5 years with his Forever Family!

It's hard to believe that five years ago, our precious son Caleb was placed in our arms for the first time.

We love to celebrate this special time, though we know that not every adoptive family agrees that it's something to celebrate because the day is often traumatic for the adoptee. We thought we would treat Caleb to a night in a log cabin over at Fort Wilderness by the Mouse.

The weather couldn't have been more perfect...a coolness in the air without being too cold.  This was, in fact,  the warmest Family Day celebration on record for him.

The dumplings loved being surrounded by all the tall pine trees and playing on the playground before dinner.

After we finished dinner, we headed over to the Chip n Dale sing along for some marshmallow roasting and a movie outdoors on the big screen, "The Lion King."  Caleb enjoyed the marshmallows, while Madeline enjoyed the chocolate bars. I personally enjoyed eating them together in the form of 'smores.  Yum.

The next morning we headed over to the Grand Floridian for breakfast in order to fill our bellies before heading to the Magic Kingdom for the day.

Oh, and some of these photos were captured with either my iPhone or Patrick's.

We had a fun spin on the Teacups.

We managed to plan well when hitting the rides, grabbing as many fastpasses as we could, including Dumbo and Winnie-the-Pooh.

We headed over to Frontier Land for lunch.  Madeline thought her stickers looked better on her face than her shirt.

The kids really enjoyed Pirates of the Carribean, well Caleb did.  We got to ride Aladdin twice because the ride attendant placed two families on the same carpet.  Score another one for us! 

The Enchanted Tiki room was quite cute, and we thoroughly enjoyed the Jungle Queen and the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse.

Normally we start in Tomorrowland and hit up Buzz pretty early, but we decided to change things up a bit.  We chose to hit Buzz and the Raceway just before heading out.

After I took this shot of Patrick, I saw that he was taking a picture of himself with the princess.  So I had to get him to share it with me.

I usually ride with Madeline, and Patrick rides with Caleb.  So again, we switched it up.

And since we had a few minutes to spare before our Buzz fastpasses, we grabbed a nice cold tasty treat.

We've never done so many rides in such a short time.  The weather was truly perfect. Normally, we are wearing jackets during the day with gloves in the morning.  But not this year!  After hitting the bathroom one last time before driving home, Patrick snapped a shot of me with Caleb.  I had no idea he grabbed my camera out of the bag while I was in the bathroom.  I really need to hand him my camera more often.  I'm thankful. though, he managed to snap a few photos of me with our dumplings using his iPhone.

Well, I couldn't leave off this post without sharing two funnies that Caleb made yesterday.

During school, after he had finished narrating his passage from The Little Duke, in which we learned of Richard receiving the ducal mantle and subsequent banquet...

Me: That was a long ceremony and feast.
Caleb: Yeah, being Duke is hard work!

Hanging out in our room watching the election returns...

Caleb: When are they going to stop talking?
Me: Oh, they're going to talk all night.
Caleb: So, they're nocturnal?

In another bit of news, I thought I would share that we found out that our dossier was sent to China this past Friday, Nov 2nd.  I know most of you were hoping the big news I shared earlier was a referral.  However, we had one last hiccup that prevented us from sending our dossier off a few weeks ago.  So we're now officially DTC Nov 2nd and are awaiting our LID. Hooray!  Hooray!