Dear Friends,

2009 was an amazing, challenging, fulfilling and altogether incredible year for us! Our normal tradition is to get some family photographs taken in the fall, and use them for our Christmas card. We start the Christmas card process early in December and work like crazy to get them all out on time. This year, we ended up being in Africa for Christmas, hence no Christmas cards! More on that below.

Aaron is still as busy as ever with his work in entrepreneurial business. His focus is in product management, marketing and business development, and we’re thankful to be as blessed as we are, with the economy as tough as it’s been for so many.

His service on the Sierra College Board of Trustees has also kept him quite busy. Since being re-elected in 2008, he has continued to advocate for sustainable budget policies that will maximize access to college, and was honored to be elected by his colleagues as Board Vice President for 2010. California's mismanagement has finally come home to roost, but thanks to the board working together, they had the reserves available to minimize cuts in 2009. They're now working on closing a $9 million dollar hole for 2010.

Cacey is enjoying being the mom of two now, although she’s looking forward to getting one of those kids out of diapers (hint, hint, hint Spencer). Her business with Tastefully Simple distinctive foods has been growing by leaps and bounds...she was #3 in her area for the year! She loves it because everyone loves the food and she doesn't have to "sell" anything. :) You’ll have to check out her blog at CaceyKlein.com!

We started 2009 with a trip back to see family in Indiana. The dead of winter usually isn’t the optimal time to visit that part of the country. Flying on frequent flyer miles, we landed in Seattle and spent a night on Madison Street overlooking the Space Needle, then had coffee the next morning at the first Starbucks at Pike’s Place Market.

We then jumped back on the plane and flew into Chicago (Cacey’s first time to the midwest), where it was snowing heavily when we landed. After renting a four wheel drive SUV, we drove about three hours to Churubusco, Indiana where Aaron’s aunt and cousins live. We stayed in a little cottage on a frozen lake (suitable for ice skating!) and had a wonderful time seeing our family and longtime friends there.

Spencer turned two years old in March and we had a very fun Thomas the Train birthday party for him. We made him a Thomas train out of a dryer box and he and his little friends had a ball “driving the choo-choo” in the family room.

Our little boy has done so much growing up during this past year—going from the crib to his “big boy bed” was one highlight. He’ll walk into the room and say “hey Dad, hey Mom? I love you!” He adores his Grammie and Pop, and his Nana and Papa, along with the aunts and uncles and cousins so very much.

We did a lot of fun things in 2009. Aaron and Spencer took Aaron’s dad to a Dodgers-Giants game at AT&T Park in San Francisco. The Klein boys have been diehard Dodgers fans since forever. This was an exciting year for them, coming close to the World Series. Maybe in 2010!

We vacationed with Cacey’s brother and sister-in-law, Ty and Amy, and their family this year in Yosemite. Aaron and Ty climbed Half Dome (and Aaron was none the worse for wear after a week of recovery!) and we all had a grand time seeing the sights and sounds of this national treasure.

As you may remember from last year’s letter, we started the process to adopt a baby sister for Spencer from Ethiopia in October 2008. After paperwork, home studies and more paperwork, it was early July when Cacey got the phone call—we had been matched with a beautiful two month old baby girl who we named Emma Nichole Asnakech Klein (just like Spencer, she will keep her birth name as a middle name).

With Emma’s arrival soon to come, we decided to take Spence to Disneyland for the first time on Aaron’s birthday. He had an absolute blast meeting Mickey, getting hugged by Tigger, posing with Lightning McQueen and Mater, and “shooting the bad guys with the boom-boom” on the Buzz Lightyear ride. As an extra bonus, the Southern California Klein-Burtt clan (Aaron’s sister Marie, brother-in-law Christian, niece Addy and sister Sarah) were along for much of the Disneyland adventure.

In November, we celebrated Spencer Day in conjunction with the first annual Orphan Sunday, designed to shine the spotlight on the needs of 143 million orphans around the world. As you can tell, this is an issue that is near and dear to our hearts. We’re working on some interesting projects to raise awareness and make a difference for this cause—and you’ll be hearing from us on that soon!

On December 8, we had quite the exciting day. That morning, we were headed to Downtown Sacramento for Spencer’s Homeland Security appointment to get his citizenship certificate issued. Just as we were about to arrive at the federal building, Cacey got the call—we were due in Ethiopia on Christmas Eve!

We quickly scrambled to secure flights, and ended up saving quite a bit of money flying in to Paris first for a few days (yes, we know—twist our arms right off). Thanks to Aaron’s dad introducing us to Hilton HHonors points, we stayed three nights for free at the Waldorf-Astoria Trianon Palace in Versailles, and were able to tour Notre Dame cathedral, the Eiffel Tower, see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and take a dinner cruise down the River Seine. No, we didn’t have any fun.

On Christmas Eve, we boarded an Ethiopian Airlines jet for Addis Ababa and landed there at about 7AM local time on Christmas morning. By 10AM we had joined up with the rest of our travel group (9 families we became great friends with), and then met our beautiful little girl for the very first time. (You can actually see that moment for yourself in the video below!)

On Sunday and Monday, we traveled down to Durame in the southern part of Ethiopia, to get the chance to meet Emma’s wonderful birth mother, and visit Holt International (our adoption agency) operations down there. The meeting with this wonderful young woman was delightful, and we enjoyed conversing with her, with the help of an interpreter, about the beautiful little girl we all love.

We toured our agency’s Shinshicho health care center, and visited a local church for the Christmas celebration with kids enrolled in their Family Preservation Project. Holt invests a great deal of its resources in orphan prevention and building sustainable families in Ethiopia. Aaron is really hoping to go back and lend some support to their work there in late 2010.

On New Year’s Eve, we departed for the airport at about 6PM local time. Our journey home—44 hours door-to-door—was exhausting but could have been far worse than it was. We were in business class seats on the first ten hour flight, which included a brief stop in Khartoum, Sudan to bring on passengers and fuel. (Fascinating...they don’t advertise this widely when you buy your tickets!)

In Amsterdam, we had a seven hour layover, so we booked the “Yotel” (a transit hotel inside security) where you check in on an ATM machine that spits your key card out. The German couple who had overslept in Room 14 were quite startled when we barged in. After getting that sorted out, we managed to get a few hours of sleep before we took off for Minneapolis and US soil.

After a five hour layover in the frozen midwest, we took off on the final leg to Sacramento and landed there just a few minutes before midnight on New Year’s Day. Our families were there to greet us—Emma’s grandparents, many of the aunts and uncles, and a very excited big brother who got to meet the “baby sister” he’d been talking about for so long. After two weeks staying with grandparents, I think he was a little excited to see mom and dad too!

(And if this wasn’t enough, we closed escrow on a house while in Africa. Hopefully, Aaron’s dad suffered no permanent damage from writing “as power of attorney for D. Aaron Klein” about 6,278 times on loan documents. Cacey’s family actually moved our furniture into our new house while we were still gone. We arrived home to a different address than we left from! We are blessed by such wonderful family.)

This trip to Ethiopia—and indeed, the entire experience of international adoption—has truly been a life-changing experience for us. It was easy to see how deeply interconnected our world is. The ingenuity and resourcefulness of the Ethiopian people, despite immense challenges and widespread poverty, was beautiful to see. This is a very special country and we definitely left a part of our hearts there. We cannot wait to take Spencer and Emma back to South Korea and Ethiopia some day.

As we drove through the rolling hills of Africa, the words of a Steven Curtis Chapman song came to mind entitled “What Now” and it seemed to encapsulate our trip and the incredible opportunities to make a difference that we were seeing before our very eyes. We can’t say it better than his words do.

I saw the face of Jesus / in a little orphan girl,
She was standing in the corner / on the other side of the world.
And I heard the voice of Jesus / gently whisper to my heart,
‘didn’t you say you wanted to find me? / Well, here I am, here you are.’

So what now? / What will you do, now that you found me?
What now? / What will you do with this treasure you found?

I know I may not look like what you expected,
but if you remember / this is right where I said I would be...
You found me / what now?

Our goal for 2010 is to answer that question—“what now?”—for ourselves. Our hope is that many of you will give serious thought to engaging in this cause as well. You can bet that you’ll be hearing from us soon with some opportunities for making a difference. We can’t wait to share those with you. We leave you with this video so you can “experience” a little bit of what we did in Ethiopia, and see the challenges and opportunities that await all of us.

So that’s our 2009 in a nutshell. We hope you had a wonderful Christmas, a very Happy New Year and that 2010 is already shaping up to be an incredible year for you and your family!

Aaron, Cacey, Spencer and Emma