Awesome discovery

For my 40th birthday, my buddies Diane and Rhonda took me to the Asian Towne Center. This is where we discovered the Asia Food Company in Cleveland. It is an Asian grocery store about the size of a typical grocery store. It had a gigantic selection of food and the prices were really reasonable. There had to be 80 vegetables that I didn't have a clue about - everything was really fresh though! The plantains, cilantro and sweet potato were great. Lots of fresh seafood too - you could even buy your own living frog for your next meal. It was amazing to walk around and truly not know what 90% of the items even were. Kind of giving me an insight of what our child will feel when I take him to our local grocery. What a whole new world! I am excited to bring our son back here and just to see what he thinks and what are his favorites.

April Update

We are all caught up with the paperwork that we currently have - everything is sent out or in waiting for another piece of paperwork.  We have finished all our training to this point and have two wonderful certificates suitable for framing.  Next week we meet with our social worker for the first time and this week we will hopefully have our fire inspection.  Tomorrow marks our 1 month mark from our application being accepted. 

We have been in the process of gathering pictures with the two of us in them.  Which we don't really have a lot of - if we do we are usually acting pretty goofy.  I keep trying to remember to keep our camera handy.

Paperwork - Game On!

March 21 - As we waited to have our application approved, I said outloud several times "I wish I had something to work on". As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for. We have more paperwork to gather than I would ever wish on my worst enemy. It sort of feels like a test - if you can survive the paper chase, you certainly are able enough to adopt. Ok, I am being a little snarkey.

Actually I feel blessed to this - we are getting baby steps closer to bringing our child home. It just seems that every step has sort of hoop we must jump through. We don't accept checks, we only take cash or you will need to get a money order for that... Black pen not blue. Your notarized document must be approved by county clerk, then the secretary of state, then the US Dept of State and then the Chinese Embassy.

Some good things though - we have finished half of the training we need to do, instead of having various parts of our paperwork go to three differnt chinese consulates, it now can go through just 1 and today the social worker called for our first meeting! However, she did mention that she was sending us a letter to have us collect more paperwork :) Bring on the hoops!!

Application Accepted

March 10 - As I finished posting the last post, we got the news we have been waiting for - our agency application was accepted. We can begin the next round and start compiling our mounds of paperwork and start our home study. Jeff and I were so excited that we immediately filled out every piece of paperwork that they sent. We decided to celebrate with some sparkling cider ( we know how to party) and ordered Chinese food for dinner.

Do you want to know a secret?

Coming to a decision in February... We became positive that we wanted to adopt after a lot of praying, reading, exploring, hushed talking in the bathroom, crying (happy tears)... the answers to the roller coster of questions started to appear. God willing - we could do it and we would adopt from China. Being the careful introspective thinkers that we are, we decided to wait to tell the kids for some time.

So, 20 hours later... The Beatles song came on "Do you wanna know a secret?" As I sang the song and walked to the basement, I said aloud " I don't even have any secrets... Oops yeah I do!" Jeff hurriedly followed me down to the basement to ask if I wanted to tell the kids. So much for waiting or announcing it over a meal of Chinese food, but I was pretty excited to tell them.

We first had them guess. Shelby (16) first guessed a new car, then a puppy and then adopting! They were both so excited, more than we could have ever wished. Robbie's only concern was that he didn't want to have to sleep on the top bunk (easy fix, the beds can be seperated). They both even volunteered their rooms.

It was so great to finally be able to share "the secret" about adopting and openly talk in front of them.

Adopting from China

Anyway, I thnk a lot of people probably already know why I am posting again. We're adopting a child from China! One of the reasons we are adopting is because we were really touched by another family's adoption from China and their blog postings several years ago. It changed my heart from "wow adoption is a really awesome thing" to "wow adoption is amazing and maybe we really could adopt a child of our own someday". So if you're reading this beware :)

The first time Jeff and I ever spoke about adopting was on the way to Florida for our honeymoon almost 17 years ago. Little did we know as we talked about our hopes and dreams, God was about to give us Shelby nine months later. Over the years, I brought adoption up mostly in passing, it really never seemed like the right time or we were the right people for the job either. I have prayed about it for a long time. Actually "adoption" is in the very center of my prayer page in my journal for the past four years. My prayer eventually turned into God if it's ever gonna happen you will make it happen, if not I would have to be ok with that.

Then came December 31, 2011. Jeff and I enjoyed a 90 minute car ride to our friends in Bellevue - alone - which doesn't happen very often. As we got on the turnpike, Jeff turned to me and asked if I still wanted to adopt. Seriously?? I felt like I was in a daze for the next 30 minutes as we talked more in depth about it.

Then came the next month of the emotional roller coaster. Could we really do this? How could we ever afford this? Would our family think it's ok? Where to adopt from? Boy or girl? Baby? Preschooler? School age? And a few other thousand questions...

New Blog

I had a blog for several years - actually 8 years (ok, I really only blogged for 5 of those years)!  Since my introduction to facebook, my blogging kind of just stopped.  With all our recent excitement, I wanted to get started again.  However, I realized my old blog had quite a bit of personal information (last name & home town..) posted on it. I didn't want to risk renaming it and losing it, so I decided to go ahead and start another one and keep the old one for safe keeping. 

I have struggled for over a week for a new blog name - so I thought I would pick some words that represent where our kids are at in their stages of life. Shelby is our new driver, robbie is our lover of all things football and China is where our child waits.   I hope the name changes in the future to something like - College Student with a full ride, Kid who keeps his room clean and a son that I am holding in my lap.  So much to look forward to!!