Kate's 5th Anniversary Celebration!

Last Saturday morning we celebrated a momentous occasion. It's Kate's fifth anniversary of remission from cancer! When we first learned of her cancer, it gobsmacked all of us, let alone Kate, just 26 years old and in the first week of a new job. She was literally on her last day of COBRA eligibility for health care. She eventually sought treatment at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Md.

Kate, I love you! And I'm so lucky to know you. You are a spark of life, a fighter, and person determined to make the world a better place and to make your impact in it! I love your intellectual curiosity and amazing ability to meet the most interesting people. I'm so glad you forced all those doctors to listen to you and not settle for everything they suggested. You are amazing!

Janice, thanks for teaching me what it means to be a friend. (Janice went to Baltimore when Kate was going thru all of this every single weekend.) You are a dedicated and true friend through the good times and bad. Every person should have a friend like you by their side. I know you helped Kate immeasurably.

So to celebrate Greg and I prepared our favorite meal - brunch! Greg made a fantastic souffle, his first. We also feasted on fruit, mocha coffeecake, lemon poppyseed scones, bacon - both real and fake. We also toasted our good fortune with Prosecco.

Fabiano came to visit and told us all about his artwork. And I got to play with the cutest baby in the whole world, Sidney. She's sooo sweet and she loves her mama. She wants to walk in the worst way, I don't think it's that far off. We put up the playpen just to show we could do it. Sidney is laughing and smiling and likes to play with her tongue.

Later this month is the annual Light the Night to benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I hope you'll join me to walk and support my fundraising efforts.

Any day now

For months now our agency has been telling us "you should hear something in four weeks". The first time was around the 4th of July. Second time was at the beginning of August. After begging for any news from our agency told us it should be sometime this week. That was last Thursday.

What do we want? We want our official 'referral' letter from the Chinese gov't. Supposedly everything has been sorted through and we are just waiting for the letter to arrive to our agency. And then we will get a call from them letting us know that it has arrived. I last spoke with Junji, our Chinese facilitator here in the US, on Thursday while at the Home Depot, trying to find white primer to cover our hideous red bathroom. This is when she gave us the latest "that we should here by the end of next week." But here it is Wednesday and again, once again, nothing.

We get plenty of calls but none are the one we want...Home Depot letting us know our storm door is in, forgot about that, old friends calling to see how we are doing, how the adoption is faring (sigh...I wish I knew) and countless miscellaneous solicitors (we are on the Do Not Call list in case you are wondering).

This letter is important as we send it back "accepting the referral" and it's put in place to begin the process for a travel date. About - you guessed it - 4-6 weeks after we receive the referral letter. Looks like we won't be in China before November. Which will make it harder to get our son's surgery before the Christmas holidays. Oh well. As long as we finally get him.

We hope to hear from our agency by the end of next week.