Walk for Hope

Today we participated in our local FCC's charity walk for children in Chinese orphanges. It was a cool and overcast day, which is fine if you're going to be walking a couple of miles. Some photos from the day...

Here is Emma with her friend Ella and Ella's little sister Mira. The two little girls adore Emma and followed her around all morning...


This is Emma with her good friend, Sophie. They actually scootered around the park, instead of walking...


All the girls in the organization were encouraged to raise money on their own for the event. Here are the four girls that raised the most money...Meredith, Ella, Sophie and Emma. Each of the girls won a gift certificate to Build-A-Bear Workshop, so I guess we'll be going back to that kiddie crack den before too long.


And just one more picture of my sweet girl...


We had a good time, but the whole thing was rather bittersweet. This was the 11th time for this walk and the sixth time Emma and I have participated. But we all have the feeling this might be the last one. Every year, fewer and fewer families attend. As our girls get older, they seem to lose their enthusiasm for these Chinese cultural events like the Walk and Chinese New Year. And because adoptions from China have crawled to a standstill, there are very few families with newly adopted children who are excited about coming. We only had one family with a child who had been adopted in the past year...five years ago, we would have had ten or more. It's just very sad. Our FCC chapter is actually considering shutting down, like a number of others across the country. I hope we don't...I've been on the board the past three years and have really loved it. But it's hard to put all this effort into these events when the turnout declines every year. We'll see what happens...