A Long Day...or Two

We can't remember... It has been a long, long two days! Awesome, but long! I will post more later, but here is a little taste...
This is how we felt when all was said and done (unfortunately the picture was taken right at the beginning of all the work!)

And to give you a glimpse of the enormity...

This is at the start of things this morning - a view of most of the yard, but there is still more off to the left that didn't make the picture as well...so much stuff! Yeah!!!

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!

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