Waiting....

It was a huge rush when our I-800A was mailed off. We really felt like we were making progress and things were moving. And then this week comes and we are back to waiting....We received the letter confirming that they received our application. We also received an email from our coordinator, a text message and an email from the government saying the same thing. Nothing like a little redundancy in the process! 

We are now waiting on our letter to let us know when we can go get our fingerprints done. I've never been so thankful that the US postal service didn't cancel mail on Saturdays!  This letter will give us an assigned time to do our fingerprints, but we have heard that if we beg, smile pretty and bring coffee and muffins they *might* let us get them done early. We will let you know when that is so you can send lots of good thoughts our way!

So that's pretty much it. I thought about taking a sad picture of us waiting by our mailbox, but then it snowed 50 feet again so this is the best I could do!

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! 

Baby room progress

Getting the baby room ready has become a great way to keep our minds off the wait while our paperwork is processing. 

About a month ago we decided on colors and went to work painting. We decided to go with 2 neutral greys above and below a chair rail. Brian is going to paint a mural, we'll leave you in suspense about the theme...(*might* be code for we are too indecisive to pick something and go with it...). We'll also decorate with accent colors once we know if we are getting a boy or a girl (so excited for the shopping that will ensue once we know gender and age!). 

So this is what we started with...boring beige

 

After a few hours of work....(which seemed like days to the dogs)

We ended up with this!

 

This is actually the first room we have painted in the 3 years we have been in our house and we are pretty proud of the way it turned out. 

Next up, furniture!

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!