30 days

I've been contemplating for a while doing a 30 day blog challenge, and trying to write every day for a month. I'd decided on Sunday that I should do it, and that I should start this week. Then on Monday night Jacob and I were talking about things and ... well, okay, we were fighting. We're both kind of stressed out right now (Jacob especially), and with frayed nerves our tempers flared and, well, it wasn't very nice. So I knelt down, crying, and poured my heart out to God. I asked for help in a number of areas, but I also asked what I could do. What can _I_ do to make this situation better? I don't know, so please let me know how I can help things. A lot of my questions and pleading went unanswered (at least for now), but one thing I felt strongly was that I should fast from facebook. For 30 days.

Now, any of you who know me at all know that this is a _big_ _deal_. I spend a lot of time online, and particularly on facebook. It's where I have support groups for adoption and various other things. It's how I commiserate with others going through the same things, and it's where I ask for advice. More than that, with the amount we move around, it's how I stay connected to most of my friends, and many of my family members as well. The thought of not getting on facebook for a month nearly had me in tears again.

But, I asked God for help, and I'd specifically asked what I could do to help things, and when I ask for revelation and then get some, I feel rather obligated to listen to it (especially if I want to receive any more!). So I got back on facebook long enough to set up a few things and tell everyone I was taking a break (and post my e-mail address so people would know how to get a hold of me, since facebook is generally the best method to reach me), and then I shut it down. I'm on my second day of the facebook fast, and so far it's easier than I thought it would be. I guess maybe if it's something God wants me to do He's willing to help me do it.

Also, maybe this is just what I needed to get this 30 day blogging challenge off the ground. After all, I need somewhere to share my thoughts, and if facebook is unavailable... So, stay tuned over the next month for a post every day! And since my usual computer/blogging time is after a lot of my friends go to sleep, I'm going to try to stay a day ahead, and write the posts at night to post mid-day. So keep an eye out for them! Hopefully you can all help me make it through the next month, and hopefully this will help my marriage, my husband's job, and our adoption process!

Progress!

So, I'll admit it. I'm a terrible blogger. There's a reason why I've pretty much stuck to group blogs before this: then when I don't post for an entire year (true story) there are others around to pick up my slack. Not so much here, so I'm determined to be better. Don't get your hopes up too high; I doubt I'll be able to change my stripes overnight. But I promise to be better! (Okay, so that's not too hard, considering I only posted once in the entire month of January. One more post this month and I'll already be doing better!)

With that said, let me update you on our progress! We've made it from the "New Commitments" page on Reece's Rainbow, through the "Homestudy in Progress" page, and are onto "Compiling Dossier". That's right -- our home study is done! The kids and I went down to the TX Secretary of State on Monday and got it (and a lot of other documents) apostilled. We sent the home study off to USCIS with our application to adopt a foreign citizen, and we sent our first paperwork of to EE to get submitted to the government there! It's kind of crazy how excited I was to know that the papers I had in my hand just a couple of days before had arrived in the same country as my daughter!

We still have a few more papers to prepare for our dossier, and then we wait for USCIS approval. I have a lot I've been wanting to say about the adoption process, our daughter, our families, and all sorts of other things, so I promise I'll post again soon!

Home Study Visit and Our First Dossier Paperwork!

I suppose I should start with a brief explanation for my friends who don't know much about the adoption process. I'll summarize here, but I'll try to go into more detail later, and if you have any questions, please ask! The first thing we need to do to bring our little girl home is to get a home study, which involves gathering a bunch of paperwork and then having a social worker visit your home and interview you. This home study is then sent to USCIS to get approval from the US government to adopt. Then we have to compile a lot more paperwork to send to our daughter's country to show them how we are able to care for her so that they will eventually give us permission to adopt. That said...

We had our home study visit yesterday, and I think it went pretty well. At least, our social worker made it sound like she was going to recommend we be able to adopt rather than shutting down our plans right now. (Honestly, I knew that was unlikely, but that didn't keep me from worrying about it. After all, I've never had to get permission from someone else to be able to parent my other children, so this is all new (and kind of scary) territory for me.) I have a total of 4 things left to do and send to our social worker to be all done with what we need for that part of the process, and none should take long. I have to finish up 2 adoption training classes (online, and hopefully I can finish them tonight), I need to measure the rooms upstairs and finish drawing up our floor plan, Jacob needs to write his autobiography, and we still need one letter of reference. But hopefully all of that will be done by the end of the week! Then I just have to wait for our social worker to write it all up so I can send it to USCIS! (I think she'll be fast.)

I'm also starting (slowly) on the paperwork for our dossier. The first thing I did was order marriage certificates, because they were the only thing I had to do by mail, and I didn't know how long that would end up taking. The answer: not long! I ordered them and they came just a couple of days later, and then I sent them back to the East Coast to be apostilled (apostilling basically means a state official putting a pretty gold seal on the paper to say that the official who notarized the paper was, in fact, a valid notary). Less than 2 weeks later and they're back in my hands with pretty gold seals all ready to be sent to Eastern Europe! One paper down and only 30 or 40 more to go...

I promise I really will do a blog redesign so you can see our little girl's cute face all the time sometime soon, but in the meantime, I'll leave you with another picture of it here:

Happy Holidays!

Nothing much to report on the adoption front. We're having our home visit next week, and we're starting to work on the stack of papers needed for our dossier. Mostly, though, we've been enjoying some time together with family and our little ones that are already here. We've also been re-arranging and organizing our bedroom, and even though it's not done, it's the cleanest it's been since we moved in.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas, and that you can continue to enjoy the end of this year and the beginning of the new one! I haven't had a chance to put pictures from this Christmas on my computer yet, so I'll leave you with a picture from last year.

Introducing Our Daughter!

We're excited to finally be able to share with you the little girl who we hope to make our daughter!

We first found her picture on Reece's Rainbow, and have learned more about her since from families who have adopted from her orphanage and met her. She is listed as "Brigitte" on Reece's Rainbow, but that is not her real name, just a pseudonym used by them to protect her privacy. We'll continue to use it here on our blog for the same reason. The picture above is the one shown on Reece's Rainbow, and it's probably about a year old. We do have other pictures of her, some more recent, and I look forward to sharing some of them here, but this is the picture I first fell in love with, so I wanted to share it first.

As things stand now she will be available for international adoption in June, so we are planning on traveling to her country in Eastern Europe then to bring her home. There is a small chance she will be adopted in her home country before we get there, but we feel like God has led us here, so we're trusting that he will continue to watch over this process.

There are a number of things we need to finish before we can adopt, but we're working on them. We have a social worker coming to visit our home in 2.5 weeks, and we're gathering lots of papers to send to our little girl's government to show them we are capable of caring for her.

Soon I'll update the blog to feature her picture as well, and we'll also get a button to put on the sidebar that links to our family's donation page, if anyone wants to donate toward the costs of our adoption. I looked the other day and found we already had our first donation! I don't know who gave it (I promise I'll find out soon so I can send you a real thank-you note), but whoever it was, Thank you!

A Few Updates

I know, I've been horrible about keeping up on this blog. I promise I'll do better in the coming months! But here are a few updates from the last month:

1. There's still no official word on the special needs list in our girl's country. Maybe in January we'll know for certain when she'll be available. (Just to remind everyone, she'll be available in June no matter what.)

2. The little boy on my sidebar, who I was a warrior for, now has a committed family, and they have accepted his file in his country, and they get to meet him tomorrow! (Actually, with the time difference, in just a few hours!) If you, like me, want to follow along, their blog is http://threemorejacobsons.blogspot.com/.

3. I finally set up an etsy shop to sell some flower hair clips and cards to help raise money for our adoption. I'm going to figure out how to put a link in my sidebar, but until then, the shop is at http://www.etsy.com/shop/vadascreations. The pictures aren't the best, but I promise the stuff is super cute! And I have a whole bunch more cards and clips to add, so if you want something specific keep checking back or send me an e-mail.

4. We're working on "officially" committing to our girl, so hopefully soon we'll get to put her picture here! At that point we'll also have a link you can use to make tax-deductible donations to her adoption, if you're so inclined.

5. We're working on our home study, should have our home visit later this month, and will hopefully have it completed by early January. We're also starting work on dossier documents to send to our daughter's country.

So, even though I haven't been updating, things have been progressing, and hopefully will continue to do so at an even faster rate!

Keeping It Real

So, October has come and gone, and we continue to wait on word from our daughter's country to help us get a better idea of the timeline that we'll be able to adopt her. Even though I know she should be available for adoption in about 7 months even if her country doesn't change anything, most days the waiting is just hard. Sometimes it feels like she's not really real, and like she'll never be here. On one of those days I comforted myself by shopping.

Now, if you know me at all, you know that I don't like shopping. A bookstore is the only kind of store that will actually inspire me to leave the house (not that I don't ever go to other stores, especially the grocery store -- I just never really want to). But don't worry, I didn't have to leave the house! (Yes, I _adore_ the fact that I can shop online and have things sent directly to my house. I wish I could get more groceries this way.)

So what kind of shopping did I do? I'm glad you asked. I went on ebay and bought a lot of little girl clothes.




This is just a sampling of the cute clothes that I bought for our new little one. Even though it feels like it'll be ages before she's home, I now have a few reminders sprinkled throughout the house, and every time I catch sight of them it makes me smile and remember that she really is coming.

And now, for an additional dose of cuteness:


My boys love to play with the camera, and usually when I pick it up again I find interesting pictures of their toys taken from weird angles, or pictures of cartoons on the TV. But occasionally I find a gem like this, taken by my 3yo of my 5 and 6yos. I can't wait until their sister is home to join in their antics.