definitely deserves her own day!!!