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.

Our new house!

Isn't it too cute? It's similar to the last house we put a bid on - but closer to DC. Our home is located in Arlington. We need to put in a new tub upstairs and hope to move in May. The kitchen is from the eighties, no joke and is smaller than the kitchen we have now but bigger than the one we had at Argonne place. We have a cute little backyard and are looking forward to planting a garden. The addition (in the picture to the right) is covered with 70's wood paneling. The living room is pretty large as well as the dining room and two of the bedrooms upstairs. Now, of course, I want all new furniture, a new kitchen and bathroom in the basement. I've already spent all of our money when we don't have any left after buying the house in this still very expensive place to live! I've already priced composters and solar paneling so we can try to be environmental (uhh...the paneling is gonna have to wait awhile). I gotta admit I've been scared about this - did we buy the right house - in the right neighborhood?

Now I'm just excited and ready to move in!

An adoption update

It has been hard to provide adoption updates for the blog for two reasons - one is that we haven't had any or much news to share and two any news we have hasn't been hopeful. I've been so depressed and discouraged especially after our adoption agency had a call with all families currently planning adoption from Vietnam. Her words were not optimistic and she suggested that all of us consider other places from which to adopt including Russia and China. We already have our dossier in China and expect that to go through in two to three years. Our agency director promised to get back to each one of us to let us know where our dossier is in the Vietnam process and to let us know where we were in the agency queue. Currently 20 families have their dossiers in VN awaiting a child. We finally got the news of our status today.

Last time we checked (about two months ago) our dossier was at the Ministry of Justice and it is now at the Thu Doc Youth Village orphanage in Ho Chi Minh City (also known as Saigon). There are four families from our agency ahead of us in line for children. Although this sounds positive, keep in mind that other agencies from all over the world also work with this same orphanage, and we don't know how many folks are waiting from these other agencies. Supposedly, two of the families waiting from our agency should receive their referrals soon and then we would be third in line.

The problem is this: the agreement for adoptions between VN and the United States expires on September 1st. We don't know if VN will be shut down completely or if they will continue to process adoptions already begun or with referrals or with paperwork at a certain place in the queue. It is our hope, obviously, that we will receive our referral prior to September 1st or if we haven't that they will still process our adoption since our dossier is already at the orphanage.

So think good thoughts for us and send us your prayers. Hopefully this will all work out and we'll receive our little guy soon.