Finally!

Hi all! 

Sorry for the lack of posts, we've been busy dealing with a typical Colorado spring, 60-70 degree days 1 week and 2 feet of snow the next! After growing up in Fargo, I'm very much a snow person, but even I am ready for this snow to turn into rain so that we can start growing things!

The big adoption news is that both our CBI and FBI clearances came back!!!!!

Not only that, but it then took less than a week for our homestudy to be certified by the state!  

                                               

                    

So what comes next? We filled out another form called the I-800A. It basically says that we are ok to adopt a child from China (of course it takes 10 pages to say that, plus asks us to repeat information we have wrote a million times already). It is also the first step in finalizing our future child's US citizenship, which is pretty awesome. The great thing about adopting from China is that our adoption will be 100% finalized in China and our child will be a US citizen the second our plane touches down in the USA. I'm guessing that is going to be a pretty emotional moment for us, hopefully we will be awake and with it enough to recognize that after the 13+ hours we will have spent traveling. 

The I-800A form should take about a month or a little more to process as we also will have to get another set of fingerprints done. We'd appreciate any prayers you feel like throwing our way for fast processing and government employees with this attitude:

We (meaning Brian and his dad) also finished another pre-baby home project on our list this weekend.

We are anticipating the extreme amount of crap toys and equipment that comes with having a child so we wanted to maximize our garage storage. So we got rid of 4 garage shelves and built this instead:

It's pretty awesome as we were able to fit all of the junk very important garage stuff on these shelves PLUS still have lots of empty space. 

So things are moving again and we couldn't be happier. We are still hopeful that we will be matched and travel by the end of the year, but that will require everything to go smoothly and quickly, so many good thoughts and prayers are needed!

Update to come!

Sorry for the lack of updates! 

Things are moving along (finally!) and I promise we will let you all know what's going on. 

But for now I will leave you with our newest additions to our baby room, courtesy of my awesome Aunt Kristy. Since we're SURE our baby will be a future CSU Ram, they are perfect! 

Furniture!

Once the baby room was painted it was looking pretty empty and we got the itch to look for furniture. We decided to buy a convertible crib for our kiddo. Since we still have no idea what age our child will be, we really needed something that would change depending on their age/size/developmental stage. We also bought the conversion rails to convert it to a toddler bed and a full sized bed so that we would be prepared to change it based on their needs. I have no idea how we will know when it is the right time to change to a toddler bed, but hopefully that is advice we can get from all of you!

We are pretty picky when it comes to picking out furniture so it took lots of searching (which meant lots of pinterest!) to find what we wanted. Or what we thought we wanted because when we went to the store we actually changed our mind and got something completely different. But we are so happy we did, we LOVE the crib we chose. We also bought a glider from the same store and we were really excited when we got the call that everything had come in a month early.
And then this happened and we suddenly found ourselves without the truck that was going to haul all this stuff back up for us. Being the cheap frugal people that we are, we scoffed at their offer of delivery for $300 and said "we can do this!". Brian's dad was nice enough to let us borrow his truck (the smaller, older cousin of our truck) and Brian convinced me that it could easily hold all the boxes.
As you can see, he was right. Everything totally fit.

                                     

Sort of.
It was a loooong drive back home with a few stops to adjust the 500 bungee cords we used, but we made it without anything falling out on the highway.

Then came the part of putting it together, which really wasn't that bad since we have bought many pieces of Ikea furniture. Kona was super helpful as always.

Kenai on the other hand was completely bored with the baby room furniture as it was not something she could eat or something that squeaks and instead found the snow much more exciting.

Yes those are Christmas lights still on our deck. No they are not plugged in anymore, we are just lazy. Moving on.... 

And here is the finished product!

There's still a lot to do, mainly decorating (aka more pinterest), but we are pretty happy with how the room looks so far! We think we will end up buying a matching ottoman for the glider and we are still not sure where to put that cute little table yet. 

Finally a quick paperwork update: We are STILL waiting on our fingerprints to come back so that we can send our homestudy to be certified. It has been 19 weeks people. 

19 weeks. So if everyone could stop buying guns and getting new jobs for a few days so that they could focus on our paperwork, that would be swell!