an amazing night

we were honored tuesday night to be invited to a golf tournament and banquet dinner to raise money for the adoption exchange. the adoption exchange is an organization dedicated to helping hard to place children find forever homes. they are also a wonderful resource for adoptive families to help them through some of the struggles they face once the children are in their home and starting to adjust. they also highlight a child every week on the local news that needs a family to adopt them. their website has pictures and short bios about all the children in the state who have been difficult to find a home for. usually that means they are older children, children with special needs or children belonging to a sibling group that want to be placed all together in the same family. our kids were considered to be in all 3 of these groups 2 years ago. when joe and i were looking to adopt an older child (older than a toddler) we browsed the adoption exchange website where we soon saw our kids. there were a few more than we were looking for but for those of you that don't know our story, when i saw those kids on that website that day i knew immediately that they were meant to be our children. i called joe at work and told him to get on the website, thinking he would think i was crazy since there were three of them. he saw the kids and not once said anything about there being more than one. the first thing he said was to call our caseworker and find out about them. so i did and a few months later a group of people, who we have never met, being charged with the task of finding our kids a family had the same thought. they were meant to be ours.
fast forward to now, when our family gets to go to an event where we can encourage people to adopt and share our story and hopefully help all the sponsors and donors who are there realize that they made such a difference in kids lives. we got to hang out with one of the local newscasters who was the mc for the night. he was very kind and told us to call him so the kids could come down and see a newscast sometime.

us with tom mustin

the dinner was delicious and the kids had endless amounts of shirley temples to drink. the golf course was incredible! it felt like you were standing in the middle of heaven. i have never seen such a beautiful golf course. we were hanging out by one of the holes for a bit, just chatting with tom mustin from cbs4 news, when some of the golfers let the kids come up and watch them hit their balls and showed them how to do it.

here are the golfers showing the kids how it's done.

this was the golf course. it was incredible!

after the dinner they handed out plaques to thank donors and awards for the golfers. the kids got to give out these awards and have their picture taken with each donor. they did a really great job and everyone thought they were so cute and sweet. mostly because they are.

at the end of the evening we were overwhelmed by many of the 200 or so attendees who wanted to congratulate us, thank us, or just shake our hand. they all said they were so impressed with the kids and they were so well behaved. and they were, they were great! we were so proud of them. it was very humbling. we left that dinner with a renewed sense of how lucky we are to be a family and how fortunate joe and i are to be these kids parents. at the end of the night the woman who organized the event to the kids to the pro shop and let them all get a cap or visor.

here they are posing with their new hats

our new little golfers