Beautiful Elk Rutting Season

I caught this video after school drop off in Evergreen.  What a lucky day to drive down to the lake!

DTC!

We began our 'official' adoption journey in March of 2014.  Today, which is five months and many FedEx'd documents later, we received news that our dossier has been sent to China and should be in the hands of the China Center for Children's Welfare and Adoption (CCCWA) by next week!  This is one of those big milestones in the adoption process, and now it's here for us.

Here's hoping for a quick match with our boy!  Happy Friday!

Chickens, Boats and Waterfalls, Oh My!

This is after all, a blog about our family's adventures, so I thought I'd post some pictures of our recent trip to Keuka Lake, NY earlier this month to visit Matt's family.  It's been 9 years since our last visit and after so much fun and relaxation on this trip, we swore we would make it back sooner next time.

Raspberry picking with Cousins Anita and Carlton

Mira in her element on the farm with the chickens.

A little excited to be on Uncle Stan's boat!

Our ride to Matt's old summer job at Lakeside...

The Alpaca Pack

Anita and Carlton's rainbow eggs

Chilling with garlic ice cream at the Garlic Fest near Seneca Lake.

Pinocchios

Mandatory visit to Mac's for ice cream

This was a terrific hike up the glenn - with a few cool salamanders!

A very appropriate photo after Mira took over two hours to get to sleep!

Light at the End of the Paperwork Tunnel

This week I was going through our Dossier guide, which is intended to help lead us through the complex process of paperwork gathering, notarizing, certifying and authenticating, and realized that I was reading the last page of the packet, meaning we are VERY close to completing our dossier!  The only thing we are now waiting on is to be fingerprinted for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in Aurora next Monday, then our I-800A approval should arrive within 2-3 weeks, at which point our dossier will be translated and sent on to China.  Once it's in China and approved, we can finally be matched with our sweet little boy.

Here is a snapshot of the most recent dossier documents we received back from the Department of State and Chinese Consulate in D.C.   I'm just glad these weren't lost in the mail after we spent the past 3 months obtaining them!  Whew!

...and our first official documents containing Chinese characters ("hanzi").  Who knows what it says.

Things are seeming a little more exciting and we are really looking forward to this feeling more real - like there is an actual child who we will be blessed with at the end of this whole crazy process.  A little boy who will someday become part of our family, run around our living room with his big sister and stand on our front porch, squirting the hose on the garden and getting messy with popsicles in the summer.  We hope we can give him a life that many other children from his orphanage will sadly never know.  They all deserve a loving family, and we cannot wait to be that family for one little child.  

"Adopting one child will not change the world,

   But for that one child, the world will change."  

- unknown

Yes, we are really doing it!

I'm pregnant.  Well, not really pregnant.  Adoption-pregnant.  To add validity, our home study social worker told me that I can now consider myself "pregnant", for all intents and purposes.  Hearing that was like reading a positive pregnancy test.  Holy cow!

Family and close friends have had a tad bit of difficulty believing that we have decided to go down this path.  I'll admit, adoption is a little out of the norm in our families, considering our relatively homogeneous family history (aside from seeing the name "Sing" five generations back on my family tree, which has a decidedly Asian sound). And up until now, we have been a happy family of three.  We finally had everyone, including ourselves, believing that we were 'one and done'...and then we changed our minds. The reasons for that will have to be another post.  So to anyone who isn't sure this is actually going to happen...Yes, we're really doing it!

I am going through stages of 'pregnancy emotions'.  Excitement- I can't believe we're going to have another child running around our house and in our backyard!  How will we decorate the new bedroom?  What will we name him?  Yearning- I wonder what his eyes, ears, hair and nose will look like?  I can't wait to have him here in our arms.  Ambivalence - I know that yesterday I couldn't wait to meet our child, but last night I woke up in utter disbelief that we have allowed ourselves to get this far into the adoption process.  How am I going to handle midnight and early morning wake ups again, not to mention 2 year old tantrums, and the hundreds of future questions about identity and origins?  What have we gotten ourselves into?!

I am pretty sure that these are all things I went through in some form when I was 'belly pregnant' (for lack of a better term) with our sweet daughter.  Only when I was 'belly pregnant', there wasn't any going back.  With adoption, there is always an out, up until you sign the papers.  So I walked into the kitchen and read the fortune cookie paper taped to our refrigerator door - "One always regrets what could have done.  Remember for next time."  This is one of the 'signs' Matt and I were presented with while we were contemplating adoption.  We are big on signs.  And these words help me remember why we are doing what we're doing.  I don't want there to be a 'next time' - when would that be, in my next life?  Matt and I are not getting any younger and there are millions of kids out there waiting for families.  What are we waiting for???  Let's do it!