Go Time

Hello all! We got some big news yesterday! We found out when we will next see our boy!!

We're going to transition over to a private Facebook group to update everyone from now until our adoption is final (and safe to discuss publicly). We'd love to have you all join us, so just let me or Drew know if you want to follow along during this time.

We are so excited! And our to-do list is a mile long!

We can't wait to see you, sweet boy!

Progress

We made some real progress this past week! Here is the week in photos. Stay tuned until the end, and I will fill in the gaps with words.

One day last week, I spilled coffee all over my shirt --> right as I walked into the office. Good thing I had on a sweater to button up...

I've been goofing around making a playlist for Little Man's musical enjoyment and education. So far, he has a lot of his grandfather's favorites. We are taking suggestions.

We finished the online portion of our parent training! Phew!

Drew had all of our documents apostilled (which is the fancy way of saying our notary stamps basically have to be re-notarized by the state). Everything is in the mail to our agency, so we're just waiting on trip one dates!

We hit 2000 pageviews last week! Woohoo!

 The next two are not very clear pictures -- camera phones have limits. Sorry.

We went to watch one of our favorite college students perform in a University-wide talent show this past weekend! In this act, Landon played guitar while his friend performed a comedic improv song.

In this act, he sang and played a song on acoustic guitar. Landon has amazing talent! He was one of only two freshmen chosen to perform.

We were lucky to have Landon's family stay at our house while they visited for the weekend and went to see the performance. Landon's younger brother, Grayson, made himself quite comfortable! (As it should be.) We just love this family and feel blessed to be able to offer them a place to stay!

So to fill in some little details: If you gathered from the fourth photo, we are getting VERY close to finding out when our first trip will be to meet our son! As soon as we have dates, you can bet your bottom dollar we will be telling everyone we see! [Two points if you can name the bottom dollar reference. (note: points have no monetary value and are non-redeemable)]

We will be taking orphange donations with us on our first trip, so keep a lookout for a post on what they need most! On a similar note, I have finally worked out descriptions of most of our costs for this process. Click on "The Costs" tab at the top to see an estimate of all our fees, the money we have raised thus far, and our remaining fundraising needs!

This Week

So, I had this post pretty much ready to go, but then yesterday afternoon was a bit rough. Don't worry! Everything will work out. We just got some news of a slight delay with our training, and this mama does NOT like more time being put between her and her son! We talked through all of our options though, and I know we are going to be just fine. After Drew got home and talked me down, the rest of the evening was actually fairly relaxing. So anyways, that was just a little look at the emotions that come along with this process, and we will now move on to other news.

After the garage sale, Drew put several of the remaining large items on Craigslist. We had to sell off enough of the items on Monday and Tuesday to be able to return one of the box trailers on Wednesday morning. We managed to empty the trailer on time and made about $340 dollars. Not too shabby. For the most part, we just listed the furniture at the same price marked during the garage sale.

We still have several items to go, but it's nice to see progress. Once everything is out of the bonus room, we will finally get to set up Little Man's new room. The plan is to move the guest room out of the second bedroom and create a guest/game room in the bonus room. This may just be a paper pregnancy, but I have been dying to get his room all set up for him! The nesting bug has definitely hit our home.

This weekend, the plan was to meet with a family friend to try to get our required face-to-face training out of the way. She is a licensed social worker and had generously offered to put something together for us to cover this new requirement. It turns out, however, that we are going to have to wait for a different scheduled training that our agency has selected. We are not super happy about this (thus my emotional breakdown yesterday), but we will do whatever it takes. These hours are the last big item we need before we can submit to get our first trip dates. And you know what that means...we finally get to meet our Little Man!! Drew and I both cannot wait for that day to come!

And what's a post without pictures?

Seriously. How cute was he as a puppy?!

August and September in a Flash

Don't worry! We're still chugging along! We've been plowing through so much, in fact, that we forgot to take time to update you all.

August:
- Leah and Jonathan, some of our best friends, got married.
- The items stored up for the garage sale doubled.
- Some friends from Estonia came to stay with us, and brought their adorable baby girl. 
- Drew turned 30! We had a great time celebrating with friends and family.
- I babysat for our friends, and Sherlock was very jealous of the sweet, tiny baby.
- We applied for our travel visas.
- We had to do extra medical check-ups to add to our home study. (We braved needles for our Little Man!)

September:
- Our visas arrived in the mail.
- Drew survived the first football game of the season.
- Our home study was finally completed and approved.
- Our church held a special service at a local water park, and we had a great time. We can't wait to bring Little Man along for the next one!
- The adoption law changed in Little Man's country, so we now have to jump through some extra hoops before we can wrap up. (This was a great source of stress for me, while we waited to try to figure out what the new law would mean for our process. Things have settled down now, and we have a plan for how to proceed. I love a good plan.)
- I traveled for work again.
- We have been sorting and purging through our own home in preparation for the garage sale.
- Little Man's room is slowly coming together.
- Our garage sale is set to take place Saturday, September 29. We still need to sort, prep, price and then beg some of our friends to come help us out that morning!

Productive Saturday

We had a very productive day on Saturday. We woke up early, as always, and started off the day by taking a family bike ride. This is always our furry family member's favorite part of the day. I was also excited for the ride because it was my second with my "clipless" pedals and it went really well. (I disagree with the term for describing this type of bike pedal, but that's a post for another day.)

After our bike ride, I wrapped up my first art project for Little Man's room, which just needed a coat of varnish. Drew then went to get his hair cut while I cleaned out/organized the hall closet and tidied up our room. Our next project was shifting the furniture in the front room to make way for our bookcase. As I attempted to fit all of our books on the shelves, Drew started sorting through the storage in the garage.  After a brief lunch break, we worked a little more in the garage, and wrapped up the first session with a pretty significant pile started for our future garage sale. We feel like we've made significant progress today toward being ready for our Home Study visit!

It looks full, but trust me - it's much better now.



We got a bigger bookshelf, and we still had to box up books for the attic...

Sherlock was helping me check out the boxes of stuff gathered for the yard sale.

After some resting, we worked up a grocery list and menu plan for the week and headed over to HEB. Our final project for the day (as set forth by Drew) was to start on Sherlock's second hair cut of the summer. With only half of his hair shaved, he looks really funny right now, but he is well on his way to a "cool" new haircut.

It feels so good to be making progress and to feel as though we are actually in control of something during this process!