Rainbows, Boxes and life in Adoption land!

We saw something yesterday that we have never seen before.......

A whole Rainbow from end to end! Then, the more we looked we realized that it was actually a double rainbow from end to end! There is a 2nd rainbow that you can make out, it is very faint but you can definitely see it!

We looked real hard, but we didn't find a pot of gold, or a baby at the end of the rainbow.

Maybe China will surprise us and send us a referral.....



We love the new house, it is a little more than twice the size of where we were and that is a good thing because it took 4 moving trucks to move us in!

I feel like I will be unpacking and finding new homes for things for the rest of my life!!!!!

The truth is we have made quite a dent in the boxes but there are just so many more to do. We even have some rooms that don't have any visible boxes (there hidden in closets) and we can feel normal in those rooms!

When Barry and I were married, we combined two households into one, and put a lot of stuff into storage. It is so wonderful now to finally for the first time ever have all of our things under one roof! We have even managed to park the cars in the garage!!!! Now we get to start the process of weeding out what is really excess and giving what we can to charity.

Then I get to put Jamie's room together and start painting the Pooh characters on her walls all over again!

In Adoption land....... we are probably weeks away from a referral instead of months or years! We are still waiting to see if the package in the air from China right now is a batch of referrals and how close will it come to completing the month of March. When we finally see this batch of referrals we will know if we can hope for a referral in October, or if we are looking more like November. An October referral would mean the chance of us still traveling in December, a November referral would make that almost impossible.

Our latest road block, (one of many over the last 4 years) is that our agency has never managed to get their Hague approval. Well, now China has decided that after December 1st all families must be with a Hague approved agency. It seems that at this final hour in our adoption process we must change agencies! We have no idea at the moment, what impact this will have on our lives.

Will our referral be held up?

Will we need to file new paperwork with immigration?

What new fees are we going to be facing?

In Adoption land we have learned that every little bit of good news......comes with its own version of bad news, or some new hurdle for us to jump. We will jump this one too but if you want to send out any good karma wishes for us......they would be greatly appreciated!

That is it for now......I really must go unpack a box or two!

We found better stuff!!!!!

It was hard to say goodbye to the home that we have loved for 18, (almost 19) years.

It was hard to say goodbye to the room that we were so lovingly putting together for Jamie.

It was really hard to say goodbye to all the Pooh characters that I had drawn and then painted onto her walls.

However, we did say goodbye!

We have moved into this absolutely wonderful single family home, and it is in the town where I grew up. Jamie's Grandmom is 7 minutes away, and she has two uncles and cousins less then 5 minutes away. The schools are good, the drinking water is good and the home is gorgeous. There is even a really nice swing set, sliding board, climbing wall for her in the back yard!

We have definitely found better stuff and we plan to be here for the next 30 years! Now all we need is Jamie (and her sister) for everything to be complete!!!!!