It's looking up!

Again, I apologize for my previous downer-of-a-post. But now, things are looking up! We received our homestudy draft yesterday via email and I combed through it at lightening speed. We emailed today the necessary changes and are crossing our fingers for that to be done quickly and emailed to AGCI for approval. Then we can get some notarized copies and finally send off to CIS. Yay!!! This is some good news. I am super excited.

I want to say a big shout out to those of you who've been sending me bits of encouragement and laughter. It helped so much! Now I am even more committed to commenting on other blog pages...even though I'm often fearful that people will think I'm a weirdo. (I haven't come to grips yet that it may possibly be the truth.) So, look out blogworld, here come my comments!

So. This is goooooood news. I feel totally refreshed, both spiritually and emotionally.

Another fun thing that happened is (drumroll) that all the material and supplies were purchased to start making baby bedding! Yay! When you're the last girl (of everyone you know) to set up nursery, you're not left with a lot of options that aren't taken by your cousin, your friend, your neighbor, etc...and I couldn't find anything that I was totally in love with. So, I combed the fabric stores with my wonderfully amazing grandmother and finally found something. Yay! So we purchased all of it. No joke, we took every last inch of two of the fabrics. This baby is going to have one rockin room. Can you tell that I am excited? Well, I am.

And I promise, cruise pics are coming. In the ship's library, there was a giant globe. That's all I'm telling you for now. It's the coolest picture. It's so cool that Justin even made it his background pic. That's serious real estate.

The weather is tooo perfect here so I'm going to enjoy it!

already waiting forever

Well, the cruise was great. Maybe I'll post some pictures of that in a bit. Right now (and for the last few days) I have just been overwhelmed with not-so-good-feelingness. We were expecting our homestudy report to be done a while back. It's still not done. This wouldn't be such a big deal if we were told it would take this long...but we weren't. We were assured we'd have it the following weekend. And then when we didn't have it a few days after that and hadn't heard anything I was nervous. Maybe I forgot something important and didn't realize it and she was just waiting for me. So when I contacted our social worker...after waiting a few days for a response we were given another deadline. But that was last Friday and it's already Monday and this just stinks.

I need the homestudy report so that I can mail in our CIS so we can get fingerprinted and approved so we can start the real waiting. Ha. The real waiting. We've been waiting forever. We waited to start the process until the job thing worked out. We waited to start again for the insurance thing to work out. We waited again for the money thing to work out. Now we're waiting for our social worker to work out. We're nowhere near the actual waiting list and I'm just feeling really whiny and complainy...as you can see.

Sorry to be such a fusspot. I just needed to get it out to someone who would understand. In the words of Eeyore, "thanks for noticing."

forget the waiting...

Well, in a few hours I will no longer be thinking about homestudies or paperchasing or anything other than the glorious sun and my best traveling buddy.

That's right. Tomorrow begins my last spring fling! Christina and I board the Ecstacy ship tomorrow and head for a "Girls Gone Silly" Spring Break. We're taking along a surprise guest. More on him later. (I love surprises...that includes pushing them on others.) Then when I return I get one night with dear hubband and then I'm taking a little road trip with my mother and grandparents. This is going to be something. Yay for traveling! Yay for being busy thinking of other things!

I was hoping to have our HS back so it could go to Portland and be accepted and then I could mail our USCIS stuff and know that I was done with all the stuff that depended on me. But alas, God has different plans and so I leave with all that up in the air. I emailed my SW and asked that she please send the HS straight to AGCI while I'm gone so that I can mail everything off when I get back, fingers crossed.

Please pray for a safe journey for us Girls Gone Silly, speedy HS acceptance, and my sweet hubband who can't vacation because he has to work. He's going to miss me a lot and the pups will also be mighty lonely. He has plenty of clean laundry but he doesn't eat at home when I'm gone. That means he'll be having meals out at lunch and dinner (since I'm not here to make his lunch...or breakfast) which includes a lot of Lenny's Sub Sandwhiches. We keep that place in business.

Enough. Until I return...this is me! Yay!

i heart john piper

my pal glo really turned me on to this guy because he is one of her favorite authors/speakers and well, i secretly want to be just like her.

check this out.

happy monday!

p.s. still no homestudy yet. but i didn't publish my unhappy post, deleted it, and replaced it with this good stuff. : )

oooow! i feel good...duhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuh

I knew that I would!

(duhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuh)

So good, so good...

baby, I almost got you!

**I added a music player...how fun is that?!**

Ok, so that's my newest rendition of an old song. I have this habit of rewriting things to make them work for my life. You know, if you had your own tv show about your life and it had a theme song or montage...well, my life does! And watch out, because I am singing them often.

So, our completed homestudy should be finished this weekend. I know, this weekend! Tomorrow morning I have an appointment at the Houston Passport Office to get that. Yep, I will have my whole passport in one day. Yippie! And (and I love it when there's an "and") if our homestudy is done this weekend, then I can send it to CIS on Monday or Tuesday. And that will be the last stop before we can be official!

Now do you see why I feel so good? So that you may all feel good too, I am adding some feel good pics! That's right, some generosity just for you! Enjoy -- and FEEL GOOD! Yay!

by popular demand

Ok, here it is. You can stop checking our site six times a day to see if I've posted about it yet. Goodness gracious. Ha ha, like we're really that popular or in demand. But thanks for checking in and well-wishing!

Here are some fun things to know:
About our house:
1. I'm pretty sure it's never been this clean.
2. I'm pretty sure it will never be this clean again.
3. I'm really astonished at what we accomplished.

About our social worker:
1. I'm just guessing here, but I'm guessing she's about nineteen years old.
2. Her vocabulary is surprising...and I'll leave it at that.
3. She drives the biggest Ford 350 diesel pickup ever.

About our homevisit:
1. It started two hours late.
2. It's finally over.
3. We should have the completed homestudy next weekend.

I'm sure by now you're guessing that our homevisit didn't go exactly as we had pictured it would. But that's totally ok because I like seeing God's sense of humor and know that it doesn't even really matter anyway. I am really glad that we got so much clean, though. So there you go, two good things happened:
1. A really really clean house
2. One more step closer to our baby.

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering about our previous predictament of name choosing, we've finally decided on a name for either a boy or a girl. Yay for that. Now if only someone would get us a baby...

tomorrow is the day!

I'm nervous!!!
In about 25 hours our social worker will be arriving at our home to judge us. Ha ha. I mean, I know she's not judging us, but she's kinda judging us. So I'm nervous. Really nervous. And my house is a wreck. I'm off tomorrow so that I can start the mammoth cleaning process bright and early -- at 5:25am when hubband leaves for work. That will give me over 12 hours of pure, unadulterated cleaning time.

I wonder what all I can get done in that time...

Two weeks ago when I thought our home visit was that week, I made this massive list of things to do. I should start check, check, checking things off that list as soon as possible. I have done most of our laundry today. Even though I'm not really sure that she'll even be checking our laundry room, and I'm sure she expects some laundry to be in there, I still think there should only be enough to look like I didn't do it all before she got here. Like, maybe I'll leave an undershirt, a pair of socks, and a couple of washcloths or something. Did I really just think that? Am I really staging my laundry room? I told you that I'm nervous.

I've wasted enough precious time blogging when I should be cleaning! Let the whirlwind begin!

yay yay yippie yay!

Christina and Me 02/07

This March marks the final "spring break" of my life. How exciting. My dear friend, Christina, is finishing her last semester of law school and so this is also her last spring break. We decided to combine our powers of fun and take a little trip together to commemorate our last attempt at sping breakdom. Her Aunt Spicy (no joke, not an undercover name) is a travel agent and was looking for a good deal for us to anywhere. This idea really excited me because I had no clue where we were going and for those of you who don't know yet,

I LOVE SURPRISES!!!!

Christina and Me again before a weekend shopping extravaganza 12/07

We are booking a cruise tomorrow! Yay! Neither of us have ever been on a cruise so we're very excited to go on this adventure. Also, one of the excursion choices is called "Race Fantastique" and has descriptors like "race", "secret code", and "awards ceremony". Who doesn't want to play that game?

In other news:

• I had a cousin pass away on Friday of last week. He was young and has a beautiful wife and two kids. It was definately a surprise and this hit our family really hard. Please be praying for them
• Our doctor appointments are this week. This marks our last paperwork for homestudy and dossier!
• Homestudy scheduled for next week. Yay!
• Hubband's hobby room is actually getting clean! I am so proud of hubband. It's already 100x better. Yay!

Here we are celebrating the capture of a highly ellusive bit of adoption paperwork. I had traveled to four different places! In three different cities! We celebrated with this huge piece of cake from The Chocolate Bar. Please notice how obscenly huge that cake is. And no, we didn't finish it. But we'll try harder next time.

Does anyone else notice how we always seem to kinda match? Funny.

Or how totally unflattering my shirt it?

"Hello, Donation pile? Meet this green shirt. "

news

Well, Monday morning I received a phone call from my mother that my aunt had died. While this seems so very sad, it is definately a huge blessing to both my aunt and the rest of my family. She has been very sick with arthritis and Alzheimers Disease for years. But now her body and her mind are both completely restored in the kingdom of God and she is happy to be with those who have gone before her.

Needless to say that Monday (and the following days) did not turn out as I had planned. Instead we made travel arrangements. I was really hoping that we'd be able to finish up our last minute stuff and house preparing for the Home Study visit, but alas, after a teary-eyed breakdown, I was forced to realize that it just wasn't meant to be.

My hubband is so very encouraging. He reminded me that this should be a happy time with as little stress as possible and that one week or two weeks would not put a kink in God's plan. The Lord is in charge of our adoption and He is certainly in charge of time! (Sometimes I really need to be reminded of this...)

We've rescheduled for the end of the month with our Social Worker which does change some things. For instance, we're not meeting my goal of March 1. Again, my timing doesn't matter so it's ok. We're still going to get our perfect baby so it's ok. Clearly I just need a refresher course in patience.

My dear blogbuddies, thank you so much for your encouragement and support over the last few days. I'll come back and read it again in a week or so. I'll need it again as I now thing with the extra time I'm going to try and finish 1-2 more projects around the house. Painting our bathroom and landscaping the front yard. I know, get real, right? I need something to keep me preoccupied.

If you've been around since the first posts, you know that our adoption is not a secret, but our timing is a surprise. We have planned to wait until the paperwork is in to let the cat out of the bag. A handful of friends know that we've started the process (we needed letters of rec. and prayers) but mostly, everyone just thinks we're going to start later this summer. Now that we're nearly finished with the paperwork, we're trying to come up with fun or inventive ways of telling our family and friends. I need some suggestions.

Gimmie all you got.

Hit me with your best shot!

ahhh! time is up!

So I got an email today stating that our home visit for the home study is this coming Thursday...Valentine's Day. Which means I have four days to get everything else done and the house ready and I'm a little bit in panic mode because I feel like there is still so much to do!!!

Our SW, Amanda, will come out to our house Thursday, take a week to write our homestudy, send it to AGCI for proofing, and then in another week's time have it finalized and done. Three weeks until our homestudy is completely complete!!!

I have so much to do! How in the world am I going to get it all done?

Eeek!