We had a great Easter Sunday together as a family celebrating the resurrection of our Lord Jesus. How blessed we were to have our precious Hope with us this year to celebrate. She looked adorable in her Easter dress & hat. Joshua, Zachary, & Timothy looked so handsome in their shirts & ties. Enjoy the pics. 
The Cyphers Family at church on Easter Sunday
Joshua, Zachary, Timothy, & Hope on Easter Sunday 4/12/09
Hello Everyone!!! I know it’s been awhile since I’ve blogged, but what can I say, life with 4 kids is crazy busy. I just wanted to post some pics to show you how great Hope is doing with her Daddy now!! Thank you so much for all of your prayers. Hope has adjusted so great here & adores her Daddy now. She chatters quite a bit in English now too. She’s all girl & LOVES to dress up & play with her dolls & despises bugs, but does enjoy playing with her brothers trucks too. Enjoy the pictures.
Now that's what I call talent!!
Resting in Daddy's arms
Hope all smiles with her Daddy, yeah!!!
Ready for the snow
I guess the very fact that I haven’t written anything in awhile should tell most of you how things are going. Hope is BUSY, BUSY, BUSY!!! She is into everything. I guess I need to look at it as she is curious & wants to learn which is a good thing. She definitely keeps us on our toes. Hope is adjusting well & is finally doing better with Alan, praise the Lord!!! Hope turned 3 on January 12th & especially enjoyed the ice cream we gave her. She is now sleeping 10-12 hours each night & takes a 1-2 hour afternoon nap. She LOVES to eat but especially enjoys lasagna & sweets. Hope is all girl & loves to play with her 8+ baby dolls. Her brothers are still doing well with her but do get annoyed at times when “little sister” gets into their stuff, understandably. We are amazed at what a good fit Hope is for our family & see how God has orchestrated bringing her to us. It has been very fun to see new things through her eyes. January was full of fun things for her, church, ice skating(okay, she was pulled around in a sled which she LOVED), PA Farm Show, Christmas presents, birthday presents, and many, many visits from friends & family!!!
Yes, we are finally home, hooray!!! We arrived home at around 6:30pm on Thursday, January 1st. We are so glad to be back in the USA & home again with our sweet boys. Unfortunately, our trip here was not a great one. Our travel day started with the bus driver being late & it went downhill from there. Somehow our tickets got goofed up & on the 13 plus hour plane ride to the U.S., they had Alan, Hope, & I all sitting in 3 different areas of the plane!!! Nice!!! Praise God, some nice lady helped us out & we found 3 people willing to switch with us so we could be together. Then, Alan had his wallet stolen at some point on the plane. Given our financial situation right now, this was a huge & disappointing loss, but we are trying to trust. We did have a nice, uneventful car ride home. (Thanks Scott!!) The great news is, despite a cold, Hope seems to be adjusting well to life here, well, minus the time change thing & being up a ton at night, yes, a prayer request. What I mean is, she is fitting in wonderfully with her brothers & they already love her dearly. It has been very sweet to watch. Hope still doesn’t go to any other adult except me, but I’m sure in time, that too will change, I pray. So, we are grateful to be home & trying to get back into a routine. The house is a complete wreck, but feel free to drop by & visit & meet our newest addition. Thanks again for your prayers.
Hello All!!! I thought I’d blog one more time before we head home. I’m happy, very happy to report that Hope is doing much better today(Wednesday). She ran a temp most of the day yesterday & started with a nasty cough, but slept great last night & is currently taking her afternoon nap!!! Praise the Lord!!! Although she is still coughing, her fever seems to be gone!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of our “prayer warriors” who have been praying faithfully for us. We could not have survived this trip thus far without you!!! We have one last stretch, so please keep praying. We fly out of Guangzhou tomorrow morning at 8:15am(7:15pm Wednesday your time) to Beijing & then we leave Beijing at 1:00pm(midnight New Year’s Eve in PA). So, as you usher in 2009, please say a little prayer for us for safe, uneventful, peaceful travel & anything else you can think of. We’ll arrive in New York around 1:30pm Thursday & will hopefully be home around dinnertime. We can’t wait to be back home & to introduce our daughter to all of you!!! Happy New Year to all of you & we’ll see ya in 2009!!! Love ya & miss you all!!!
Hello everyone. It is 2:00am here on Tuesday morning & we have been up awhile with a very sick little girl. On Sunday, Hope started pulling at her ears & we thought she might be getting an ear infection. Then, Monday night she was running a temp of 104 & just a little while ago she started throwing up. So, please pray for healing on her little body & for good health for Alan & I as we are extremely tired right now. So ready to be home!! Thanks for praying.
Hello everyone!!! Sorry it’s been awhile since we’ve blogged, but life with an almost 3 year old, is …. well…. busy. Some of you know EXACTLY what I mean, but throw in there the inability to speak the same language & you have a very interesting situation, our situation. I can’t remember who told me that the language barrier would not be an issue because she probably couldn’t speak Chinese, but they were wrong. She chatters constantly. The other day we went to the park & there were pigeons that came right up to us. Hope was afraid & said something in Chinese. Our guide said that she said, “Hit those pigeons.” Awhile later we passed a man with a cane & Hope was really checking him out. She said, in Chinese, “That man should take that big stick & hit those pigeons.” NICE huh? Such a 3 year old thing!!! Oh I almost forgot, we are in Guangzhou now with our group again which has been better. Hope has been very tough on Alan though. I won’t go into detail now, but please pray for him as she has just not been nice. He is trying his best!!! Thanks, as always for praying & please continue to do so. We leave here on Thursday at 1:00pm & are so ready to be home!! Can’t wait to see you all.
Hey Everyone!!! Yesterday we went to the Civil Affairs office again & signed tons of papers to make Dang Haoyang officially Hope Kathleen Cyphers. We received her passport today, but are waiting for the notary papers & can’t leave her province until we have them. We do covet & appreciate all of your prayers. This has been an EXTREMELY hard part of our journey. Don’t get me wrong, we love our daughter & can’t wait for you all to meet her, but this province is not as accustomed to foreigners & hardly anyone speaks English. Even our guide’s English is sometimes hard to understand & she doesn’t always understand us. There is very little to do here, so we are left in our hotel room A LOT, missing our boys especially because it is Christmas. We have nothing planned for Christmas Day, so please do pray for us as it will be a VERY hard day for us. As I was thinking about our situation last night & how discouraged & frustrated we feel right now, I couldn’t help but think of Mary & Joseph & how they must have felt so many years ago. For us, Christmas is a very special & joyous time as it should be, celebrating Christ’s birth, but I’m guessing for them, it wasn’t completely that way. Being in a strange place, with a baby on the way, & no place to stay…..I feel one step closer to understanding how they might have felt. Yet, they knew as we know that God was with them, thankfully. We can’t tell you how much all of you mean to us & again, how much we need your prayers for our safety(I was within inches of being hit by a car yesterday going the wrong way into 3 lanes of oncoming traffic:)) & for our sanity. Hope is doing well & is clinging mostly to me, not too sure of Alan yet. We can’t imagine all the fears & doubts she must feeling right now as well. We are enjoying getting to know her but again, can’t wait to get her home. Merry Christmas everyone. We love you all!!!
Hello everyone. Well today was the big day, so despite my utter exhaustion, I’m going to try to update you all. Alan & I left our hotel in Beijing this morning at 5:30am to catch our 7:45am in country flight to Taiyuan. Then we met our guide, Linda, & headed to our hotel where we rested until 2:30pm. Then we headed via taxi, (now that WAS an experience, think New York City 10x’s worse, we closed our eyes & prayed)to the Civil Affairs office where we’d meet Hope. When we got there, she wasn’t there yet. She and her nannies had to take a train for 6 hours to meet us. Poor thing. So, when she walked into the office for our “big moment” she screamed her little head off at the very sight of us. Don’t worry, I was, somewhat prepared for that having read many other peoples blogs. She didn’t warm up to us at all & then they expected us to get a picture with her??? Funny!!! So, I held her screaming. Finally she did settle & actually fell asleep in my arms on the way back to the hotel. She showed her true colors back in the room though, good & not so good. I’m amazed, having been in an orphanage for almost 3 years, how smart & advanced she is. From what I’ve read, that is not typical. Once she warmed up to us, she chattered a mile a minute & even graced us with song, all in Chinese of course. She even tried repeating English words we said, already!!! If your wondering how she did with Alan, well, she did have a harder time with him, but when I left the room briefly I left her sitting on the end of his bed, & he was at the other end. When I returned, she was sitting up by him & she had moved there herself!!! So far, she LOVES to color, read books, sing & chatter, like I said, oh & Timothy & my Dad will be happy to know that I’m pretty sure that she too is left handed.
One thing we would ask all of you to pray about is for guidance on handling her facial deformites once we get back to the States. They are worse than we anticipated. We know though that God has an amazing plan for His precious little Hope & we are trusting in that. But we do covet your prayers in this for us & that people will look beyond her physical imperfection & see the sweet little person that God has created her to be.
Oh another impressive moment, she used the “western potty”(that’s what they call the potty’s like ours) already, which again, from what I read is extremely unusual. I would say she’s quite a gem, not to say that there aren’t some “moments” because there have been tons, thus the exhaustion, but it’s been a joy already, getting to know our daughter. Can’t wait for you all to meet her. Please do continue to pray for us & thank you so much for praying. Your prayers, thoughts, & love have been felt & SO GREATLY appreciated!!! We love you all & miss you so much.
Wednesday, December 17th our journey began. My awesome brother took Alan & I to JFK airport & we arrived there around 12:00 noon. As soon as we got in line to check in, the family in front of us noticed our America World Adoption tags & introduced themselves!!! How cool is that??? They are the Miller family from Virginia & were the only other family on our same flight from our group. We were excited to meet them so quickly!!! So then we endured a FOREVER flight, but all was well & we got to watch 3 movies. We arrived in Beijing Thursday night, December 18th around 6:30pm. It felt like we lost a day. We arrived at our hotel, the Radisson, around 9:00pm.
Our guide Sherry has been awesome & very helpful. Our hotel is beside a Carrefour,China’s version of Wal-Mart, & across from a Pizza Hut & KFC.
Today, we met 3 other families in our group. The rest of the families will arrive sometime today. We went on a tour this morning of “Old China” where the streets are so narrow that cars cannot get through so we had to use rickshaws(the bike/carts). Then we went to a Kindergarten to see the children there & to get an idea of what the orphanages that our children are in look like because we are not permitted into the orphanages. The children were too cute. Then we went to a couples house to see what a “traditional Chinese home” looks like. It was very humble & we found out that there is no bathroom in it so they must use the public restroom down the street. I can’t imagine!!! Then it was on to a restaurant for a Chinese lunch. My favorite……………eggplant, believe it or not. We will have 2 more days of touring, Great Wall, Tieneman Square, & the Forbidden City. It will be COLD!! The weather here is similar to home.
Then Monday is GOTCHA DAY when we get to meet Hope for the very first time!!! We can’t wait. We miss you all, especially our precious boys.
