~Travel Dates~

We now have our travel dates to bring home our daughter!

It has been a busy time getting flights, an apartment and packing.

~~Happy 5th Birthday~~

Today is Angie's birthday how I wish we all could be with her on this special day. Gavin and Tyler woke up this morning and sang Happy Birthday to her, which was so sweet. They helped set up a doll house for her and a kitchen set

We are starting to make lists and pack for the trip to bring Angie home! The USCIS approval letter has been apostled and ready to go. The next puzzle piece is the actually travel dates and hopefully our facilitator will get a chance to ask for them the first week of September.

Happy Birthday Princess ~ We hope to be with you soon~

Round two done

Our older son Gavin also had to have his tonsils and adenoids removed. Luckily he was old enough to do same day surgery and did not have to stay the night. Gavin was a dream to take care of after surgery and now a week later he is feeling a lot better.

Adoption update

We received great news that our information was officially submitted to the adoption officials at the end of July.

Our orphan petition approval letter also came this week.

Things are definitely coming together and hopefully we will get a fall travel date.

The Girly room revealed

It was nice seeing the boys work together to help/play with the painting of Angie's room. They want her home just as bad as Clint and I do. Here are some before, during and after photo's.

It is hard to tell from the photo's that there are fairies sitting on the trees.

~Dossier update~

Our Dossier will be translated now and submitted at the end of July!!! So hopefully we will hear about travel dates in September.

We have been working on Angie's room, painting and decorating. Gavin picked the colors purple and pink for the walls. The room had a Dr. Seuss theme before so we kept a few of the same elements but made them girly! I still need to order some fairy wall stickers and it should be done. (Gee I really hope Angie is a girly girl)

Hopefully I will be able to post some before and after pictures soon.

How July is going....

Our little guy Tyler is recovering from surgery.

He had to have his tonsils and adenoids removed plus both ears drained. His surgery went well, but he did scare his recovery nurse. Tyler holds his breath when he is mad. It is something that he has always done. In recovery, the nurses were trying to calm him down from thrashing and he had Oxygen on because his levels would drop real low and set the alarms off. To us this is normal Tyler!! He hates to be woken up and yes at home he thrashes around and gets all worked up and quits breathing for awhile when he has to get up before he wants to. So we made the nurses feel better by letting them know this is normal, but I think they felt bad for us!! I am so dreading getting this child ready for school in time when he gets older.

Here are some photos from our hospital stay:

Playing in the waiting area

Showing off his super hero muscles!

First Ice cream after Surgery (The blue is a popsicle)!

Taking it easy at home with big brother Gavin

What a great smile!!

I love this photo of Angie. It shows a little of her feisty side that I am sure that she has! I can just see her up to her elbows in trouble with her brothers!!

This the boys "helping" their dad level the sand for the pool!

Mini Update...

Our Dossier is on the truck to be delivered today!!


UPDATE: Our Dossier made it to the hands of our facilitator safe and sound!

A step closer...

I just tracked our Dossier and was surprised to see that it has already left.....PARIS, FRANCE!!! It is well on it's way Thank you FedEx.

Mission Accomplished

We sent our Dossier off for Angie tonight!!

It will hopefully get there early next week for translation. Then if everything is OK we wait for a travel date for fall time!!

The Customer service was so sweet and they made airplanes for the boys.

The boys are very excited about Angie being their sister and they want her NOW. We keep explaining that it takes time and there is a lot of paperwork that needs done first.

So as we were leaving the FedEx store my little one starts yelling wait wait we forgot Angie. The cutie thought for sure that Angie was in the store and because they took our paperwork that they needed to give him his sister.

Boy I wish it was that easy!

Good news!

We think our home study is completed!

Our Agency should be getting everything Apostled this week (we hope they do it tomorrow). Then they should overnight it to us so that we can send it off for translation! Then I can worry about getting Angie's room ready and getting her clothes without monster trucks on them.

We signed with our Home study agency on April 20th. Everything has been going so fast which is great. Hopefully we can get a travel date in early fall. I would love end of Sept to mid Oct. that way I can get my boys settled in to school and we will be back in time for holiday stuff. I am so excited to go get Angie and at the same time my heart hurts about leaving my boys for that long.

The road to finding our Princess

We are so excited to bring her home and spoil her like crazy!!

What a long road to finding our little girl. We have been planning on adopting for years and always thought that we would adopt though foster care first then maybe international adoption. Well after being foster parents for 4 years we were ready to try something else and have someone stay in our family forever.

I stumbled onto Reece's Rainbow and I found this sweet little one, but another family was already committed to bringing her home. I thought if she was available I would snatch her up in a minute.

Then I remembered another great website Until all have homes and went searching. Found another sweet little girl showed her to my husband who was on the fence about International adoption. We both decided that the timing was not right and we would wait to summer time and look into Bulgaria and start the home study. Cause we figured there was no way she would still be available.

Well by springtime I was getting antsy and started looking at photo listings. I looked at Reece's Rainbow and to my surprise Angie was available and my husband was hooked. So all was great, then we remembered the sweety on Until all have homes that we both fell in love with. I of course had to check and not only was she still available........SHE WAS ANGIE!!!

We fell in love with the same little girl on 2 different photo listings!! So to us Angie was always meant to be our daughter and we are working on bringing her home.

Here is the other photo:

Wow.....first post!

The funniest thing about me starting a blog is that I am one of those people that never write or call back. I mean to and I always want to, but I don't. So this will be a personal challenge that I am looking forward to.

Well the reason for the blog is to share about our journey to getting our little girl from Eastern Europe. Please stay tuned.......