Garage Sale

We have officially scheduled our first fundraising Garage Sale!

Save the Date - May 9th (weather permitting!)

Testing...

I was just curious how this blogging from email worked, so I did a little reading and now I am doing a test run.  Have a great day!  T  - Oh, and just seeing how the pix feature works.  So here is a cute pix of our newphew Grant 

The snow continues!!!

So it has now been snowing since sometime this morning and piling up where ever the Kansas wind blows. Some of our pictures from the front yard. Note: the yard slopes down toward the street away from the house and at this point is almost level from the street side up toward the house. In the foreground is some snow we had to shovel to get the car in the garage after Dan came home from work. Thankfully Staples closed early (3 pm instead of 8pm) so Dan got to come home and spend more time with Tara who had the entire day off. Thanks Jeff and Bobbie for closing. The roads were really bad and it wasn't fun being out on them.





The South side of the house and the fence line. The snow beside the house reaches the top of the tall fence approx. 7 feet and the front yard almost to the short fence approx 3 feet. Thankfully we have covers over the windows that lead to the basement buried somewhere beneath the 6.5 or 7 feet of snow.



A shot down the alley when someone was trying to get through. He was walking away from me and made it through with some effort but not before...

falling over at about the half way point to his crossing.

Out the back door to the porch and yard. Compare to the picture form our earlier post that shows what is buried below this pile. You can hardly see any of it at this point.

The air conditioner and the butterfly bush in the top right corner. Hopefully the bush will still bloom well this year even after this cold in the middle of when it was starting to warm up.

Mickey having yet more fun in the yard. It seems like he come in just to warm up a bit, then he whines at the door to go back out and run around in the fluffy white stuff again.

Covered with snow on his face it was irresistible not to get this picture of him.

Since there was so much snow in the driveway and street dip we had to shovel a path for the car to get in the garage. Tara came out and helped, but ended up with a battle scar for all her efforts. Hopefully it will heal fine and not cause her to much pain. D

Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow!!!

I have spent time reading many blogs since we started this adoption process and one thing I noticed was in common on many...people complaining about so much rain and snow! All I could think was, send it this way! I don't know if many know how dry it has been here in Southwest Kansas. Let's just say there has basically been no winter. We went straight from fall into spring. There were a few cold days here and there, but not many, and basically no moisture. I actually read an article from the Colorado Springs paper (when we were there last weekend) comparing the situation now to how it was in the dirty thirties (the days of the dust bowl, 1930's). Let's just say it is DRY! Well, thank the Lord, we are finally getting snow. Enough snow to basically shut down Southwest Kansas. YEAH!!! Here are the best pictures I could get this morning.

Moving right along...and the weekend

Well, first things first. The adoption...

We ordered certified copies of our birth certificates and marriage licenses on this past Tuesday. When we got home from Colorado Springs on Sunday both of our birth certificates had come in and the marriage license came in yesterday! So, check, check, and check!
Last night we got all registered and signed up with our online education. We hope to spend some time in the evenings and on Saturday getting it all done. Dan actually has a Satuday off in which we have absolutely nothing going on!
I also finished our Power of Attorney and our Post Adoption Commitment letter. Dan is going to write our application letter to MOWA (the ministry of women's affairs in Ethiopia) this afternoon.
We also sent an email to Al and Kristen to request our two recommendation letters that we need. We asked them to get them done in the next two weeks if at all humanly possible.
We are going to straighten the house up and take pictures of it as well as getting the passport photos done that are needed. We are trucking right along and it is exciting!
My goal is to get everything done that is humanly possible in the next two weeks before our Homestudy orientation and education workshop. That is one of the fun things of living in the boonies. It is a 6 1/2 hour trip to our homestudy agency. (Which we plan on using the drive to work some more on the 'With Eyes Wide Open' workbook that is required). Thankfully they have a social worker in Wichita, so that is only 3 1/2 hours away. Our workshop and orientation are on the 4th of April. They are nicely combining those two in the same trip for us. I am hoping then that we can totally focus on the homestudy and get it all done quickly.
My goal is to be done and getting our dossier to AGCI by the second week of May. Unfortunately our state does not let us do early processing on the I-600A, so we have to wait on that until the homestudy is totally done, but that is O.K.



On to the weekend!


This past weekend we went to Colorado Springs to celebrate Dan's grandma's 80th birthday. It's a 4 1/2 hour drive, so we started working on our 'With Eyes Wide Open' workbook. It was a good time. Here are a few highlight photos from the weekend.

Dan's Aunt Cathy, Aunt Carla, Nana (her birthday), and his mom Betty

This is Dan's sister Trista and Aunt Carla (and brother Jeremy off to the side)

Dan's brother Jeremy teaching his nephew Braden how to use chopsticks

All of us at the party!

We took our dog Mickey to Colorado Springs for the first time. He did great on the trip and was a huge hit there. This is Braden 'running' the dog after the party.

Dylon loved Mickey as well. Here he is getting kisses.

Sunday we had a big traditional Thanksgiving dinner. It was good. Here Al is cutting the turkey. And yes, he is doing it down on the washing machine.

Here is me, Nana, Dan, Aunt Cathy, and Mickey.

304 pieces of ...

We are so excited to be moving forward in our adoption process, and preparing for all the new things that are to come. With all the blogs we have been reading (Tara mostly) we found that the orphanage our child will stay at for a time before coming home always love outdoor things for the children to do. Several mentioned that they like sidewalk chalk so...
we got boxes tonight while we were out shopping. It wasn't that we were looking for them, but kind of stumbled across them in the dollar bins at the front of Target, then by the card rack in Wal-Mart. I can't wait for the day we will be able to pack all of the donations we gather and fly to get our child(ren) in Ethiopia. Untill then we have a lot of paperwork to do and forms to fill out that will bring us to the child(ren) that God has planned for our family. D

It arrived!

Our official dossier planner arrived today! We are so excited to be moving ahead! I mean, really moving ahead. I am going to spend some time reading through paperwork tomorrow. Tonight we are going to try and focus on cookbooks. Here are some pictures of Dan opening it!

What a weekend!

Ok, so it has been an absolutely crazy weekend. To start off, last Wednesday we had our Orientation conference Call with Mindy at AGCI. It was great, we got it done and then on Thursday, we signed and notarized all our contracts and paperwork. We then overnighted them to AGCI. Got a phone call on Friday from Minday and she got the contracts and everything was great and our Dossier binder is on its way! That's so exciting!!! Ok, so in the meantime, I contacted the homestudy agency and got things underway there. Spoke with one lady and we got whatever application and whatnot filled out. The sosical worker, Alisa, called Friday as well to find out when we would be able to make a trip out to Wichita. So, we are looking at our calender and figuring it all out now. So we had two wonderful phone calls on Friday. Only thing was, we were in the middle of trying to cook for 180 women. We (me, Dan, our friend Brenda) cooked for the women's conference that our church does each year as a fundraiser for our adoption. Dan's mom and step-dad came out on Thursday night to help out. Thank the Lord they did. We put them to work. I had them cooking, cleaning, binding cookbooks and what not. On friday afternoon we had lots of little helpers, it was fun. Brenda's four kids were there and them we had my sister's four kids. I thought since I wasn't going to be at work, I would help her out to some degree and watch the kids.

Here are Betty and I working on cookbooks.

This is me just standing there, but Betty is getting ready to cut desserts for me. I felt like when I was cooking professionally. I did some stuff, but spent most of the time giving directions to all sorts of other people.The end of the day we were all ready to go home and had some great help cleaning up. Betty, our friend Troy, and his daughter Maggie are pictured here.

This is Betty and Al at the end of two long days relaxing!

It Came!

God heard our prayers! Our orientation packet came in the mail yesterday! We are excited and spent a lot of time yesterday afternoon/evening reading through the whole thing. I am still not done reading some of the contracts, but am so excited. We have our orientation call scheduled for next Wednesday afternoon. That should give us enough time to look over everything and have any questions we may want to ask. The ball is finally rolling, it's exciting!

Cookbooks

We are so excited to be officially accepted, and able to work with AGCI. Since we started looking at different agencies, they were the one we felt would be the best for our family to work with. So now that we are started with them, we can officially get printing on the cook book that Tara has been working so hard on. We printed 500 covers last night (just a little excited about this step), and this afternoon I printed 100 intro portions and 11 books. Unfortunatelly 2 of them had a mis print or double page pull so I only have 9 books that are done. We'll have to see how many I can get done in the next couple of days, while leaving some time to sleep during the day, so I can get my work done at night preparing for inventory at Staples. Overall we hope to have about 750 books printed in the next two and a half weeks. We already got an order from my mom for one hundred cookbooks we hope to deliver to her when we visit in a couple of weeks. THANKS MOM. You have been so encouraging with this whole process.-D

It's a Good Day!!

WooHoo! We are officially accepted and working with AGCI to become parents!! I cannot begin to describe how excited we are. We went out to a steak dinner at Samy's to celebrate in style, and thanks to a gift certificate, it only cost us $8. Then, after dinner, we came home and printed the first official Adoption Fundraiser Cookbook! My Copy :) We ran by Staples (it's nice to have Dan working there) and Dan cut and bound the book. It is totally done. It's exciting to move on to the next phase in this adoption. We should be receiving our orientation packet in 2-4 days, so we are obviously praying for it to come Wednesday. Then we read over it all and have an orientation call next Wednesday afternoon. We can't wait to spread the news. I mean, most people don't spend over 2 months getting accepted with an agency, this is big news! Ok, so to sum it up, we are stoked, flying high, excited, running on adrenaline, and any other way to describe it. I think you get the picture. More news to come... T