Leah's Forever Day

Friday March 30th was a much anticipated day.  We were able to take Leah to the temple and have her sealed to our family forever.  It was awesome!  It was such a neat experience.  We had so many family and friends in attendance supporting us.  Our boys were able to come into the temple and witness the sealing.  It's an experience that I know Luke and probably Seth will always remember.  It's so comforting and amazing to know that a little girl born in China where there's not freedom to worship freely is now our forever daughter.  The blessings of the gospel and the temple are incredible.

Leah was very peaceful and happy throughout the entire event.  I think she knew it was a special day for her.  She was almost sleepy and out of it before the ceremony when we were trying to get pictures of her, but she was a little angel in the temple.  (Ian not so much.  For those of you who were there and know our spunky Ian let's just say it could have been worse!  For whatever reason he wouldn't nap and was just super grouchy from the get go that afternoon.  Then he wanted to stay in the playroom, then ride the elevator continuously, etc.  When he finally got to the sealing room he wanted to be part of the action and was not taking no for an answer!  Poor Cindy had to physically keep him from running to us.  I think it was about that point he shouted something along the lines of, "get your hands off of me!"  Yep.  That happened.  We all got a chuckle about it and the sealer picked up the pace quite a bit.  Oh Ian.)

I can't say much about the ceremony here, but it was great to have my mom in white helping with Leah and the spirit was very strong.  I couldn't really look around the room much at all our guests or the tears would flow.  Tears of gratitude and just pure happiness.  We are so blessed!

Our friend Candi took some beautiful pictures of our family, and I'm so grateful to her.  Leah was kind of out of it and not really performing at first but there are still lots of great shots of the family and my handsome little men.  Thanks Candi!

Welcome to our Forever Family Leah!

 I feel bad that some people had already left before we took this group picture.  We are missing some great friends who were there with us.  We had a fun dinner at our house afterwards in Leah's honor with about 65 or 70 people there to celebrate!

To my non LDS friends who may be wondering what this post is all about I'd love to tell you.   In case you don't know already, we are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  You may know us as Mormons.  There are lots of misconceptions out there about our church so let me quickly clarify one thing--we are Christians!  If you'd like to learn more about LDS temples or our religion please contact me, or you can visit the church's great website www.lds.org.  If you do check it out, you should watch some of the "Mormon Messages."  The one called "Dayton's Legs" (click through to find it) is especially touching.  A website with answers to lots of commonly asked questions about Mormons and statistics and facts about our church is www.mormonnewsroom.org.  Thanks!