1. We put Seth's "magic circle" in and as of now it is working great. It's definitely a learning process for all of us because we have no idea about contacts.
2. We are trying to spend as much family time together as possible. We took the kids to see Lego Batman and I am almost ashamed to admit that Jon and I both slept through a lot of it. Oops.
3. Zoey finished up Upward and it is amazing the improvement she had made this year. I love watching her play.
4. Seth and Thad are still loving preschool. They really don't like anyone in their class if you can't tell.
5. We just spent last weekend in Gatlinburg at our annual CYC trip. It was an awesome trip and we made some crazy awesome memories.
6. The boys are living miserable lives.
February finally brought a surprise that several of us had been working on for MANY months. Jon and I have some close family friends who we love dearly. Katy Beth has always wanted to go to New York and so I convinced her mom, Kay, that we should take her for her birthday. Kay was super excited and we made the initial plans and booked the hotel and flights in SEPTEMBER. Y'all this trip wasn't until February and we booked in September. Here is a word of advice, DON'T EVER PLAN A SURPRISE FIVE MONTHS IN ADVANCE. That's a long time to keep a secret especially for three women who can't keep a secret. Well we made it until about 3 days before her birthday and that is REAL good, people. I don't know if I can stress how physically and emotionally draining keeping a secret of this magnitude was but we survived.
Here are a few photos from our trip. It was awesome and we had a great time. I also introduced the girls to a Carmel Apple Spice from Starbucks. Go get you one. You're welcome.
I've saved the best for last, Lila. We are making progress. Slowly but surely. We had our last homestudy visit last week. We are waiting for it to be edited and approved by our adoption agency. Here is what the process looks like from here. We are working on our dossier which is made up of several key pieces.
Dossier
1. A bunch of paper work that has to be signed, notarized, certified and authenticated by several groups of people. We have most of this paperwork done and waiting.
2. Homestudy-almost finished.
3. I-800A-This is approval from US immigration which allows us to adopt a child from a specific country. It will be amended later in the process to allow us to specially adopt Lila. We can not file our I-800A until our home study is completely finished.
Once all of these steps are finished we send our dossier to China and the waiting begins again. If you didn't follow the crazy explanation above I am including the diagram I put in the last post. It is a lot easier to understand.
Finally, we have sold almost 300 of our puzzle pieces. WOW! Your generosity is insane. You guys are more than welcome to buy one if you are still interested. We are still looking at a few different fundraisers. One of which is a Both Hands Project. We love the idea of this project. Look it up. The idea behind it is incredible. We have the next couple steps funded thanks to your generosity but we have some big steps ahead. Once our home study is finished we will start applying for various grants. Please continue to pray for us. We are racing to get to her but our hands are still tied in a lot of ways.
If any of you are still reading, thanks. I love you all. You are such incredible pieces of our family's foundation.
