I Wished for You....

My first post of the new year. I have a feeling this is going to be a great, unforgettable year for us!! Now that I'm about to turn 35 years old in a few days, I feel like there are things I want to experience in life. Meaning do different things, take risks, be spontaneous! Not that I haven't taken a few mild risks in life, but if in the next year we may be bringing a child home to live with us, now is the time to do some crazy fun things:) First thing I decided to do for the new years was to chop off a chunk of my hair last week and go back to the style of having bangs. It was a little scary, but I like it and it makes my forehead look less huge in pictures and makes me look a little younger, haha. I also went skiing and snow tubing for the first time! My husband and I took a trip to Banner Elk, NC which is in the western part of NC. We stayed at a little cozy B&B about five miles from Sugar Mountain Ski Resort. I'm glad that we experienced skiing, but I don't think it's something I would do again lol. We also just signed up for our first 5K run in April! Wish me luck on that one. 

Sugar Mountain Ski Resort

Since my last post, a few things have moved forward with the adoption. We had our fingerprints taken at CIS in Durham, NC. Two weeks later we received our I600-A approval from the US Department of Homeland Security.  This was a huge step because this approval is saying the US Government is allowing us to bring a foreign child into the United States.

This approval was the last step in completing our dossier. We sent it off for French translation and it was back a week later. Seeing the French translation on all of our documents is kind of cool.  At this point we gathered all of our documents together and started making copies. We had to make four copies of each document. I never did count how many documents it was, but seemed like hundreds. As you can see below, I took a pic of us trying to get all the dossier documents in order, with copies and then the final stacks. 

Meanwhile, I had some thought of possibly doing an adoption fundraiser.  International adoption is VERY expensive.....period! Will and I both have our reservations about doing fundraisers, so if we do decide to pursue this idea, then we will probably do the Apparent Project bracelet fundraiser. You can read all about the Apparent Project here: www.apparentproject.org It's a great cause for the women and families of Haiti and also for those of us who are adopting and want to raise funds to cover some of the expenses.  I decided to order one of the bracelets myself just to see how they look and the quality. I was actually pleasantly surprised!! The bracelet is very nice (see below)

If we decide to do the fundraiser in the spring, we would get 150 of these bracelets (multi-colored) and sell them for $8.00 each. $4.00 would go back to Haiti and we would keep $4.00 for our adoption fund.  Pretty cool!

I was doing some searching online a few days ago and somehow came across a forum or page that had books on families that adopt. I saw this book titled "I Wished for You" which is about a mother bear that adopts a baby bear and she tells him about how she wished for him for many, many months he grew in her heart and loves him very much as her own biological son. I read a lot of the reviews on Amazon and everyone raved about how it is such a good book to read to children who have been adopted.  I could not help but to order it that day.  When the book came, I almost shed some tears. It's very heartwarming and makes me feel so happy to know that we will soon have a child to love. I will save the book and read it to our son when he arrives.