Life update

Life seems to be flying by at the moment and Spring is right around the corner. We are very excited to have nice weather again, as it is much easier to survive the day with small children when you can get out of the house. We just had A's preschool conference. His teacher said he is very ready for Kindergarten. She listed out everything he can/can't do and it was very fun to see. At first I was skeptical about how she could be so specific about certain things (such as "A can count to number 49"). I just thought, I bet she makes some of this stuff up. So, right when we got home I asked A to count as high as he could. Sure enough he counted right to 49 then said 80! I guess she really knows what she is talking about. We are so excited for him to enter Kindergarten and for C to start preschool next year. I think they are both ready for the next step. C points at the doors to the 1st year preschool and says "That's my school," every time we pick up A. He is very excited about next year.

We had our pre-St. Patrick's Day party last Saturday. It really turned out well. The weather was perfect and just about everyone we invited showed up. My final count at the end of the day was 109 people (this includes children and infants!). Not bad. Unfortunately our parish school's auction was the same night, so we headed up to that after everyone left our house. We were really looking forward to the whole event, but ended up being so tired that we hardly enjoyed ourselves. We did pick up a nice photo of the church and some horse back riding lessons. Hopefully the kids can use them this summer, otherwise it looks like Susie and I will be saddling up!

Adoption update: We are done with our home study!! This is a big relief, but now that it is over, it was really not difficult at all! Our social worker was just great! We had heard rumors about other people's experiences, but ours turned out really well. We are still waiting for the final copy and then we can send in our I600A to CIS. This is the petition to adopt an overseas orphan. That is our last official step to the paperchase. We have some other loose ends to tie up, but we are getting very close. I sent about 7 docuements off to the state of KS to get certified and got them back right away. We also sent off Susie's birth certificate to Indiana for certification and got it returned with a rejected letter attached. Apparently it was the wrong type of birth certificate (it was a notarized COUNTY certificate and they will only certify notarized STATE copies...how frustrating). What is even more frustrating is that they recommended us getting a correct copy from the website vitalcheck.com. This is the website we got the first one from, so I am going to have to do some investigating Monday as to how to get a notarized state copy. More money to spend!!

I am still wanting to add pictures to this, but I am not computer savy, so I will have to wait until Susie sits down with me to do it. I never think about doing this while we are both home. Someday! (I have learned to add pictures, thank you Susie, so now you can see some of the excitement from around our house on St. Patty's Day!)