Thursday morning, 5:45 am,  something woke me up.  I couldn’t figure out at first what it was.  So I followed the melody downstairs.  It was Olivia.  She was dressed for school, right down to her coat and her backpack, dancing across the living room and singing one of her favorite Disney “Frozen” songs at the top of her lungs. (And completely on key, btw).

THIS is our Olivia!  She is sweet, sassy, unpredictable.   Sometimes as slow as molasses, but not thursday morning!  I asked her to sing a little quieter and went back to bed for awhile…

Yesterday, she got her hair wish – and early eighth birthday gift.  I took her to the salon and she got her hair cut – really cut!  She is excited to send her ten-inch cut braid to Locks of Love to become a wig for a needy child.  And she got a darling haircut!  And it is funny how many people in the last 24 hours have said how much she looks like Annie.

Before:

After:

Today we celebrated her eighth birthday.  Of course, we had do a Frozen theme!  We invited three of her classmates and their moms who work with me at Nozomi, and then the females from our Be One team.

Because I do all my cake-making in Japan, I’ve never really worked with fondant (except for my Thomas train wreck).  I found a company where I could order it, and so I had fun last night making Olaf, the cute-as-a-button snowman in the Frozen movie.  The tress were Baskin Robbins ice cream cones… the pond came from my last box of blueberry jello.  The most challenging part was the black parts of Olaf – I tried to paint on the color which made it sticky and left black stains that I had to try and get rid of on Olaf’s white body.  I learn stuff every time I make a cake!

 

 

It was really fun.  I was thankful for Eric, who cooked a beejiba bunch of food on the grill; and for our team who helped me so much when my back was pretty bad today.

Tonight, as is our family custom, I told Olivia her (adoption) birth story when she went to bed.  One of my favorite parts of her special story…On the very night when Sarah from the adoption agency called to tell me that Annie’s birth mother was pregnant again, the passage that I read in my Bible was from Psalm 128:  “And he will fill your table with olive shoots around it…”  Five or six years prior, I had written next to that verse in my Bible, “God, can this be true for us?”

Yes- it can be!  God has blessed us with a table full of olive shoots!  Olivia is a beautiful, daily reminder  of the amazing God who keeps His promises.