Mill City Museum

Today I took the day off from work, Dave and I took the 3 younger girls on a surprise field trip (they are out of school until the monday after Thanksgiving.)
This was the first time any of us ever been there. Seeing it was midweek and school day, there wasn't many people and the girls were the only kids there. We started out eating lunch at the cafe and talking with another. Monika came up with a game and was shocked that I didn't know what the word meant (I can't pronounce it), it is when a word sounds the same, but spelled differently. It just amazes me how well the girls could come up with words, Monika went one step further was was trying to make sentences out the words. I thank the Lord that they have such great teachers in school and in their lives, it is amazing how much of a sponge their brain ares, how much they teach one another and us. Once we finished, we got into a big elevator that has seats in it and watched a 19 minute video that the elevator moved from floor to floor, very interesting. We finished on the 7th floor and walked up to the 8th floor and overlooked the Great Mississippi River. We went back down and they got to go in the bake lab, put puzzles together and play in the water place. They got to learn a lot about flour and we quizzed them while we were walking and they remember parts of it and between the 3 of them, they could come up with the answer. There was a lot of hands on teaching. We even took a nice walk on the Stone Arch Bridge. The temp. was a little cool, but the sun was warm. What a wonderful day it was. I highly recommend people to go and visit here.
Today we sent in our application to our local agency for the homestudy part of our adoption. We are so thankful that we will have them for part of the adoption process. We continue to wait for the Lord to take us to the next step of bringing Erin home. We will have been waiting 3 weeks on Wednesday for our Pre-Approval from China. The wait is hard and the fear of the unknown can make it harder. I have total faith in the Lord that he knows what he is doing and that when the time is right, we will know. Everytime I look at Erin's picture, I know it will be so worth it, just wish it could happen overnight.
I had a long talk with my niece today. Please say a prayer for her to stay strong. She has had some dependencies and made the decision on her own to become clean and straighten her life out. She trying to do it on her own and is managing so far. She temporary moved out of town to get away from the sources. She has always been a very strong headed person and I pray that will help keep her away from the dependencies. I thank the Lord that she realized she needed to change before something really bad happen to her or someone else.