When You Wish Upon a Star

Graduation & Throw-Away Thursday

Today my big boy graduated from kindergarten. He looked so handsome in his cap and gown, his tassel swaying from atop his head. Both boys did such a great job singing the songs they learned with their classes during the program. In just a few days J will finish the school year and he'll be one step closer to the first grade. It's *this* that chokes me up and makes me sad. I'm not a mom that cries on the first day of school- no, that day is one of celebration. But the last day, or really the last week in general, is tough for me. It's the sign that he'll no longer have *this* teacher or be in *this* class. It's a sign that he's growing older and far too quickly.

Anyway, enough of my rant. Here's a few pictures from the evening:

 

 

A new blog friend, Kristine, posted a weekly challenge last week. It's called Throw-Away Thursday. You grab a trash bag and throw away items around the house with a 30 minute time cap, counting as you go and trying to get rid of 100 items. I spent my time in the boy's playroom and cleared over 75 items, consisting of broken items, games with missing pieces, and loved-no-longer toys. Some of these items will be put away in the garage until our next garage sale (we have about 2 each year) but most will be tossed.

 

On the adoption front, there's no big news right now. I had my fingerprinting done (total time from in to out was only 18 minutes!) last week but Mark had to reschedule due to a conflict with a very big project with work. Once he gets his new appointment and he has his physical, we are done paperchasing our homestudy! Woot woot!

An Update

I received a call from our coordinator yesterday- we have been unofficially placed in either Tula or Tver regions. We will know as soon as they know, but they felt that the 2 of these regions would be a good fit for us. They are both just outside Moscow (which means no connecting Aeroflot flights!!), do not require blind travel, and allow us to bring in a Dr. easily (since they're both just outside Moscow). It's still sinking in, but my excitement is growing with each thought of what this means for our journey- it's beginning to feel more real- you know, when you see something beyond paper-chasing that really puts you "into" the journey.

They've given us both of these regions because they run very similarly paperwork wise (and will thus give us more to do now instead of later). The "tricky" part of these regions is that they only allow 1 registered family per agency, thus the reason we do not know which we will be placed in. I suppose it has more to do with which family currently registered there accepts a referral first. We were told that one of the regions has a family over there right now. We are the first in line in both regions to be placed next, so it looks like we are moving along quite well.

In other adoption news, Mark & I are currently reading Adoption Parenting. Awesome book which I highly recommend. We are both beginning to feel much better prepared for our daughter with the information it is giving us, and frankly, there's quite a bit of great information that we are applying to our boys; it's certainly written for the adoptive family, but has great information for all children in general. It's a required reading for our agency (part of our Hague-compliance pre-adoption education) and I'm very glad it is!

And in non-adoption excitement:  tomato plant #1 (I currently have 3 growing in my yard) has tiny-pea-size tomatoes that have "sprouted" from it's limbs!!! I'm thrilled to have success in my garden. Once I get my laptop back from those geeks over at Best Buy (and thus have photoshop again), I'll post some pictures. I leave you with an Etsy find that I would love to purchase (but really, needing 6 of them at $8 a pop, they're not in my future), just because they are so stinkin' cute!! (and because pictures make blog reads so much more enjoyable, right??!!)

slowly but surely

Do you want to hear something amazing? My hubby called today and asked if the mail had come yet? I walked out to check and sure enough, it had. Sadly for him, what he was looking for was not in today's mail. However, in amongst the contents of the box were 2 envelopes addressed to each of us from Homeland Security. My adoption friends, you KNOW what this would be!! It was the anticipated letters with our fingerprinting appointments for our I-600A. The funny thing is that I wasn't quite anticipating these letters for a while since we only sent in the initial request 13 days ago. From start to finish is only 3 weeks and 2 days. Last time we cleared 2 months easily! It makes me wonder! But I surely won't wonder too loudly!

Our family had a great day yesterday. We were sure to go to church on Saturday evening so we could sleep in a bit Sunday morning, which was nice. We stopped by a local blueberry festival, but were a day late since all of the blueberries had been picked the day before. So we took the opportunity to run some errands as a family, which is a rarity! We did find brown curtains for Sunshine's room. We purchased a crib bumper from ebay quite a long time ago- before we traveled or even knew we were traveling last time:

 

It's made by Dwell, I believe it's called Garden or Garden Blossom or something along these lines. I think we'll paint the walls a shade similar to the brown on the back wall of the photo, possibly with wainscoting along the bottom of the walls. I had the idea to recreate the vining and flowers from the comforter with threading and felt, so we picked up 2 sets of dark brown sailcloth panels for this future crafting project! It will give me something else to create after our dossier is complete and the real waiting begins.

Here we go

I apologize setting up the private blog and then not posting right away. We have been so busy with school and baseball (J began playing this season) and life in general that it's been hard for me to find a spare moment to sit down and update. All of this, coupled with feelings of fear and uncertainty, not wanting my heart to dive in fully for fear of more heartache.

With that, it's probably clear that our family has begun our process once again. It's very exciting to be back on our journey, but, as I just stated, a little hard, too. We have yet to tell our family- we just don't want to deal with the 20-questions we will certainly get from everyone- and we have a huge family! Some are a little outspoken and to be honest, we just don't want some of their opinions at the moment. We are waiting until our dossier is finished and submitted before opening up about his. The only ones that know/will know are the ones that we need letters and such from for our home study update.

When we began this journey over 2 years ago, I was filled with great hope and anticipation about who our daughter is and how we would feel when we find her, the fairy tale of adding to our family, I suppose. It's returning to me, but very slowly. I've spent many hours in prayer- and continue to do so- because I know it is our Heavenly Father who has put us on this journey and in knowing this, there is a child out there that He has known since the beginning of time would be ours. I opened His word a few days ago and was brought to Galatians, thinking that the verses I was looking up were about something completely different (I meant to turn to Philippians). God spoke to my heart in Gal 1:5- "In love He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with His pleasure and will." He spoke into my heart that just as He has known His children that He has adopted into His family since "the creation of the world" (from Gal 1:4), He most certainly knows the child He has to be a member of our family. I'm resting in that.

I've been catching up on other's blogs over the past week or so. It brings great joy to my heart to update on your stories. I've missed you all!!! Very much!