June Update

I wish there were tons to share, but there isn't. Our immigration papers have been submitted and were received, but it will probably be a month or two till we get approval. And so we wait... The kids and I have been working on VBS decorations this week. We are making this really cool airplane hanger for our set that should look a lot like the one pictured. Robbie was picked to play in a kickball at Progressive Field last week to represent his class. His school helped to raise money for the Kick-It Childhood Cancer charity. He had a great time and we all got to tag along for the tour of ballpark. We finished the day with a meal in Little Italy and a trip to the Westside Market.

Asian food trials

Here are the foods the kids picked to try out from the Asian market. I would say we had less than a 50% hit rate. Pork buns ( surprisingly good!) peach soda, plantains, cilantro and sugar crackers were all very good. Coconut soda, chicken buns, ham & cheese crackers ( yes they were as bad as they sound) and tea cookies (soap like texture and taste?) not so much. All the cookies we tried weren't too bad either. The ramen style noodles are a little different than "american" ones too - comes with an oil seasoning pack and sort of a funky flavor.   Still waiting to try the dumplings...

Family pictures

I though I would post some of our family pictures that we have been taking for our dossier.

We borrowed our canine "nephew" from next door

May update

Home visits are complete! Actually the visits were pretty painless (we did have to move our "ammo" away from our bb gun though ;) however our social worker was very nice. It was great motivation to keep the house picked up for 3 whole weeks. We are waiting to have our home study written up and hopefully it should be complete by next week. Our next thing is - immigration approval to be able to adopt a child from China. We have heard that it can take 30 - 90 days to get approval. Once we have that document, we can finish having all our documents sealed (at the county, state, federal and Chinese consulate levels) and THEN it all can go to China.

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!!