Ways I am keeping Brian busy

As we get finished with our parts of the adoption process, our thoughts have moved to getting our house toddler ready. We have pretty much left the "baby room" empty since we moved in, knowing that someday it would be a child's room (although if you ask the dogs, they are pretty convinced it is the room for taking naps in the sun). We chose colors and started talking about decor (more posts to come!), but we also wanted to focus on making the closet as storage efficient as possible.
Now, there are few things I love more than organization. Many many projects have started with me saying "Honey come look at this. Don't you think it would work better if we.....". And Brian always says "yes honey, I agree that more bins/organizers/shelves would make it much better! How can I help?". (ok maybe it's just in my head that he says that. Who knows what he actually says, I've already moved on to planning our trip to Ikea).

After much time spent on Pinterest, I decided that I wanted the baby room closet to look like this:

Source

However, our closet looked like this

 

So I had to reel in my expectations a little and Brian (and Kona) got to work!

 

Brian is always saying that he isn't good at these things, but he never ceases to come through and create exactly what I was thinking, if not better. 

I LOVE how it turned out! 

We are trying not to buy too much until we know the age and gender of our kiddo, but we can't wait to start figuring out how use our great new closet space!

This week's accomplishments

This was a big week folks, big week!

We both had our physicals this week that included some lab work and passed with flying colors. China has a few health requirements, one of which is a BMI requirement. We both worked really hard to be as healthy as possible before these appointments and I wanted to give a quick shout out to Brian who lost a significant amount of weight this year. I'm so proud of him and the hard work he had to do to get there. We both are committed to making these changes permanent and living a healthy lifestyle from here on out (minus this weekend when we celebrated by throwing the diet out the window! Yay junk food!)

We also checked out 3 local daycare centers and feel very comfortable with our options. Thanks everyone for your advice! It really helped us to feel more educated going into the tours.
There was one that really stood out to us. The director gave a great tour and gave us tons of information. They have a great curriculum, the kids all seemed happy and there was a good sense of controlled chaos. They do have a waiting list so we will try to decide sooner rather than later. Doing the tours definitely made everything seem real, we are actually becoming parents!

So the physicals mark the last step that we have any control over, from now on we will really be waiting on everyone else to process our paperwork and keep it moving. It's difficult to know how long it will take. Our coordinator warned us that it could be as late as January 2014 before we travel. Hopefully it won't be, but we need to be prepared to be patient. (I'm starting to really hate the word patient!)

We will be sure to keep you all updated as soon as we know more and keep the blog posts coming with everything we are doing to get ready for our baby!

Don't you hate it when you look at the phone screen vs. the camera? Brian apparently has no problem with this, but I look like there was something shiny in the corner that caught my attention.
Must work on photo skills before child comes!

On being thankful...

I was going to post about how our psychiatrist's report finally came back after 2 months and whine about the fact that insurance isn't going to cover the entire cost. Or whine about the fact that our CBI backround checks still aren't back. Or stress over our doctors appointments this week because I hate getting my blood drawn. 

But then this happened

And our world stopped

So, today I am thankful. I am thankful that my husband is only bruised and sore and not in a hospital bed or worse. I am thankful for a truck that I wasn't sure we should buy 2 years ago that saved his life. Sometimes it's easy to be selfish and forget that God might be dealing with larger things than our paperwork. 

Going forward I hope that there will be a lot less whining (like this) and a lot more celebrating of each day and each step. Because we are very lucky and need to remember that. 

Daycare already?

 Next week we are going to check out daycares. I know, I know, we don't even have all our documents to China yet, but what can I say, I'm a planner! Plus we both have a day off so it's a handy to check them out now and I've heard there can be waiting lists. It does make the phone calls sort of awkward though when I don't know the age or gender of our child or when we will need daycare, but so far everyone has been really understanding.

Let me start by saying that we won't be sending our child to daycare until they (and we) are 100% comfortable with it. We learned some techniques from our classes on how to start the transition and while I do need to go back to work at some point, our child comes first and if I have to take more time off I will (I get more time off than Brian so I will be the one staying home longer). We have heard that many adopted kids do ok in daycares since they are used to being around children from their time in the orphanage. We hope that is the case for us, but we will be working out a contingency plan just in case we feel that it's not the right time for daycare yet.

We have decided that we really prefer to have the daycare as close to home as possible so that we are both only 20 minutes away from our kiddo and both daycares are our way to or from the gym. Plus our parents will be close in case they need to pick the baby up for us for any reason. We are also pretty sure that we want a day care center vs. an in home provider for various reasons that we have talked about.

This is where we need help! Since Brian and I know nothing about daycares (although our dogs used to go to doggy daycare, that's pretty similar right?), fill us in! What should we know? What should we ask about? Obviously if we see small children chasing each other with knives and the workers having cocktail hour, we would count that as a red flag, but what else should we look for?

Thanks for your help! I'm sure this won't be the last time we will need your advice!

Well Brian's covered, now just need to find one for the baby.....

Holding pattern

The above saying pretty much sums up how we're feeling right now. We are currently waiting on our home study to be finalized, waiting for our psychiatrist to send our reports (hopefully this week!) and waiting for our doctor's appointments next week to have our forms filled out and do the required lab work. 

Due to this holding pattern we are in, for the last month or so when people ask us how things are going or when we think we will get our baby, we generally give a fake smile like this:

and say Everything is great! We are almost done! We are learning patience! 

However on the inside mostly we are saying "This is taking FOREVER!!!! I want this to be done NOW!!". 

Now, I realize that a biological child takes 9 months to get here and we have only been working on this for 4 months. I also realize that patience and going with the flow is something that we (mostly me) need to work on as I have heard this bizarre rumor that children don't always do exactly what they are told when they are told to do it (although I'm sure our child will always behave at all times ;)). 

So, we (again, mostly me, Brian is much better at going with the flow) are trying to take a deep breath and realize that things are actually going at a decent pace (minus the CBI backround check, which is still not back after 12 weeks!!) and we should be thankful for all that has gone well and how much support we have. 

So please excuse us if you catch us flashing a fake smile now and then in the next 2-4 months.

We really do appreciate and love the questions and frankly are honored that anyone cares enough about our little journey to ask.

We can't wait to report back when things are finally moving again! 

P.S. I promise the coming weeks will bring more fun and upbeat posts like book reviews and baby room progress! 

Happy New Year (again)!

The Chinese New Year starts on February 10 this year. From what we have learned, it is the most important and oldest Chinese holiday that celebrates the start of the new year and new season. It is celebrated with visits to friends and family and special traditions designed to bring good luck. People will stay up until midnight setting off fireworks to frighten away evil spirits. Red symbolizes fire which will scare away evil spirits, so people dress head to foot in new red clothing. Kids often receive money in red envelopes to symbolize good luck in the new year. 

Our baby has most likely been born by now and it helps to know that this is the only New Years they will have to spend in their orphanage. Hopefully his/her caretakers will do something special for them for the holiday!


We are looking forward to celebrating the year of the horse next year with our little one! 

Small beads, big lesson

We had our last adoption class this weekend. It was a really eye opening series of classes and we are really grateful for all that we learned. We are also grateful that we are done with them and can check one more thing off our list :)

There was one exercise that we did today that struck me as really interesting. It was really simple and I admit, as it was in the last hour of the 8 hour class, I wasn't really taking it seriously at first. 

We were given bags of beads and each of the colors represented skin colors of different ethnicities. We were then told to add beads to our cup with the color that represented the different people in our life. They listed everyone from parents to neighbors to our pastor to our mayor. It really resonated with me how boring our little cup was (see that lonely little red bead? that's our baby).  It was unsettling that our child is going to look around and see very few people in our circle that even remotely look like him or her or look like our family. It was also surprising that it took a bunch of beads to make me realize this about our life.

So, while we didn't meet anyone that lives in our area at any of these classes, we are really hoping that we can find other interracial families to have as a support and community. I have no idea how we go about finding such a group (any ideas?), but I think its worth the effort for our future child.

What would your cup look like?