Happy Thanksgiving

We are in Dallas enjoying an unusually warm Thanksgiving Day. The boys having been hitting the pool! We are thankful for our family and our health this year! Have a wonderful day!

Another bird down

We can't seem to keep parakeets alive for more than one year. I thought they were supposed to live 5-7 years. We lost Oscar on Friday. Susie removed the cover from their cage on Friday morning to find Oscar dead on the cage floor. Blue was just hanging out. I'm sure he is completely traumatized from seeing his best buddy dropped dead. Yikes! Looks like we will be making a trip to Petsmart this weekend for yet another bird. Hopefully Blue will keep kickin'!

Happy Birthday C

Today we celebrated C's birthday party. His actual birthday was last week, but he wanted a bowling party and the bowling alley was having a league tournament last weekend. C is five years old. Susie and I were saying today that he has improved so much (attitude wise) over the past year. C is our "fit thrower" around here and lately he is doing great! He is such a sweet boy and we just adore him. He wanted all the boys from his preschool to come to his party and they all did! Of course C hardly spoke to any of them, as usual, but I know he had a great time. Will we ever grow out of the John Deere themed parties? Only time will tell!!

Happy Birthday A

A is 7 years old! I hate the cliche that "time flies," but it is true. It seems like yesterday I was pacing around a delivery room as they rushed Susie to the OR for an emergency C-section. I am very happy to not relive that moment again, but I am happy to celebrate A's birthday. He is such a great kid! Just today we were noticing how "big" he looks lately. What happened to our baby?

We had A's party last weekend (on C's actual birthday...his party is tomorrow, so I will post on that later). He wanted a pool party and we were able to find this great indoor pool rec center that allows parties. It was great and A loved it. Today he got a scooter and a watch so he has had a great day. We also went down to Union Station today and saw the Holiday miniature train set up. I love this time of year.

Halloween (late)

We had a great Halloween. The weather was unbelievably warm. C was not too interested in trick-or-treating, but A and F had a great time.

Powerful

Check out the link below. It is about Mark Richt and his family. Mark is the head coach of the University of Ga. football team. They adopted a child with special needs. This really touches my heart and points to the fact that EVERY person has value and EVERY child deserve a family and a chance at happiness.

http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/video/video?id=3663225

The not-so-slow boat to China

***********Adoption Update*************

Wow, what a whirlwind we have had the past two weeks. Two weeks ago today (10/25) we got a call from our agency telling us we have been matched with a little girl in China. She has some minor correctable special needs to her hands and feet. Our next step was to look over her file and make sure we wanted to move forward with the adoption. Well by Sunday night we had spoken to our pediatrician (who runs the international adoption clinic here in town) and he had forwarded all the information to a surgeon. We were only waiting on this surgeon's confirmation that these needs were correctable (which were already knew from our own research, but needed the confirmation!). Then the bad news came. Sometime between 10pm Sunday and 8am Monday another agency had "locked" this little girl's file and we could no longer adopt her. This is a difficult process to explain, but basically multiple agencies here in the US have access to "waiting children's" files. They are not supposed to "lock" the file until they have a family who is 100% committed to adopting the child. Though sometimes, an agency will see a child they think they can match and they will lock the file before having a family on board. Once the file is locked, the agency has 48hrs to get all the family's paperwork wired to the Chinese adoption agency. If they don't have a family, or the family backs out, then the file becomes open again. Our agency follows all the rules and will not lock the file until the family has truly committed to the adoption. We were a little suspiscious of her "lock" since it occurred in the middle of the night, but all we could do was hope that it would open back up 48hrs later (Wednesday morning).

In the mean time we got word from the local surgeon that this condition can be surgically corrected for normal function. It was devastating thinking we had waited too long and may have lost her, but all we could do was wait. Fast forward 2 days and our agency calls again around 7am on Wednesday (10/29) morning. The little girl's file opened up again and we had the chance to lock her in for adoption. We jumped at the chance!!!! We scrambled around to get all our paperwork wired to China. The next step was waiting for something called a Pre-Approval (PA). Our agency said to expect this in about 2-3 weeks. We did not want to tell anyone our news until we had this first step of approval. Well last night we got an e-mail from our agency that they received our PA (in 8 days!!!). So now she is officially locked to us!

The next step is for us to get a Letter Seeking Confirmation (LSC) or some people call it the Letter of Approval (LOA). This is the official referral from China. Originally our agency said this arrives 6-12 weeks after the PA. In our e-mail last night our agency said they are seeing the LSC arrive in 30-60 days after the PA. So we are hopeful for a quick process. After we get the LSC we will travel 4-8 weeks later to pick her up!!!!

Needless-to-say we are thrilled!! We will keep you all updated as we get more information. We can't post any identifying information here until we get our LSC. But let us assure you, she is beautiful!!!!!