Yee Haw!!

(The title of this post will become apparent towards the end.)

Wow!  Have we had a busy month!  We've also had several good photo ops so I'll include some of the good ones as we go.

Starting way back in April...

On April 30, we drove up towards central Nebraska to Monroe for a 50th birthday celebration.  Before we went there, however, we went on to St. Edward to visit a high school friend of mine and her family.  They have quite the menagerie!  Meighan got to see cows, horses, a goat, dogs, cats, a young rooster, a couple very cute ducklings and a baby pig!  She even got to ride a horse and has been talking about it ever since!

On May 5, Tony took the day off and went with Meighan's preschool class to the zoo.  He got some pretty good pictures.

For Mother's Day, all the daycare kids made a gift for their moms.  I thought it was pretty cool!

One day she came out from drawing on her chalk board and told me to come see what she drew.  She drew Mama, Daddy and her!  (Mama is the one with the big head ;-P !)  Still, it's pretty good for 3 years old!

And now, her newest "thing."  Tony has had a pattern for a tire horse swing for a couple of years but has never had time to get to making it.  He saw it on sale at Tractor Supply this last week so he decided to just spend the money and buy one.  She LOVES it!  Here are pictures of her swinging and a video of her seeing it for the first time.

And, for anyone interested, I now have the ability to upload YouTube videos into my account that are longer than 15 minutes, soooo.... I uploaded our coming home video from April of 2009.  Just click on the YouTube link on the right side of the blog and find "Welcome Home, Meighan - 4/17/2009" on our channel.  Enjoy!

Referrals (not for us, yet!)

(The following post was written in a notebook but not actually posted on the blog until we received our referral because we didn’t tell our family that we were in process. We waited until we had the referral for our son before we published on the blog because we wanted to do this “covertly” and have it be a surprise to as many people as possible.)

We received an email from Holt the other day letting us know that there will not be any referrals from the CCOP program in June. This doesn’t really affect us because we are expecting to have a chance at our son in July, not sooner. Apparently he’s not ready for us yet. We know that God has a very special little boy picked out for us and we will get to bring him home soon!

Our 11th Anniversary AND Dossier off to Holt!

(The following post was written in a notebook but not actually posted on the blog until we received our referral because we didn’t tell our family that we were in process. We waited until we had the referral for our son before we published on the blog because we wanted to do this “covertly” and have it be a surprise to as many people as possible.)

We were able to get our dossier taken to FedEx today and get it off to Holt! Finally! However, due to the holiday and the fact that I started transferring money from our savings account to my checking account too late, I have to let them know not to cash the check until I know the money is in my account.

Dossier to DC!

(The following post was written in a notebook but not actually posted on the blog until we received our referral because we didn’t tell our family that we were in process. We waited until we had the referral for our son before we published on the blog because we wanted to do this “covertly” and have it be a surprise to as many people as possible.)

Oh! It’s so good to have our dossier off to DC! A little time to relax from the paper chase! I never thought we’d get to this point a few months ago!

I was able to concentrate on cleaning house today! It really needed vacuuming, DUSTING and other cleaning. Some things kinda get pushed back when you’re working on a dossier! Glad that part is almost over!

Back to Lincoln

(The following post was written in a notebook but not actually posted on the blog until we received our referral because we didn’t tell our family that we were in process. We waited until we had the referral for our son before we published on the blog because we wanted to do this “covertly” and have it be a surprise to as many people as possible.)

I took the last hour off work and drove to Lincoln AGAIN to get the last two documents state certified. I drove back to Omaha and had sometime before the dinner that our office was taking us out to (for Administrative Professionals week) so I stopped at Office Max and made copies of everything that I didn’t have copies of and another copy of everything for the Chinese Embassy. I then went to meet everyone for dinner. Very good, very filling – A LOT OF FOOD! I brought lots home.

When I got home I collated all the copies together. Then, after Meighan went to bed, we got it all together and Tony made the FedEx envelopes for outbound and return to send it to the courier in DC to be authenticated by the U.S. Dept of State and the Embassy of China!

We’ll look it over one more time tomorrow before we seal it up!

WHEW! As I said before…NO ONE ADOPTS BY ACCIDENT! It is a very purposeful and deliberate way to build a family!

To Lincoln

(The following post was written in a notebook but not actually posted on the blog until we received our referral because we didn’t tell our family that we were in process. We waited until we had the referral for our son before we published on the blog because we wanted to do this “covertly” and have it be a surprise to as many people as possible.)

We received the I-797 (fingerprint approval) form on May 6 and got it copied and notarized. Today, I took a couple hours in the middle of the day and drove to Lincoln to get it all state certified. They couldn’t certify the two medical forms because the notary wasn’t quite right. They gave me a couple forms for the notary to fill out. Geez! How many “hiccups” does there have to be?

Happy Birthmother's Day!