Happy 1st Birthday

Yu-Lin turned 1 today...oh my. He is officially a toddler though he will always be our little baby. While we welcome this day with joy and happiness, we are reminded of the difficult decision made by his birthfamily to place him for international adoption. But for their unconditional love for him and their desire for him to have a better life, our dreams of becoming parents would have never been possible. We know this day must be very difficult for them and there is nothing we can do to ever tell them how grateful we are to them! But we do hope they find peace in their hearts by seeing pictures of how much we love and cherish Yu-Lin. He really is the light of our lives and the best gift God ever gave us. Please keep his birthfamily in your prayers today!!

We started the morning off entering his room singing happy birthday. He was not quite sure what to make of all the commotion.

Heeeeee..this is funny

Ooo...balloons for me...cool


Yu-Lin then got to eat some banana pancakes I made for him with rice cereal...a real hit at our house as you can see

After breakfast, Yu-Lin got dressed in his Chinese outfit from Taiwan to play the game where you place a bunch of objects out for your baby on his 1st birthday to see which one he will choose which indicates what he will be when he grows up.

Here is a picture of what we put in front of Yu-Lin
Hmmmmmmm....what are all these things.
What do I want?
Still checking....
I think I like this thing.....but let me look some more
Yep...I still think this thing is kind of neat...Alright, I think I wanna keep this and go inspect the video camera...a gavel it is...so we will see if he becomes a judge.

We then headed over to Farrell's for lunch and a small celebration with some of our immediate family.
Of course, I had to order the zoo ice cream with 30 scoops of ice cream just because I wanted to see the waiters run up and down the isle with it : ). I really am reliving my childhood. Yu-Lin was quite fascinated watching them run up and down the isle ringing the bell!And today was the first day he got to try out cake and ice cream...he didn't like the cake, but did like ice cream
Whew....what a day...I'm exhausted

Happy Birthday son. We love you and thank you for coming into this world to be our son. We look forward to sharing many more memories and milestones with you.