Tagged

So I escaped being tagged for 12 months then right when we got extremely busy and got our referral I was tagged twice by two different friends :) So I'm just now getting to it. 7 things about me:

1. I am a health nut! We follow a mostly vegan diet and LOVE good food. I do have a sweet tooth though see #3.

2. I love big dangley fancy earrings. This is really the only type of jewelry that I really wear much besides my wedding ring.

3. I LOVE sweets, candy, cake, brownies you name it I like it (except pumpkin pie). My theory is I will eat healthy all day and reward myself with a small piece of dessert at night...life's too short to not enjoy! P.S. I have a wonderful vegan cookie recipe

4. I HATE shopping!!! For food it is okay, but anything else I hate.

5. I'm a terrible traveler. Yeah, I know, my poor husband on our trip to ET. I feel for him already

6. I love my friends and family deeply, passionately and loyally.

7. Jesus is the driving force in my life and he has given me the gifts of mercy and encouragement. I do my best each day to use these gifts to help those that he lays on my heart.

Referral Day!

Wow, I sure got in trouble for not sharing more info yesterday hehe. For those of you who have not heard, our agency requires that we don't post pictures, names or personal info about the child until he is home, so this will be fairly limited. We will share what we can so here you go. After six days short of six months on the waiting list we finally got to see our baby. Baby "M" is a beautiful 2 month old baby boy. He is so sweet and we were blessed with having 40+ pictures of him. Julie says he has a very unique story, which we are going to keep private. He is healthy, and all his measurements are very good! We feel so lucky to have photos of him from when he was only a few days old. I can't wait for the travel group to take updated pics for us.




Here is how my day went...perfect!

We woke up and had a chiropractor appointment. It was an AMAZINGLY beautiful fall day out side! It has been kind of cloudy and icky before and now today, but for one shining day it was gorgeous. So in honor of the beautiful day I decided to take my daughter to the park and have a picnic lunch with my husband. We got burritos and went to a park near J's work. We ate and played and had a great time. When J's lunch was over he said he had to get back to work, but if he finished up some projects for next week he could get off early. So hearing this I shooed him back to work to hurry up and get done:) Well, I was about ready to pack up and come home but my daughter said "NO, not yet mommy!" So I thought "well, we should stay and enjoy the day more." We did, and not 20 minutes later I hear my phone singing "Africa" by Toto. I think my brain froze so I had to look at the caller ID to see if it was really who I thought it was and sure enough it was! I answered and Julie said I have a little boy to talk to you about. I think my voice got a few pitches higher and I said "Really, I'm so excited!" (they must hear the dumbest things from us moms in that moment ha) So she told me all about him and I tried to take it all in while forming 100s of questions in my mind. After the conversation was over I told A "you are a big sister today" she said quite matter-of-factly, "Yeah, I am" silly girl. So I hung up, called J and left the park right away. J got off work and ended up right behind me in traffic. We were about 15 mins from home but traffic was TERRIBLE! I tried to be patient and finally we made it home and dashed into the house. We spent the whole afternoon looking at pictures, calling friends and family, emailing like crazy and getting in contact with our adoption pediatrician. We had our date night all set up so I got ready as fast as I could and we headed out to celebrate. We had a great dinner of salad and clam chowder. and then we went to a coffee house for dessert and sat and chatted for a while. We were going to bowl but it was league night :( We had a great time! Since we don't have family up here we are going to have a celebration party next Friday I think with friends up here. Any of you CO folk are welcome too!

Thanks for all the congrats we received! It is so nice to have support of good friends, family, and blog stalkers :)

We Got The Call!

We got our referral today!!!! It feels so weird to actually be typing this instead of reading it from someone else's blog. I'll post about the day and how it all went later, but now I have to go get ready for our date. We had a date already set up with a babysitter for tonight so it worked out perfectly and we are going to go celebrate!

Since the phone isn't ringing...

I have been trying to keep myself so busy that I don't have time to wonder if the phone is going to ring, so here is what we did today.

I had heard from another adoptive mom here in town that a shop had ET chicken crepes so we decided to go try them for lunch. Much to my disappointment they no longer make them :( We tried other things from the menu and they were good, but I was definitely disappointed! After lunch we were walking back to our car and passed a few shops that I'd never been to (we were down town). We passed a game store and my daughter said "lets go in here mom" at first my defalt mommy "No" was going to come out but then I thought well, why not it looks neat and I've never been in there. So we went in and looked around. They had some really cool puzzles and I was hoping to find an African one. Well, sure enough they did have some. There are two REALLY cool ones that were a little pricey but I did find a fun one for $7. Here are some pictures of it. I plan to glue it and hang it on our little guy's wall.





The puzzle is 100 pieces almost 4 feet long. My daughter had fun putting it together with me. When we were done she said "It's Africa, we made if for "M" my brother" How cute is that!! So this was a good distraction for the day. I hope I can keep myself distracted for as long as it takes to get THE CALL.

Back to 2...I think

Okay so the family that was put back on the wait list just got a new referral! As long as this goes as planned that puts us back on the list at:



Like many who have posted before me I welcome the weekend because I know that if my phone rings it has nothing to do with a potential referral. I do have a set ring tone for AGCI, "Africa" by Toto, but still any ring and I get excited. Two days of peace and then we will see what next week brings. October 23 would mark 6 months on the waiting list and I post a while ago that it would be cool because that is my brother's birthday, but I'd really rather not wait 13 more days if I don't have to. The "pumpkin vase" that my necklace is on was a cute project my friend's mom invited me and my daughter to do last week. They turned out so cute that thought I'd do my number post with it this month. Keep checking back next week because I REALLY hope to have my "referral day" post soon!

New Number

But almost:




Okay so here's the scoop...we were unofficially two and then officially two for a few minutes, but now we are back to three because someone ahead of us lost their referral and were put back on the list. We don't know details, but we are just glad to know for sure what number we are. Today was a bummer of a day for me finding out we went backwards and also that time between referral and travel is now looking more like 3-5 months vs. the 2-3 that we had been anticipating. I'll just have to trust that God will continue to give me patience. I do want to send out a congrats to my friend Amy who got to "meet" her baby girl yesterday. I know I'll be there soon and I can't wait!

Okay for those of you (Cassie) who are checking our blog hoping to hear new numbers, we still have not heard. I was really thinking we would today, but no word yet. I know that AGCI is planning on giving out new numbers this week through email, and I'm hoping that we also get a call. Since I think we are #2 we should be getting a call to go over the referral process even if we don't have our referral quite yet. A friend of mine who is number 1 on the girl list got this call a week ago and I have been hoping for the call soon too. Now that courts are open things should be processing again, but I know it will take some time for them to get caught up and back to normal. I kind of feel like we are sitting in traffic and the light is green way up ahead but we have to wait for all the other cars to start driving before we can actually start going ourselves. While I am very anxious and excited I am still managing to maintain a peaceful and patient attitude about the wait which is only due to knowing that the Lord has his timing. This attitude may change very quickly if we go another two weeks with zero referrals, but I'm trying my best and the Lord is calming me. For those of you who know me well I hope you can see how clearly this peace is from God because you know how impatient and passionate I usually am. The thought just came to my mind that God did the same thing to me while I was pregnant. I was so laid back and calm durring pregnancy (aside from the normal crying at the drop of a hat). I didn't have severe mood swings I just felt calm and at ease and that is overall how I feel now which is SO nice, what a blessing! I can't say that this will continue while I'm waiting to travel, but I'll take what I can get :)