The twins saw snow for the first time today. The area of China that they are from is somewhat tropical and doesn't get snow so this was a new experience for them. Mom says the girls weren't really too excited about it but did get a few snapshots to share so here's a few pics of our little Snow Bunnys --

Our Little Cowgirls--

Aren't they too cute? You can also see these great pictures in a slideshow by clicking here

Well, we've had all of the turkey and leftovers we can stand and life has had to return to normal -- Mom, Dad, and the twins have returned to Seminole and I (Mimi) have gone back to NYC and I'm sure Aunt Karen is glad to be rid of all of us and have her house and life back!

It was a busy fun filled week visiting with friends and family, eating, shopping, eating, visiting Santa, eating ---- we've got four weeks to diet and be all ready for Christmas! I've got many pictures of the activities (and the eating!)and will add them over the next days, there are too many to add all at one time.

Thought I'd start with the girls' first visit with Santa. The first video is of the girls playing at a great children's area at Northeast Mall (Ft Worth) while we waited to see "the real Santa" and the second video is "the visit"! This is a very special Santa as he is also the girls' great uncle, what kid wouldn't love to be related to Santa!! As you can see, just like most kids this age, they aren't as excited about the event as Mom, Mimi, and Aunt Chelle:) Wonder how they will react when they meet him again in 'everyday' clothes? A funny little story about this Santa -- at Tara and Dirk's wedding, Rachel who was standing with them looked up at Dirk and interrupted the ceremony with "Why is Santa here?" and no, he wasn't in his red suit!

Hope you enjoy the pictures!

The Girls' First Visit to Santa

From all of us to all of you --HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

There are so many things to be thankful for this year and some of the best are friends like you. We are so fortunate to have our little China Dolls with us this year and to have an opportunity to spend time with friends and family. We want to also remember Shay Lamb Benefield who was in a bad car accident last Friday night. Please keep her and her family in your thoughts and prayers, especially on this Thanksgiving Day.

Mom and the girls have spent the week in DeLeon visiting and picked up Dad at the airport in Dallas last night so he could join in on the fun and good food. This will be the girls first Thanksgiving but they recently had a trial run testing out turkey and dressing and both of them liked it a lot. We'll see how they do with all of the trimmings:)

We've had a great time this week and have lots of pictures to share, I'm (Mimi) just a little slow with getting them posted but I'll try to get them done within the next few days -- including a trip to see Santa!

Well, guess the twins got busy and didn't get anything posted so I'm taking over again!! The Mimi is back!

Tara and the girls made their first car trip alone on Friday and drove to DeLeon. Mom said the trip was uneventful as long as she had LOTS of bags of Cheerios, raisins, apples, and cookies and a good movie to go along with the snacks :) I was able to travel to Texas that day too so we've had lots of fun these past few days playing, have lots of new pictures but haven't had much time to post so I'll try to catch up.

We all met up with lots of folks from DeLeon on Friday night to watch the Bearcats play football, they all played really hard but unfortunately didn't win the game. We've heard that Seminole didn't either so I guess all of the boys can eat lots of cake and pies to go along with their turkey on Thursday and not have to worry about their weight. The twins say "Go Bearcats and Go Indians! Good season! We'll be looking forward to next year."

The twins have been visiting with lots of cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents these past few days and we've had great fun! Sorry you got left behind Dad but I'm sure you've been enjoying those full nights of sleep and we'll see you tomorrow. The girls are going to visit Ms Angela's Fourth Grade Class at DeLeon Elementary today. Cousin Hannah is in that class and they've been very excited to meet Hope and Faith. We'll take lots of pictures and post them soon so everyone can see:)

Aunt Laurie took a couple of great videos of the girls on her last visit to Seminole so I'm including both. One is of the girls listening to some of their Chinese music they love. The other is of the girls playing with one of their dolls, it speaks both English and Chinese. Enjoy --

OK Mimi, I think we can take over this blog now!



I'm sure I can do this!!



Faith, just let me do it!!!

The Twins want to send Good Luck to the DeLeon Bearcats and the Seminole Indians tomorrow night. Both teams have made the first round of football playoffs! DeLeon will be playing Muenster Friday night at 7:30 pm at Pennington Field in Bedford and Seminole will be playing Midland Greenwood at 7:30 pm at the Mustang Bowl in Andrews. We'll all be cheering loudly tomorrow night!! GO BEARCATS AND INDIANS!!! especially cousin Cody Welch (Bearcat) and honorary cousin Kyler Todd(Indian)!!!!! and just found out that cousin Tanner Welch has moved up to Varsity for the playoff game - yea!!

The Pink Chair -

The girls have an adorable pink chair in their room, I'm sure you've seen it in several of the previous posts and slide shows. Both of the girls really like it and on occasion have been known to fight over it! Seems like that chair gets into a lot of the pictures taken of the girls in their room, guess it's a great prop and the girls so often are sitting in The Pink Chair! Anyway, while looking through the many pictures we've taken over the past month I (Mimi) kept coming across pictures of The Pink Chair so I decided to put them all together in a slide show, it was so fun I thought I'd share -- notice one series of pictures where Hope is sitting in the chair and Faith decides SHE wants the chair, you can just look at their expressions and read between the lines!! Too funny----- sorry if you've been trying to see The Pink Chair and haven't been able to see the pictures, I had them marked as Private, try again :) The Pink Chair

By the way, do you like the pictures of the twins at the top? - this blogging thing is fun!

Just Playing Around at Home - Late October

Here's a cute video of the girls I took just before returning to NYC at the end of October, thought you would like to see the girls in action.

While Mom and Dad were in China to get the twins, there were MANY people back home waiting and waiting and praying and thinking about them and waiting and checking the blog and waiting..... In Seminole those people weren't waiting idly (is that a word? -- it is now!!) They were planning and building and putting up and painting and decorating and who knows what! Thought you might enjoy some pictures of Seminole not being idle while waiting for the twins.
Seminole Getting Ready for the Twins

Hope and Faith would also like to take you on a little tour of their room. It's adorable, what little girls wouldn't love to live here? Welcome to our room! I've also put a permanent link to this tour on the right side of the blog under "Links". Maybe I'll add new pictures of the girls playing in their room from time to time too, who knows -- so you might want to check back periodically :) Enjoy!!

We AREN'T afraid of the tractor, maybe we'll just start growing peanuts and forget about those scary old lambs :)

First want to say Happy Belated Birthday to Cousin Taylor Rae!!
Also, during the past week there have been other big events in some of the girls cousins' lives - Lisa got married last Friday and Hanna won more blue ribbons at the Brownwood Stock Show on Sunday, also Sidney moved to Eastland (it's always hard to leave old friends but I know she will make lots of new ones) -- anyway, I'll try to get a few pictures of these great events to share.

Don't have much to write about as Mom, Dad, and girls have just been spending time doing regular day to day stuff and continuing to get to know each other better. Everyone is doing very well. Here are some pictures Mom has taken over the past week so thought you would just enjoy seeing them.

Oops Lisa - you went off to get married and Mom paints the girls toenails first! Anyway, I'm sure they will enjoy the pretty flowers you can paint on them and you'll surely get plenty of chances! They seem to think it's pretty cool, notice how they already know to blow on them to get them dry faster, or is Faith biting her toenails?

The girls had their first road trip this past weekend, that is if you don't count flying all the way from China as a road trip :) Let's just say they had their first one since they've been home. I'd like to be able to report that they got on another airplane and flew to NYC to visit Mimi but they didn't, they drove to De Leon to visit Grandma and GDad and all of the aunts, uncles, cousins and many friends waiting to see these adorable girls.

They went to the football game on Friday night to watch cousin Cody play and to cheer De Leon to a victory over neighboring Gorman. Saturday they traveled to Ft Worth to visit Granddad Norman as well as "Grandmother", Tara's grandmother and their great. She is also the one the girls are named for, both of the girls have the middle name - Marie. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures but we'll work on getting some soon. Saturday night was the annual Fall Festival at the De Leon Methodist Church so Grandma and GDad enjoyed showing off these little cuties to everyone there as well as at Church Services Sunday morning. The rest of the fun filled jam packed weekend was spent playing with cousins Hanna, Bailey, Tanner, Cody, Slade and Neeley (were there others I've left off? - who knows!) While this picture wasn't actually taken this weekend, I'm sure that after this busy weekend they were just this tired!

The Quilt - Back in August, Tara started allowing me (Mimi) to lurk in the background on various Internet Adoption Groups she belongs to as long as I promised to NOT post any messages :) Anyway, there was a lot of chatter about the 100 Wishes Quilt. So the story goes, there is a tradition in the northern part of China to make a Bai Jai Bei (a.k.a. 100 Wishes Quilt) to welcome and celebrate a new life. The family would invite friends and family to contribute a square of cloth along with their wish for the baby. Part of the square went into the quilt and the other part would be placed in a scrapbook along with the wish for the child. These quilts are said to contain the luck, energy, and good wishes from those who contributed a piece of cloth. Whether it is really a Chinese tradition or not, it has certainly become a tradition of many of the adoptive families who are waiting to travel to China for their babies to make one of these quilts.

I decided that this would be something special to do for Tara and Dirk and the new baby (or babies) we were all anxiously waiting for. I called up Tamera Todd to see if she was willing to get involved in the project and of course Tamera is always ready to pitch in (what would we all have done without her through this process!!) As Tara and Dirk had requested and were REALLY hoping for twins, we knew we would have to have two quilts, nothing like being optimistic - and see how it's paid off! Anyway, we both started trying to reach out to as many people as possible to invite them to participate, all the time trying hard to keep this a secret as we wanted this to be a surprise. Tamera had the hard part, being the keeper of the fabric and wishes as they started rolling in. She said she couldn't wait to get home to see what had arrived in the mail each day.

Well, the quilts are still a work in progress but we were able to share this with Tara at her shower last weekend, including showing off one of the partially completed quilt tops. The response was great and our 100 Wishes Quilt has turned into something around 120 Wishes, but a person can't ever have too many good wishes so we'll just make the quilts a little bit bigger! Tamera is also putting together the scrapbook filled with the wishes and everything should be finished within the next month or so.

In the meantime, I'm posting a picture of the quilt top so everyone who sent in fabric can get a peek. If you don't see your piece, don't despair as all of the pieces have not yet made their way to the quilt top -- my piece isn't attached yet either. Can't wait for everything to be finished, especially the scrapbook. When the quilts are completed, we'll post another picture of the finished product. We hope these quilts will be a way to give Hope and Faith some sort of history, as they will someday know that while they were waiting for their Mom and Dad to come for them in China, so many people back home thought of them and loved them.

Thanks to everyone who sent in fabric and wishes -- and helped to keep the secret.

The girls are adjusting very well to life in the Lindsey Household. They are such happy sweet little girls and are certainly keeping Mom and Dad very busy! They seem to be understanding more English every day but still chatter away in Chinese, especially to each other.

They love to call to the cats and puppies but are still very afraid of them when they get anywhere near. I'm not sure what they really think of the lambs, lamas, and donkey but hopefully they will be more comfortable with the lambs by the time they're old enough to show them:)

Here is a link to more pictures taken between October 29 and 31 to give you a glimpse of day to day life with the twins -- enjoy! More fun pictures