Our first picture

As you know, Timothy has a cleft lip and palate. The lip has obviously been repaired since this photo, taken when he was three months old. This is the very first picture we received of him.

He's still absolutely adorable, but you can see how great he looks post surgery. They really did a great job with his lip.

Introducing Timothy

Today we heard the best news - we got our referral! Finally, finally, finally at very long last!

We are absolutely thrilled as you can imagine. We got the phone call this morning on our cell phone, thank God it was on. Saw the 301 number and actually picked up the call thinking it might be our friend Todd (but hoping because you never know, it might be from our agency, but not wanting to think it might be our agency, no it's definitely not our agency).

Lo and behold it's our agency director Jennifer and she sounds pretty excited. Okay, be careful now, and she asks if I'm at work and no I'm at home. She says she has the referral and hold on so she can conference in Junji. I run to go get Greg who's home too and cleaning out my Halloween pumpkin so I can carve it, whispered that it was "the" referral call. Ask Jennifer to call us back on our regular phone. I'm stammering and stuttering and can't get my words out.

Turns out they want to fed ex the referral letter for us to sign and don't forget to check the box with "acceptance of this referral". We'll meet Junji later and hand over the papers to her.

Jennifer calls us back an hour later and says she can't fed ex to receive on Saturday. So Greg says we'll go pick it up and sign in person. So up to Columbia, Md we go and sign it we did and now we are finally back home and starting to get excited. Because the shock of receiving the call is wearing off and we are starting to believe it's real and actually happening...

We hope to send this referral or LOA (letter of acceptance) on Monday and from there we wait for travel permission from the gov't of China. We hope to go by the first couple of weeks in December. Won't this be the world's best Christmas present?

So now, we prepare for travel, fill out the visa applications and buy the stuff we need for a little baby. We'll post more pictures later, some early ones from the first few we received. The picture posted now is the latest we have, taken at some point in September. As you can see his cleft lip has been repaired. When we return from China, we'll get our little man surgery on his cleft palate, hopefully about a month after he returns. The palate is how we are able to talk, so it's important to get repaired as soon as possible. He'll need a lot of surgeries over the course of a few years.

His birthday was October 9th, 2007, so he's almost 13 months old. He weighs about 18 pounds. He's a little little guy. Isn't he adorable? Doesn't he look so sweet?

Here's a bit of the back story for those of you that may not know it:

We were trying to adopt from Vietnam when the bottom fell out - lots of problems between the US and Vietnamese governments. Although we were third on the list from our agency to adopt a child (the orphanage also works with multiple families from other agencies) things did not look good.

So our agency asked us if we would be interested in adopting a baby from China with a special needs. We said sure! and they sent us information about three little boys, all with cleft lip and palates.

After a heart breaking decision we choose Qing Xing. He's a tiny, tiny little guy.

Originally we were told we'd probably travel in July. Then it changed to you'll receive your referral in August. Then it was September. The latest was "we just don't know". So, I was pretty surprised, but thank God.

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.

Don't ever paint in red

Somehow I got the bright idea to paint our bathroom what I call "barn red", you know after all those great old barns you see when driving along the highway. We love old barns. One of our favorite wedding pics has us in front of a barn.

Plus red is considered a lucky color in Chinese culture. We need luck with our adoption taking so much longer than we expected.

Sounds like a great idea, right? I didn't like any of the available colors at Home Depot, so spent a fortune at our local paint store agonizing between two choices but eventually decided on "heartthrob". Shoulda known it was a bad choice from the name alone.

Turns out this was a bad idea because it was really a primary red color - the starter red on the color wheel, think of the red from kindergarten or the color of a fire truck. Plus we've had to do three coats already and it still shows every single painting flaw and it just looks terrible. Honestly. Greg says it's growing on him but really what he means is that he doesn't want to paint it again in a different color.

Kind of looks like the Amityville Horror with the blood red walls. All we need is piggy's red eyes in the back yard...I'm not sure I'm cut out for this DIY lifestyle.

Fixin' our house

Just thought I post some pics of what we are doing to occupy our time...

This is our dining room...we got a new table with chairs as well as a hutch from Larry and Kathe in Cincinnati. Rick noted that we needed some artwork, so we got this picture from a yard sale for $10. The bikes we got from a catalog.

It's a long story but lots of changes

Hi there,

For the five of you that read this blog - you probably already know. Our Vietnam adoption did not work out - we were third on the list from our agency, but the country will be closing for adoptions without referrals on September 1st. BTW, this closure is only for Americans. On September 1st all dossiers without referrals will be sent back to the agencies.

So we decided to go another route - by way of a special needs child from China, a precious little boy. He is as cute as he can be, I'll be sure to post photos when we have our official referral. We were hoping to bring him home as soon as July, but it's not in the cards. We now hope we be able to travel by September.

Life has been extremely busy. I started working and actually like it. We just bought a new house and moved in on May 17th. We've had families from both sides visiting. We've painted two rooms - one orange - the dining room and it looks fabulous as a matter of fact! We also painted our wood-paneled addition to "barrister white" making it a much brighter and more tolerable place to be and less of the dumping ground it had become...

Next room up - perhaps a baby room? I've been putting off buying anything for this room but maybe it's now time to start. We have the idea of an "aquarium theme" - what do you think? Of course, then we have to actually paint it when Greg's dad Larry painted our other rooms.

I hope to post some positive news soon! Hope all are doing well.