Introducing Beatrice Elizabeth LuRu Betts!!

Meet our gorgeous daughter Bea!! Is she not the loveliest? She was born January 24th of this year, so she is just seven months old. She is nearly 25 inches long and weighs nearly 18 pounds. So, gratefully, it seems like someone at the Yifeng County SWI where she has been living has been making sure she has plenty to eat. That is certainly a relief. Her SWI is in the Jiangxi province.

Her Chinese name is Zhuang Lu Ru. Zhuang is probably the orphanage director's surname and all of the children in Bea's SWI are called Zhuang Lu plus another first name. It is tradition for those who adopt from China to combine the two first names to form a second middle name for their child, which is why Bea's second middle name is LuRu.

The medical paperwork we received hasn't been translated from Mandarin yet, but it seems that her development is considered normal. However, since she has been institutionalized since she was a wee thing, she will probably be a few months behind developmentally. Typically girls adopted from China catch up really quickly--sometimes making huge gains within days of being with their parents.

Beatrice means "bringer of joy" but we didn't even know the half of it when we chose that name! We are insanely happy! Over the moon! We got the news and some info about Bea from our agency yesterday morning and they overnighted her pictures to us so we just got them today. Neither of us slept last night!

It will be about 8 weeks until we can go to get her and we will be in China for about 2 weeks. Of course we are going to be mental wondering about how she is until then.

We will be posting more info and pictures while we are in China, so be sure to visit here often...

And now, we sleep. Or try to! I can't believe we really get to be parents! And the parents of this beautiful baby girl no less. Besides all of her beautiful features, Scott noted that Bea is wearing Burghardt style socks...She must be ours.