Our Escaping Pets!

Okay. One would think that I might be talking about one of our two dogs or our cat, but I am talking about Cole's fish and Alex's hamster. First, Cole has this little minnow that we caught down at the neighborhood lake last spring. He has been keeping Fishstick (who my Aunt Betty-Jo claims is a female fish) in a vase on his dresser ever since then. I had no idea that she would live this long. I was changing the water the other day and Fishstick jumped out and slid down the drain of the kitchen sink! Mike quickly started taking apart the pipes under the sink. However, Fishstick was not in the pipe. I used a flashlight to look down the drain from the top, and she was stuck on a little tiny ledge just below the drain in the sink. We ran some water through the drain, and we were able to get her back safely in her vase.

Alex's escaping hamster is another story. Leia has a really cool cage with lots of tubes that disassemble for easy cleaning. But she has figured out how to detach the plastic lid and open the wire door, and she likes to escape nightly. The thing is that she will manage to disassemble her cage, spend the night running around, and then return to her cage by morning with a collection of little "treasures" that she has found. Unfortunately, some of these little "treasures" that she has collected have been the buckles to Alex's L.L. Bean monogrammed book bag (not cheap). My mom suggested that we put her cage in the bathtub so that she would be stuck in a closed in area if she escaped again. So we did that for several nights, but then she made a jump from the cage to the faucet and managed to turn on the water! When Mike went to wake the boys up for school, he found Leia back in top nest of her cage asleep with over an inch of water in the tub and a steady drip of water coming out of the faucet. We finally decided that the hamster was going to have to get a new cage. My mom helped us out by purchasing a new glass cage with a latching lid that does not have all of the tubes and detachable features. Leia is very bored, but we try to get her out every day for a run in her ball.

Our Labor Day Weekend Camping Trip

We spent the weekend camping in the mountains in our pop-up. The campground had a lot of activities for the kids including a water slide, fishing, a jumping pillow, and lots of places to ride bikes. However, the camp sites were extremely close together and the place was crawling with people. When we first arrived, we quickly found that if we opened our camper, it was going to actually touch the camper in the site behind us!! The people in the office were nice enough to let us move over one site. Our closest neighbors for the weekend had 3 boys, so our boys made instant friends. We had planned to go tubing down the river, but it drizzled rain most of the day on Sunday, and it never seemed warm enough to get into the middle of a cold river. Mike and the boys spent most of Sunday trying to catch the huge trout that were stocked in one of the campground lakes. In fact, Mike caught one fish Sunday morning before the rest of us even woke up. Later in the day, there were several groups around the lake who were catching whole stringers full of fish while other groups of fishermen (like my little fishermen) could not even get a bite. Mike even switched over to several different types of bait, but nothing worked. Still, we had a great weekend. Now, we are home, and the camper and car are cleaned out, and we are busy trying play catch-up with getting ready to start the week.

The Wait...

Our agency has matched 10 more special needs children to families this week! Slowly but surely, we are inching closer to the top of the list to get our referral.
As I was out walking tonight, I reflected on the time that we have waited so far. Mike and I have talked about adopting a child even before we were married. We did not know if we would do a domestic adoption and an international adoption, but we knew that we wanted to give a home to a child that needed one. Cole and Alex were born, and we still felt that our family was not complete.
It was November of 2007 when I started to feel an extremely strong pull towards adopting a child from China. Mike was worried that the boys were too young to bring in another child, but we discovered that after all of the paperwork was complete, we would still have a year or two to wait. I just had this urgent feeling that we needed to get our paperwork gathered (it is a very long, tedious process) and off to China. We really felt that God was telling us that we had a daughter in China. It took us until April of 2007 to get all of our paperwork sent off to China and then the real wait began.
However, in the fall of 2007 I kept having this nagging feeling that something was wrong. I kept feeling like we missed something or that God was trying to tell me something. We talked about the special needs program and even ordered the packet of special needs paperwork from our agency. I remember one day at work feeling really sad with this feeling that our daughter was sick or had some kind of health problem. When the special needs packet arrived, Mike and I carefully read over all of the special needs that we might consider, but every single one of them scared the heck out of us. We talked about the possibility of a heart condition, but we got too scared and filed the papers away in the adoption box in the closet.
Fast forward to April of 2008. I was sitting at the computer on the last day of my spring break. We were just about to hit our 1 year anniversary of officially waiting for our daughter, and I kept coming across blogs and websites with little Chinese girls with heart defects. Every single picture of every single little girl seemed to feel like it was my daughter looking back at me. I called Mike at work and said we needed to talk. I remember he asked if we could talk when he got home and I said, "No, we need to talk now!" We talked for a little while and by the time he got home from work he was also convinced that our daughter has a heart condition. We finally made the decision to talk to our doctors and our social worker and then turn in our medical checklist to officially enter the waiting child program. I remember feeling the same sense of relief that I felt when we made the decision to go forward with the adoption. It was like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders that we were back on the right path.
Now, as we edge closer and closer to getting our referral, we pray that God will give us the wisdom to know when we get our referral that it is the right referral for us. We do not want to take on more than we can handle. We pray that the doctors will give us the right information and that the decision to accept the referral will come easily.

First Day of School

Sorry it has been so long since I last posted. Now that school is back in and I am working every day, our lives are so much more hectic! Cole and Alex started a new school this year due to re-zoning in our county. They like their teachers and new classrooms. Unfortunately, neither one of them knew any of the kids in their classes, but they make friends easily. My students this year are really sweet, but it is a big group. I am already worried about leaving my students when we are traveling and I am at home with the baby for a while. Today we have cousins coming in from out of state. We are planning to take all of the kids to the pool. I guess I need to starting getting ready!

Progress in Anna Grace's Room

We finally have carpet in the baby's room!! Over the last 6 months or so, Mike has worked on painting the room a pretty green color. The ceiling is a really pale pink that matches the duvet-cover. We have a white chandelier hanging from the pink ceiling, and Mike also painted cherry trees in bloom on two walls. The furniture is my antique bedroom set from when I was a little girl. So far, the room has two fabrics. One is a print of an Asian garden in bloom with cherry trees. It has little girls dressed in traditional Asian clothing. The other print is a pink and green stripe that is on the bed skirt and curtains. We are planning to add a crib or toddler bed to the room later if we find out that she is too small for a big-girl bed.

We still have a lot to do. Mike is planning the build some white shelves into a play corner to house toys and books. I plan to buy white baskets with liners for the shelves. We also need a little table and chairs, chandelier shades, and some lamps. I had tears in my eyes yesterday as my mom and I finally opened the boxes that had the little Chinese baby dolls that have been sitting in the closet for so long. We still have a lot to do and buy, but I finally feel like we are making progress. I would love to have the room complete when we get her referral so that we can concentrate on getting ready to travel.

Cole and Alex start back to school this week so I will post first-day-of-school pictures soon.

One of those days & Is "ship" a bad word?

This day has started out wrong and has gone from bad to worse! It started with the boys and I sitting at the kitchen table as we have done almost every day this summer to work on some school work. Of course, I was still in my pajamas when we had a knock at the back door and the doorbell at the front door rang. The backdoor was the carpet men coming to install the baby's carpet 3 hours earlier than expected and the front door was the Jehovah's Witnesses. So, come in carpet men (even though I am still in my pjs with no make-up on) and no Jehovah's Witnesses, we are not interested (sorry if you are Jehovah's Witnesses but we are very happy going to our Baptist church, oh and sorry I was little short with the visitors at my door). So, in come the carpet people as I rush around trying to make myself look presentable. I was actually happy that they were here because we really want to work on that room. However, things did not go as planned. They brought the wrong carpet (berber and we ordered frieze) and ours might still be at the factory on the other side of the state. Of course!
After they leave I decide that since they are not sure if they will be back today, and I am hosting Bunco at my house tomorrow night, I may as well give my house a good cleaning. This is not the way I wanted to spend my last day of summer break before I go back to work tomorrow, but I might as well be productive if I am stuck at home and can't go to the pool. That's when the kids started in. They were in and out, in and out of the house, leaving the back door standing wide open every time, tracking dog hair in from the garage (our yellow lab is shedding terribly right now and I can't keep the garage clean), and they spilled water all over the kitchen floor. Cole comes in tattling on Alex that he keeps saying the word "ship." I say "Ship?? How did he use the word." Cole says that ship must be a bad word when he is talking about fighting- like a warship. I say, "Well, I think that is okay as long as you are not saying 'Oh, ship' because then it sounds like a bad word." Both boys say, "Why would someone say 'Oh, ship" and "What bad word are you talking about?" Oh, forget it! Go back outside and play. Then Cole pitched huge temper tantrum that I would not allow him to take his Nintendo DS outside for the neighbors.
Back to cleaning, I am dusting the entertainment cabinet and find that there is a TON of dust behind the DVD player, much more than my dust rag can handle. So, I go get the vacuum cleaner (which just had $30 in new parts over the weekend to make it work again). I start up the vacuum to suck up that dust and it starts billowing smoke! It manages to spit melted black rubber all over the carpet and stink up the entire house in less than 10 seconds! Now, I need a new vacuum cleaner, have stained carpet in the living room, and still have no carpet upstairs! I am afraid to touch anything else and it is only lunch time! At least the boys are happy to stay outside playing for the day since the entire house smells like burned rubber!!!

Some good news!

This wait for our daughter has been filled with highs and lows. We never knew that it would take this long, especially once we decided that we were going to adopt a child with a medical condition. We just new that we would have our referral by now. Last spring we received an email for our agency saying that we would likely wait 18 to 20 months or more from the date that we turned in our medical conditions checklist (MCC). Our 10 to 12 month wait had turned into a 18 to 20 month wait. We have been waiting for 15 months now and our agency has been doing a ton of special needs referrals this month. So, I decided to email again to find out if we are getting any closer. For this first time ever, they said that yes, we are getting closer to our referral! I was so scared that they were going to say that we were going to have to wait even longer than 18 to 20 months. They could not predict exactly when it is going to happen, but they said the current wait time is still 18 to 20 months. We could see our daughter's face as early as October!! We are back at work getting her room ready. We ordered her carpet last night and a chandelier this morning. I will post pictures as soon as it all starts to come together. I really want to have her room ready before we get her referral so that we can concentrate on getting ready to travel. It feels so good to finally feel like there is an end in sight. We can hold on for another 3 to 5 months, no problem!! Our prayer is that she is safe and well cared for.

Our agency has been doing a lot of work with the Henan province to help them learn better techniques for childcare in the orphanages. They have been going into the orphanages and helping them with supplies, training, and placing as many kids into foster care as they can. They have also been helping to pay for the process to prepare the children's paperwork for adoption so that these children can have forever homes. Without all of this hard work, these children would have to live out their childhood in orphanages with inadequate care. Our daughter is most likely one of these children in Henan. We are so grateful for the work that our agency is doing.