Diapers, Bibs, and Burp Cloths...Oh My!

Things are starting to look real around here. Like, it looks like we're about to birth a baby at any given day.   And I mean, a BABY.  We have bottles, burp cloths, diapers, wipes, teethers, and bibs, along with a whole lot of other stuff. We even brought this up from the basement . . .

Our Sunday School class gave us a baby shower last week and they gave us a lot of our essentials that we're gonna need, which is a ginormous blessing . . .

Its kinda funny, because they asked us for a list of things to get.  One thing I asked for was gift cards.  This is because I just got to where I was really unsure about Maya's sizes for clothes, but of course, she's gonna need clothes.  We converted her European sizes to American, and according to the conversion chart she's wearing 18-month sizes.  When I looked at some of the 18-month clothes, they just looked so small.  I decided that we should just have a few things here for when she came home that would be easy to fit, and then we'd be able to figure out her real size quickly and go find more things in the correct one.  But, you know how it is.  You go in for one thing, find 3 cute things, and leave with 7 cute things, HOPING that they're gonna fit.  I bought 24-month clothes so hopefully they'll work.  If not I can always take them back for exchanges.  Just LOOK . . .

 

Craig and I were kidless this weekend, so we took the opportunity to go out and get more of what we're needing for travel and when she gets home . . .

I don't care how many kids you have, its always so exciting to go out a buy stuff for a new one.  Even though Maya is 3, she's very much at the developmental stage of a baby, so we were absolutely baby-shopping again, and it was fun.  Its just one of those things that never gets old.

We received word the end of last week that our dossier had gone through the final stages of approval.  I'm not 100% sure on this, and I've emailed our social worker to verify, but I think that because of this, we should be assigned a court date next week.  It seems that I've read in a couple of articles, as well as talked to a few other families adopting from BG, that a court date is imminent within 48 hours of this step.  Again, not positive on that, but that's my thinking right now. 

. . .which is why we're getting ready!  Once court is over, we believe we'll be able to travel a couple of weeks afterward to bring Baby Girl home.

June still looks possible, but we'll be cutting it close.  Just keep praying that things will run quickly and smoothly and that she'll be home very soon!

I'll post another update as soon as we get more information.

Love,
Paige

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Canyons and Crickets

So, if you've made it here to the ol' blog page, you may have heard crickets chirping in the background because of the dark loneliness.  I keep waiting for big news to write about (uh, like a COURT DATE) and it just hasn't happened.  There's lots of other stuff going around here, but we're out and about so much that all of you out there in the big wide world probably already know what we've been busy with.  I'm not going to give you a bunch of 'we got in the car and went to Publix today' stories.  Blah.

A few days ago, I sent Stephanie (at Lifeline) an email voicing our frustration with where we are in the craziness of the adoption process.  Stephanie has done a great job in every area of all of this, but my frustration was centered on the Bulgaria side of things.  The attorney there doesn't speak very good English, so there's a communication gap there which seems to be the size of the Grand Canyon.  That, in part, seemed to be where the progress disappeared.  There's a whole 'nuther explanation in this, but just understand that we've heard 'white noise' for about the last 6 weeks or so.  Sooo . . . Stephanie set up Sasha (who lives in Ukraine, but works for Lifeline) to have a talk with our Bulgaria lady to see if his Russian could mesh with her Russian and maybe we could get a good explanation of what's going on with our process.  It worked, but the news wasn't really what we wanted to hear.

Do you remember when I explained that we needed to get a court date before the middle of May?  Because the middle of May was when the government was going to go crazy, like ants that have been scattered all over the place because some crazy kid decided to stick his shovel in their bed?  Well, that ain't happenin'.  At this point, we're kinda stuck.  Maya is kinda stuck.  Right now our dossier is sitting in a stack of about 70 other people's dossiers.  We may be on the top, or we may be on the bottom, or somewhere in between, but the bottom line is this:  That stack is S-L-O-W-L-Y being worked through.  They anticipate that within 2-3 weeks, all of the dossiers with be worked through and we'll finally be submitted for court.  That court date will probably be anywhere from 2-5 weeks away from then, and we can travel back a couple of weeks after that.  At this point, we'll be lucky to travel by the very end of June, but its very possible we may have to wait until July.  I'm not even gonna THINK about August, because, well, I don't want to, quite frankly. 

Whoever is reading this, wherever you're reading this, I need you to PRAY.  I know its all about the Lord's timing and inside I'm just as happy as a bird out of a cage with that and all, but you know what?  The Lord also tells us to BRING IT.  Bring it all . . . your worries, your fears, your anxieties, and your REQUESTS.  I have a request, and that request is to PLEASE let us bring our little girl home soon.  She needs us.  She needs good food, she needs good doctors, and she needs LOVE to surround her.  WE WANT HER HERE.

Just pray for us, that God will somehow see fit to allow the person that's carrying those 70 dossiers wherever they need to go to trip a little (with no injury, of course), and when those dossiers are all picked up, ours will be on top.   Honestly, I don't care how it all happens, I just want you to pray it will happen soon.  And in the meantime, give me another glass of patience, because I just swallowed the last little bit.

Love y'all...

Paige