Log in date for China!

We are now officially logged in as a couple waiting for adoption from China. Our date is December 12, 2007. Which still means we are three years away from adopting our little girl, but at least the process is in place. People are still waiting for little girls with log in dates from as long ago as 2005!

No new news on the Vietnam front, it looks to be a long process of waiting and waiting ahead. So we are focusing our efforts on house hunting, starting in Arlington, Va, where cheap homes start at half a million dollars. Our lease runs until July, so we hope to find something by then. So our weekends are filled with home searches. I think we found our real estate agent, a helpful man that is giving us advice on what to look for on the outside as well as in the basement.

Homes are wicked expensive, even the ones near busy roads but some of the houses we've looked at have reduced their prices further. It's an overwhelming process and feels like much more of a commitment than marriage, plastic surgery or a tattoo. We've just started and a friend of mine looked at more than 100 houses before she found her cute little bungalow. Every house seems to have something wrong with it, like a weirdly configured kitchen, or one with a refrigerator that was literally on an angle (interesting). Tiny, tiny rooms or major roads next door, really right outside your front door or as it says in the listing...."convenient to major highways". I'm a sucker for a cute front porch. The house I've liked the best is still a breath-taking $605,000 with need for a major kitchen renovation. And I'm not just talking granite counter tops, it means pulling out walls. All of this, to take our minds off of the fact that we don't have a little one yet. But if we can find a house, we can fix it up and be ready when we finally get Milo.