We made it home!!

Well, we have finally made it home. We arrived home Friday night, June 26. It is so good to be home and sleep in our own bed. Jon-Michael is doing great, he is still eating and sleeping well. Katelyn is such a good big sister, she is such a big help with her little brother. We really appreciate all of the food, the phone calls and the visits since we have been home. It really is nice to see all of you again.

We just wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you to some very special people. First of all thanks to everyone who kept up with our journey and for all of your prayers. Thanks to all of our family for helping out with all of our chores while we were gone. Thanks also to all of my staff at work; without you covering for me, none of this would have been possible. Thanks to all of our family and friends for your phone calls and emails while we were gone, it really was nice to hear from each of you.

Now that we are home we are trying to get our life back to normal, if that is possible. Please feel free to stop by and visit with us, we would love to see all of you. We are home most all of the time now. I don't think we will be leaving for a while. We are really looking forward to getting some real seafood.

Thanks again to everyone for your prayers and support. This will be our last post on this website.
Love,
The Daniel family,
Mike, Shellie, Katelyn and Jon-Michael
Come and see us, we missed ya'll

WE ARE COMING HOME!!!

Well we are finally on our way home. We are really excited that we are headed back south, however we honestly do have mixed emotions about leaving. Not that we aren't ready to get home, see everyone and show off our new little man; but we have grown such a great relationship to Jon-Michael's birthmother we are going to miss her a lot. We could not even begin to tell you how wonderful of a person she is. Such a very beautiful, caring, loving and unselfish person. Please keep her in your prayers. We love her dearly.

Michigan is a really neat place to visit, there is so much to do. The weather has been beautiful, on the very hottest days it gets up to 85 degrees. I understand we will be coming home to some very different weather conditions.

We plan on making a few stops on the way home since it is such a long drive. We will be stopping in Kentucky first and staying at one of their state parks. Here is the link for those of you who are interested, http://www.kyhorsepark.com/. We do not have any firm plans after that. We should be home sometime this weekend. If we stay gone to much longer the grandparents are going to send out search and rescue for their 2 grandkids.

So for now we will show Michigan our taillights and head back south. Someone get the crawfish pot ready, we need some real seafood and sweet tea. See ya soon!!

Almost time to start home!

It looks like the paperwork and legal processes are about finished and we should be able to leave really soon. We've been gone over a month! Jon-Michael is doing great! Thanks to all who continue to think of us and leave messages here. We'll let you all know when we're headed home when we know for sure. Here are some recent photos to view of Jon-Michael!

Looking at my big Sis

(Click any photo to enlarge it)

Katelyn and Jon-Michael

More Pictures. What a great big sister!

The wait is over!!!

Hey everyone. Well the wait is finally over. We are proud to let you know that Jon-Michael Reid Daniel was born June 9, 2009 at 6:40pm. He is a beautiful big healthy boy. He weighed 8 pounds 9 ounces and was 21.5 inches long. He has a head full of hair. Both Jon-Michael and his birthmother are healthy and doing well.

We are in the special needs nursery at the hospital, only because that is where they had a vacant room. Jon-Michael is staying in the room with us. The hospital has been great.
They are allowing us to stay with Jon-Michael until he is discharged. We anticipate he will be discharged Wed. or Thursday. At that time he will be discharged to us. We still have the legal process to complete that will take about 2-3 weeks. Thanks to everyone for your prayers and kind words.

Katelyn at our campsite
(click photos to enlarge)

Campsites across the lake from us

Evening view of the lake from behind our campsite

Still waiting...

We’re still patiently waiting for Jon-Michael to be born. At the doctor’s appointment this week, the doctor said it could be anytime now. The birthmother is still dilated about 2 cm, which is about the same as last week and she’s now 70% effaced compared to 50% last week. The doctor said when she goes into labor it will happen fast. We’re sure ready for that! We’ve spent a lot of our time either at the campground or going to local tourist attractions. Yesterday we went to the Henry Ford Museum. It was very interesting to see all the different types of cars. I’ll try to post some pictures of it later. Hopefully we’ll have our new addition soon. Thanks for keeping up with us and please continue to keep us in your prayers.

Hurry up and wait

Well on the most important topic, Jon-Michael, we seem to be in the dreaded hurry up and wait scenario. On Wednesday, May 27 we went with our birthmother to her doctor's appointment. Her doctor checked her and told us she was dialated 2 cm and she was 50% effaced. So things are moving and we are getting anxious, we just wish they would move a little faster now that we are in Michigan waiting. We did get to listen to the baby's heartbeat, that was exciting. So for now we are just waiting. Keep us in your prayers.

More Pictures from the Red Wings Game

Stanley Cup Playoffs

Last night we traveled to Detroit and attended the Detroit Red Wings hockey game. As you can imagine hockey is very big in this area. Last year the Detroit Red Wings won the Stanley Cup which it the "Hockey Super Bowl". The Red Wings have been in Detroit for over 80 years and the people here love them.

Last night the Red Wings played the Chicago Blackhawks for game 5 of the Western Conference Championship. Detroit and Chicago are huge rivals because they are so close to each other. Detroit won the game in overtime and it was pandemonium. This was by far the most exciting professional sports game we have ever been to. It was loud; very loud, very high energy and non stop action. The Red Wings will now play the Pittsburg Penquins in a 7 game series for the Stanley Cup Championship. Coincidentally the Red Wings defeated the Penguins to win the Cup last season.

We made it!!

Well, we made it to Michigan. We pulled in to our campsite around 9:00pm Saturday night. We are at Haas Lake Park in New Hudson, Michigan. The RV Park is nice, it has 4 large lakes, several beach areas where we can swim in the lake (the water is still freezing cold here) and a 2 hole golf course which I will be checking out soon. This is a very large RV park and about 85% of the sites are rented out yearround to people who leave their campers here and use it for a getaway. Hopefully we will get our rental car on Tuesday, everthing is closed until then due to the holiday weekend. We are trying to relocate our motorhome to a site on one of the lakes. Well it looks like this is where we will be for the next month so we are getting settled in.

No new information on Jon-Michael. Now that we are here we are really ready for our new baby boy to be born. We are not very far from the hospital so we should have no problems rushing over to the hospital when we need to.

We do have good cell phone signal here and good internet signal so feel free to call us or email us. Right now we are just spending time at the campground waiting for Jon-Michael to be born.

If anyone has visited the Michigan area please give us some suggestions of places we should go. We will be looking for some ideas for day trips while we are waiting.

Made it to Nashville, TN

Hi everyone,
We made the first half of our drive today. We have arrived in Nashville, TN and are staying at the Yogi Bear Jellystone Campground. It has been a long day but it has been good to finally begin this phase of our journey. Tomorrow we will be leaving out early and we anticipate completing our drive to Michigan. We will be traveling through part of the US that we have never been to before so we are excited about seeing all the new terrain. We appreciate the phone calls, emails and words of encouragement. Keep us in your prayers and we will give you another update soon.
Mike, Shellie and Katelyn

Waiting to leave

Journey for Jon-Michael

We’ll be leaving late Friday or early Saturday on our trip to Michigan to adopt our second child! We’re very excited at the opportunity to add a son to our family. Katelyn is especially excited to be a big sister! It’s about 1,100 miles and 16 hours to Michigan, so we’ll spend a lot of time on the road. We’ll travel through Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio before we reach our destination outside of Detroit. On our first day, we plan on finding a campground near Nashville and spending the night there in our motorhome. The next day we should arrive in Michigan about eight hours later. Once Jon-Michael is born, we’ll be there for about three weeks before we can head back home. There are a lot of paperwork and court proceedings to go through before we can leave the state. We’re looking forward to getting back with our new addition to our family! Follow this blog for updates on our trip. We’ll try to keep it updated as much as possible!

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