We are "taking the next step"

I am so excited!!! We are putting our final touches on our application and it looks like, God willing, we will be able to meet our 1/1/2008 application date! (Yes, I realize 1/1/08 is a mail holiday so technically it won’t be mailed until 1/2/2008, but we will have it signed, sealed and ready to mail to Orlando by 1/1/2008!) Please, please, please keep us in your prayers that we are following God’s will and will therefore get a quick approval so we can keep going.

~*~

Earlier this month at the picnic we had for Kyle’s 10th birthday we reached a point where we had two 10 year olds, a 5 year old, a 4 year old, a 3 year old and a 2 year old…Bill made a point of noting that this is only slightly more children than what could quite possibly comprise our family soon. It was pretty cool, actually. Then again this past weekend, while spending time with our extended family on the opposite coast, with my cousins’ kids (he and his wife have three kids, so combined we had 10, 5, 4, 3, and 2 years of age) we had fun looking around and seeing them all playing together and imagining again what our family may look like when (again, God willing) our adoption is completed.

We won’t know for quite some time what the gender(s) or age(s) of our children will be, but we are comfortable in the fact that God knows and will reveal them to us when He is ready. Most of the time the kids are excited to have new siblings and our family is all really supportive. We are trying to make sure Kyle and Katie are prepared for the wonderful changes to come in our family. We’ve discussed with them how life will change when their new sibling(s) come home and have found that something as simple as what they’d think about sharing a room with a new sibling has allowed them to give us moments of pure clarity that can only come from the heart of a child. When asked, both said that it would be ok as long as they had a sister or brother. Katie’s words were “I’d love to share my room with my sister because I LOVE her!” No hesitation, no qualification. It was really sweet.

We’ve also discussed that just like God chose to bring us together as a family, God will choose their new siblings too. (They understood; but be sure they both want to place their votes for a specific gender – naturally, Katie wants a sister and Kyle would prefer a brother. Thankfully both are satisfied leaving the final decision to God.) We have discussed a little bit of our own family history with adoption and how this adoption differs from the experiences we have had already. Kyle made sure to point out that it doesn’t matter if someone is adopted or what kind of adoption it is, it doesn’t make you love that someone any less. How true that is.

One of the more exciting things of the last few weeks for me is that I have been able to actually correspond with a couple of other bloggers who are in varying stages of their own adoption journey. I feel as though I must sound like some kind of maniac when I tell them that it feels as if I know them; but I have read along with each of their stories and have prayed for them and there really is a familiarity there. Crazy or not, it’s there, and it’s been an incredible blessing for me to be able to correspond with them.

I will continue to keep you updated as we go along. Please forgive me if I continue to beg for prayers – we need all we can get! Please be safe and have a wonderful New Year. 2008 brings many promises for many of us. A couple of thoughts to remember:

"You know with all your heart and soul that not one of all the good promises the Lord your God gave you has failed. Every promise has been fulfilled; not one has failed." Joshua 23:14

and

"Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you saying, 'This is the way; walk in it.'" Isaiah 30:21

Christmas 2007

I hate to sound redundant but we are so incredibly blessed I just can’t even properly express it. I suppose the holidays are the perfect time to reflect on our lives and our blessings and a reminder of all that God has done in our lives and that's what I am doing here by recounting parts of our Christmas for you.

This year, like always, we had a beautiful service at Church followed by an Open House at my parents’ house on Christmas Eve where all of our local family and friend-family gathered to spend time together laughing, talking, catching up and just being together. The older I get the more I believe that my parents’ Open House is representative of what Christmas should really be about – spending time with the people we love – and it is by far my favorite Christmas family tradition. While reading some of the other adoption blogs I was impressed by the creativity and care that the other families have put into building their family’s traditions and I am working on ideas for re-vamping some of ours; but not the Open House, that’s gotta stay!

This year, even though most of us were pretty disillusioned with the commercialization of Christmas and the general lack of focus on what really matters, we continued in the gift-giving tradition just on a slightly smaller scale. We tried to put more thought in to the gifts and focused on what we called "experience gifts" for our kids where they were given certificates for activities the family could do together, rather than more toys they don't really need anyway. They still got a few toys, but I was happy that they really seemed to appreciate the "experience gifts" too. Bill and I decided our gift to each other would be to focus on our family and to proceed with the adoption and that we didn’t need to have a package under the tree to represent that.

Another tradition in our family is Mom’s Ornaments: every year Mom selects ornaments for each one of us to remember the year by. For example, my sister conquered her growing fear of flying by taking a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon this year so her ornament was a helicopter; my husband spends an enormous amount of his work-day time (and after hours) on one of two cellular phones so his ornament was a cell phone Christmas tree; my ornament for many years has been chosen from the Precious Moments ornament collection – I just love them and look forward to them every year – and this year was no different. What was different from most other years is that this year’s ornament brought me to tears. Literally. In fact, just thinking about it now, two days later is bringing tears to my eyes. This year Mom selected a Precious Moments Disney collection ornament that is titled “I’ll be Home for Christmas.” (On a side note, I wonder how many prospective adoptive parents out there got this ornament for Christmas this year? Personally, I think every one of them should have!) It’s a little boy dressed as Santa toting a sack of Disney characters that, to me, now represent the children who I pray will be home with us for Christmas very soon. Funny enough, I was so excited to see my new Precious Moments ornament that I didn’t even notice the name at first. It wasn’t until Mom pointed it out and told me why she had selected this particular ornament that it clicked for me – and I was immediately in tears.

I have to say it again. We are so blessed. I just can’t wait until we can have our WHOLE family together for Christmas. I hope that all of you had a wonderful, safe and happy Christmas, and that your New Year brings many joys and blessings. xo

Gathering MORE Information

Even with the decision made to go forward there is so much information to gather and so many things to do before the application is actually sent. We recently registered for, and attended, a “webinar” hosted by the agency we’ve chosen, which gave us a lot of great practical information. We began gathering the information we need for our application and started looking into the logistics of accomplishing all that we’ll need to accomplish throughout the process. We began to familiarize ourselves with words like “home study,” “dossier,” and “apostille”; we began searching for an agency to perform the home study; we realized that even though we have in hand a lot of what we need, it will all need to be apostilled when we start our dossier during our home study process and it looks like we’ll be required to somehow have documents apostilled from 4 different states and probably even one foreign country (?!?!); and with all of this and the holiday bustle we began to get a little bit overwhelmed with it all. This is a busy time of year so in our house, much like in yours I would bet, there has been so much going on that we have a bit of a head-spinning feeling right now. Still, we are muddling through trying to get organized and compile the information and photographs needed for our application. First things first, you know.

I’m really trying not to get ahead of ourselves here, because if it turns out that we don’t get approved to proceed with the adoption with the agency we’ve selected we’ll be heartbroken enough, but I am also trying to make sure that we have some idea of “where to go from here” when, God willing, we are approved. The information I have compiled so far is pretty general but at least it gives me some idea of the timelines that will be involved with the process; so that’s good. I’m still trying to get permission to link the other people’s blogs that I read to my “Blogs I Love” list. Some people think it’s a touch neurotic of me to wait to have permission before linking them, but I think it’s just polite. Unfortunately I can’t seem to figure out how to contact many of the bloggers that I read frequently, apart from posting my request to link them in comments on their respective pages…

Anyway, we’re almost there and really hope to have our application submitted by New Years or shortly thereafter. Then, when the application is submitted, the first of many waiting periods begins – the wait to see if we are approved by the agency for the Colombia program.

Deciding to move forward

Be forewarned, much of this post of the blog is “cheating.” I am not writing a “from scratch” blog entry here, instead I am posting a portion of an email I sent to Bill not long after coming across the quote I told you about in the prior post.

I really think the only way to do this adoption is to walk by faith. I know I told you about the quote on that blog …So my thought is this: I think we need to send in the application in the next couple of weeks or so and just trust that when the approval comes we will be able to pay the approval fee. And then we will have to have faith that as the rest of the money comes due we will be able to pay it.

Clearly the house is not sold and likely won’t be for a while. But, to use Hillary’s words (from conversations with her about the adoption) here: I think we have to play the cards that are in our hand rather than sitting around waiting on the cards to change. For whatever the reason, our family is supposed to be here in Florida for a little while longer and not in Tennessee right now - so allowing ourselves to remain in this holding pattern waiting for “perfect timing” or the house to sell or whatever probably isn't the best course of action for us. There are just wa-a-y too many unknowns at this point - there is absolutely no way that we can have it all figured out before it happens, no matter how hard we try. I guess those types of things are decisions that are for another time - once we get all the approvals in and have a better timeline to work with we can make more detailed plans.

Tonight I thought we could go through all of this again and make an actual plan, but I guess that’s where I’m at with all of this. Thoughts? Feedback? Agree? Disagree?

Call me crazy, but that quote in the blog really struck a chord with me. We had been praying and praying and praying for guidance from God to tell us how He wants us to proceed. It seems to me that we must have missed a few to have one so crystal clear placed before us. I mean, think about it - a “random” quote in a blog, written by a woman with my name, living within 70 miles of where we hope to live, who has a beautiful daughter adopted with the help of the agency we have selected, from the country we have selected, that says don’t worry about the future. Trust God. Take the next step. I really believe that as applicable as that quote was for the Jennifer who originally posted it in her blog, it was meant for us, too.

Remember in the earlier post when I mentioned Proverbs 16:9? What do you think about it now? See what I mean? I just can't write this all off to "hearing what I want to hear" So, we’re just going to go for it. We’re still praying - and hoping you’ll pray for us too - that we get the approval we need to move on with the adoption, that we take the right steps when they need to be taken, and that we’ll figure out how to make this happen for our family. We know in our hearts that if this is really what God wants for us we’ll be able to see it through, but we could use all the prayers we could get!

Inspiration from Strangers

Around the same time we started to discuss the adoption with our family members, I started finding a lot of blogs on the internet that dealt with adoption in general, and adoption from Colombia to be specific. I started reading (and becoming quite addicted to) other families’ Colombian adoption blogs. Whenever I would find a new blog, I always went back to the beginning and read all the way through the posts to present. Then I added the blog to my favorites so I could stay up to date and tried to find another.

Interestingly enough, MANY of the blogs I found through my online searches were families who were adopting through the same agency we have selected. I took that as a good sign that we were still following the path God has for us in this. I started to feel connected to these other families, even though I don’t know any of them. I felt a deep sense of camaraderie with them, even though they didn’t even know of my existence and, technically, we had yet to apply for approval to even begin the adoption process.

Each blog I read touched in me in one way or another but I think more than anything I was struck by the faithfulness of all of them. I began to compile a reference listing of inspirational quotes and bible verses from these blogs to reflect on and refer back to throughout our process. We were still praying for guidance and direction and still looking off into the future when everything would fall into place for us and we could begin to move forward.

It was late one Friday night, when Bill was out of town on business and the kids were sleeping that I came across an early entry on a “new” blog I had found that contained a quote by Joni Eareckson-Tada that reads "Faith isn't the ability to believe long and far into the misty future... It's simply taking God at His word and taking the next step." Is that beautiful or what? It struck me immediately, and I just love it. Now if you can believe this, the blog I read it in is written by a lady named Jennifer who lives in Nashville, TN (about 70 minutes from where we plan to move when our house sells!) who just adopted a child from Colombia through the exact same agency we plan to use. True story.

I emailed a link to Bill immediately and stepped away from the computer, stunned to tears again.

More research, more prayer

As time went on we continued looking through the informational packet – over, and over, and over again – and praying and researching and thinking and talking and praying some more, and we finally came to the conclusion that we would apply to adopt from Colombia. A lot of factors came together for us in making this decision and we both agreed that Colombia is where the rest of our family will be waiting. All said, it seemed like a pretty natural decision for us. We have family from Colombia, we have close friends from Colombia, but most of all it just feels right. Having made this decision, we started to make more plans and our daydreams got more detailed, but we were still holding off “until the right time.”

Slowly we decided that we should let our family in on our plans. We were so excited that we wanted to be able to share it with everyone! We told family members here and there and then Bill made the big announcement at his birthday party when all of our local family was together. Since our focus had been, and still is to an extent, on selling the house we were careful to preface it with “when the time is right…” We were thrilled when our family was as happy with our decision as we are. It really means a lot to us to know that we have the support of our family, because without it where would we be?

Sometime around the same time, I received a follow up telephone call from the agency from which we had requested the informational packet. The representative who called me was so kind and so willing to answer all of our questions. She asked what country we had selected and why, she asked about us as a family and she asked if I had any questions about the agency, the program, or in general. I posed the question of selling the house and moving mid-process, and she assured me that we could go ahead and get started and we could amend the home study later if needed. We discussed waiting times and cost payment timelines, we discussed the agency and the services, and by the end of the conversation I was comfortable and confident that this would be the perfect agency for us.

When I got off the phone with her, I relayed the information to Bill. We discussed the information she had given during our conversation, and for the first time discussed the idea of maybe not waiting until the house was sold and we had moved to start the process. We know the housing market is really bad right now and we could be waiting for quite a while to sell our house. Factor that with the lengthy process of applications and home studies, the time required to compile all the dossier documentation, and the time spent waiting to be matched with our children and we could be looking at quite a long time. The adoption process takes long enough, and rightfully so, but do we really want to add an extended (and indefinite!) wait on top of the process itself? We were torn, and decided we didn't have to make that decision right now; more prayer was in order.

The picture worth a thousand words

The next day I spent my lunch hour as I had been spending them all of late, searching for information online about adoption. This time, however, I decided to look at the website for the agency the mother had told me about the night before. While browsing through the website I came across the photo galleries. Now, in my limited experience, there is little more heartwarming an event than looking at pictures of the happy faces of completed families on these adoption websites so I clicked on the link and began to flip through the photos.

The galleries were divided by category: Now & Then, Gotcha Days, Portraits, Kids & Pets, I looked through them all. But believe me when I tell you that I certainly wasn’t prepared for what I found hidden in there. There in the Family Photos gallery, right at the bottom of the first page of pictures is what has come to be known around our home as “THE photo.” Out of nowhere, right there on the webpage before me, was a darling little black and white photo, captioned “brother and sis,” of a little blonde-haired boy kissing what is presumably his brand new little sister. Now, I know for some of you it is hard to imagine that a person could actually look at a photo on the internet of a complete stranger and be totally and completely convinced that the photo is of her own child, but I know it happens. And with this picture, I gotta tell ya, for a split second I was convinced that the picture I was looking at was one taken of my son. If you were to see the photo, I would venture to guess that you, too, would believe that the little boy in that photo is none other than Kyle. But it’s not.

I sat in stunned silence, and then in tears, and stared at my computer screen. Now, granted, the picture would have had to be taken a couple of years ago, when Kyle was a little bit younger, but if I didn’t know better I could have sworn that picture was of him. I whispered a quick prayer – God, if You’re trying to tell me that we’re doing the right thing here, You certainly got my attention! We’d been praying for guidance and reassurance that this is what we were supposed to be doing and I am pretty convinced that this was meant to tell us we are on the right track.

Still, I was wondering if I was grasping at straws or trying so desperately to get some sort of affirmation that we were doing the right thing that my eyes were playing tricks on me; so, I emailed the picture to a few of the people closest to me to get their opinion. We had not told any of our family of our plans to adopt yet, so in order to avoid any questions about how I found the picture and such I left the email pretty vague - probably something along the lines of “check out this picture, what do you think?” or similar wording. I sent the pictures to Bill, my sister, Hillary, and one of our closest friends and my daughter’s godmother, Janelle. Each of them agreed that “that kid” was Kyle, but who was he kissing?

I really wish I could post the actual photo here, because those of you who know us would probably be as stunned as I was to see it, but because of legality concerns I will just direct you to this link [http://www.gwca.org/index.php?q=gallery&g2_itemId=16 ] that (hopefully) will take you to the website gallery page where you can look at the bottom of the first page of family pictures and see exactly what I am talking about. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Little Signs...

It was a Tuesday, as I recall, the day I ordered the information packet from the adoption agency. I had emailed Bill during the day and we discussed it again later that night, agreeing that we weren’t really in a position to start this now, what with the house for sale and the plan to move to Tennessee. Our concerns were financial and practical – whether we had the money to fund the adoption or not, we had no idea how our plan to move once the house sells would affect us if we’d already started the process of being approved to adopt. We knew enough to know that there are comprehensive home studies done and had no idea what would happen if we moved to a new home mid-process. Would it delay us, or worse, send us back to the beginning? But we agreed to keep praying and agreed that ordering the packet was a good idea, since it is a really good idea to get as much information as we can so we can prepare. Two days later, I received a follow up email from the regional office of the adoption agency in Orlando, just one of those “thanks for your interest, your stuff’s on its way to you” things. Nice touch, I remember thinking. And I went about my business for the day.

That evening when I took Kyle to karate I was excited to see him take part in the sparring portion of his lesson. It was a favorite part of the training for him and I’d not yet had the opportunity to watch him spar. So when the class split off into the sparring group and the non-sparring group and I moved to the other end of the dojo to watch him, I can admit I was a little irked when another mother sat down next to me to “chat.” It started off simply enough and I learned by half-listening that she, apparently, knew Bill from years ago and was working with him when Katie was born. “I can’t even remember his name,” she said, “but I just remember he was such a doting father.” I smiled because she was totally right, he was and is a great father. A few more polite nods and pleasantries exchanged as I tried to look past her without seeming rude, and then, I don’t even really remember how it happened, but the conversation transitioned to her daughter on the mat sparring with Kyle; a beautiful little girl of Chinese heritage.

The next thing I know, I am hearing in amazing detail the story of her adoption seven years ago, told with love as only her proud mama could. I was drawn in and awestruck - no one knew about our plans to adopt but what a great story to hear now! Before long the entire dojo disappeared and this mother and I were deep in conversation about the fears and the joys, the benefits and the drawbacks, the cost and the value, the heart and the love of adoption. What a sight we must have been, two moms – complete strangers just minutes earlier – in tears and smiles from ear to ear.

Back at home that evening my first words to Bill were “after the kids go to bed you HAVE to hear what just happened to me at Karate!” We made it through dinner and bedtime and I could hardly wait to tell him the whole story. When I had finished recounting the tale (through tears again), it was his turn to surprise me by pulling the informational packet from the adoption agency from the stack of mail and handing it to me with a smile. Talk about timing!

But now the wheels are turning and I’m curious…

And the idea has firmly taken root so, me being me, I started researching on the internet. Just surfing for information and seeing what I could find. Nothing concrete, just compiling as much information as I could to help us plan this out as well as we could. I searched various agency websites, the Department of State website regarding international adoption and all of the country advisories, and information about the Hague Convention. Just for an idea of what to expect, I picked an agency that seemed like a good fit for us and ordered an informational packet. I sent an email to Bill that day, the gist of which was something along the lines of: listen – I know we’re still just planning and praying and gathering information right now, but I ordered a packet from an adoption agency just to get an idea of what we’re looking at and what we need to be planning for. This doesn’t mean that I’m trying to push something faster here, I just think we need to have a idea of what we’re looking at.

Truth was, despite a lot of surfing for information I was starting to have more questions but no more answers, which for me, was really not working because I was getting more excited by the day and I HAD to know what we are going to need to do to make this happen. I wanted to learn about the process and what I would need to prepare; I needed to know the costs and how we could go about getting it all paid for; in short, I just needed more information. So, I ordered some. (And hoped my husband didn’t think I was getting out of control with this, since we’d decided to wait until the house was sold to get started and we hadn’t even had anyone LOOK at the house in a while.)

It was at about this same time that we had some of the most amazing experiences happening all at once. Looking back on it, I’m reminded of Proverbs 16:9 which reads In his heart a man plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps. In the next few posts I’ll try to explain the things that happened, as well as I can, according to the way they happened and see if you don’t agree.

The Big Decision (subtitled ‘When did we decide to adopt?’)

From almost the moment Katie was born we have talked about the idea of adopting children but it was always a vague concept that just kind of floated on the periphery, prefaced by a big “if.” Whenever the question of more children arose the response was always the same - “IF we decide we’d like to have more children, we’ll adopt.” Sometimes we got a cross-eyed kind of “why would you do that?!?” response, sometimes polite nods and blank stares, sometimes even a “neat-o” kind of a thing, but usually it was all just ignored and the subject changed because we have been blessed with two great kids that we are perfectly happy with and had no immediate plans for more.

Steadily over the last few years more and more of our friends and acquaintances began having babies and building families and each new baby brought a new “wouldn’t it be nice…” followed quickly by an old “yes, it’s wonderful - for them.” But the thought was always there; a niggling little what-if-we-did? Rocking friends’ babies to sleep, and watching ours grow so big it almost hurts, we’ve considered and then discarded the idea over and over again for such reasons as not being sure we should do this, not being the "right time", not being ready for more; until sometime this fall - amid the TiVo'ed episodes of Adoption Story and re-runs of Jon & Kate Plus 8, despite the ever growing chaos of trying to sell our house, and peppered with random outbursts of the giggles from thoughts of adding more to our mix - when we started talking about the idea of being ready to expand our little family.

We talked very briefly about the possibility of actually trying to conceive and give birth to more children, but that was ruled out pretty quickly. That was never our plan and we both seemed to agree that it was time to talk about adoption. For real. So from then on whenever we were out of earshot from family members young and old, we talked about the logistics of adding to our family and the idea of starting to plan. Basically, the bottom line came as far as “when we sell the house and get everything situated financially we’ll get serious about this.” As you may understand adoption is an incredibly expensive proposition and we - like many prospective adoptive parents - just don’t really have a spare $20,000.00 (or more) hanging around. It just made sense that once we sell the house and get situated in Tennessee we’ll be in a better position to scrimp and save to pay for all the expenses associated with adoption. But the one thing we both agreed that we needed to start on now was praying for guidance in this. This is huge!

To tell you the truth...

Now before we get too far into this, I have a confession to make. I am a blogger copy cat, of sorts. Not in the plagiarism/stealing-someone-else’s-stories kind of way, but more of a using a borrowed concept utilized by many, many others and adding my own flair to it kind of way.

My blog to chronicle our family’s story of growth is far from a solitary find in the blogosphere. There are so many other families out there who have blogs and online journals of their adventures in adoption that it’s almost unreal. When you get a chance, I really recommend you check some of them out. Just be prepared to get hooked! I have been reading some of the blogs listed in my “Blogs I Love list” (which will be found in the sidebar over there ~>) for several months and some for just a few days or so but, personally, I have found quite a bit of comfort, encouragement, and inspiration in reading and following other families’ narratives and may even refer you to some of their postings from time to time in my own posts.

Some of these blogs I love for their endearing stories, some for their engaging tones, but all have a faith and optimism that is really catchy and I am thankful for the knowledge that I am not the only one who is experiencing these things, as well as the wisdom that they impart (even, perhaps, without realizing it). I have just begun to compile my list because I want to try to get permissions before linking people I don’t even know to my blog. Check back to it often, or even run a search of your own, there are some real jewels out there! If you find a great one you’d like to recommend, let me know. As for us, we’re going to be plugging away over here to get through this and I’ll do my best to keep you up to date!

Introducing...

US! The Murrays. Who are we, anyway? In a nutshell we’re a family of four who are trying to grow into a family of six. We are mostly happy, usually positive, sort of wacky, and a little kooky, but at the heart of it all we are very blessed with each other, a large extended family and an enormous “friend-family,” as the kids like to call the others in our life that we love most.

In the broadest of terms we’re made up of a proud Irishman who’s never stepped foot on the Emerald Isle, a “Hippy-lite” who daydreams more than mobilizes into action, a future conservationist, and a princess in training. We are quirky and spirited and faithful. We are active in our church and active in each other’s lives. We like to have fun and we like to be together. We love to travel and explore new places. We tend to be nibby and sometimes get a little too deep into other people’s business, but we mean no harm by it.

We can be a bit rambunctious and lean a bit toward the eccentric at times. And I, as the writer of this blog, will be your narrator and am lucky enough to get the opportunity to write the story of our lives and our journey any way I see fit! What power! (Kidding. I’ll try to stay as accurate as possible here, but you have to understand that there may be some emotion-skewed writing throughout this process. I'm quite prone to being a biased Mom and Wife...)

The More the Murray-er!

As many of you already know, Bill and I have decided to add to our family by way of adoption. Surprise! (Or not…some of you know that adoption is something we’ve pretty much always talked about and that we have just decided – or realized, I guess – that now is the time to actually do it.) Anyway, having tried my hand with the as yet “unfinished” House for Sale blog last year, and at the urging of certain people who shall remain nameless, I have decided to create this blog to chronicle (both for our benefit and for that of our friends and loved ones who would like to follow along with us) the newest adventure in our lives.

If the House for Sale saga has been a roller coaster ride, I can only image what’s in store for us here. I have a tendency towards tangential thinking anyway and since, clearly, this process involves a much higher emotional toll than selling some silly house, I’m coming to grips with the idea that it may be a lot harder to keep up an intelligible timeline on this blog, but please bear with me and know that I am going to do my best. One way or another, despite any of the many tangents I may drag you along with me, this blog will always come back to one basic theme: our family and how we are growing through the process of adoption. I’m excited! How about you?

Up until this point I have maintained various notes of my own, so I will try in this initial series of posts to bring the blog up to the point of “real-time” posts since the blog dates every entry for me and I can’t manipulate the dates to reflect when they actually happened. That said, there will be a lot of catching up to do at first and then the posts may slow down a little bit. Who knows, I may never shut up... Ok, ready? Great! Here we go…