Praise God!!

One Week! That's all it took for us to finish the homestudy paperwork and get it mailed off. - Actually, they let us send it in without two pieces that we are waiting for that are in the mail already. We had it all done by Monday, so 1 week! We are anxious to get it done so we can get our dossier turned in and on the wait list! All we have left is this homestudy! So yes - Praise God!!! T

Update

Okay...update time (and pictures, cause it's not as fun without them). What a crazy week. We got home last Sunday from our trip, and have been running ever since. We have the goal to get all of our paperwork for our homestudy done in 1 week. Almost there. All we have left it to finish our autobiographies (an hour or two more for each of us) and I need to finish our application. we will have the rest of our recommendations by Sunday. We plan to overnight everything to the agency on Monday and hopefully get our home visit done very shortly aftwerwards. We have all the paperwork done for the dossier, so as soon as we are done with the homestudy - Wait List Baby! Ok, so on to pictures - the fun part of the post!

The Homeschool kids had a play this March - Grant didn't look too thrilled - He actually slept through the whole thing.

Here is Grandma Fuller and DanHere are some of the kidsHere is Macy afterwards with a prop she got to use (and then keep)Then on April 1st, the Bible Bowl crew threw our feerless leader Mrs. Zauche a suprise birthday part at the beginning of practice. And now on to our trip... This is the hotel we got to stay at in Kansas City. Sadly, we were only there for like 8 hours. It was one of the nicest places we've ever stayed. We got a studio suite which had a good sized bedroom area, living area, full sized kitchen, and large bathroom. It was nice, kind of sad that we didn't get to enjoy it for longer. And then into the morning - onto here. Our homestudy educational workshop (which was great, by the way) and then our homestudy orientation. After a full day there, we headed down to my brother's place. He lives south of Kansas City about an hour. He has this great place out in the country - wooded trees, pasture, pond, chickens, roosters, lambs, dog, milk cows, cat, and kids - it's wonderful! He is Dan with a couple of the kids on Sunday morning - checking things out. Here is Judah, Tate, and Brooke (3 of the 7 - #8 on it's way!) Here are Steve and Margo (my brother and his wife) getting things together to hit the road for church. All and all it was a wonderful time and a crazy week following. Now I should get off so I can get back to what I need to do. I have to make 2 banana cream pies, straighten the kitchen, and get the application finished.

Home Again!

We finally made it home at 2:30 this afternoon. It was a long trip, around 14 hours in the car total...too long! We learned lots and have lots to do. We actually got a lot done this weekend. We utalized the time in the car and finished our With Eyes Wide Open workbook, so it will get sent in tomorrow. We came home and dove into the homestudy paperwork. Our goal is to get it all together and off to the Homestudy agency by next Monday! It's a big race, which we are running somewhat backwards, but it is moving! As soon as homestudy is done our Dossier will be complete. All the other paperwork is totally ready to go for AGCI, so that is nice. I will post some pictures tomorrow about a little more of our time in Kansas City, but it is somewhat late, and I am very tired from all the travel. Have a blessed evening!! T

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.