Friday, March 30, 2007

A Shout Out To "G"


Today is a great day for many reasons. The first reason is that it is our neice's birthday today and she is the ripe old age of 9. Everyone knows how much I ADORE my neices. I remember wondering, when I found out that my sister was pregnant with G, how I could ever love someone as much as I love my oldest neice. Thankfully (because where would my own children be in the list of kids to love??)that all of that obviously wasn't even a consideration from the first moment that I held this little girl in my arms on the day she was born. She was a BIG baby - both were over 10lbs - and had a cute little red birthmark over her eye. She has now grown into quite the young lady and at the age of 9 is about as tall as I am, 5'2", and can share shoes with me as we wear the same size. She has a personality to match her stature and is going to one day take the world by storm with her acting and entertaining abilities. She is crazy and zany and so full of joy and a zest for life and brings tremendous joy to our family. Happy 9th Birthday G - We love you!!!
In other fantastic news, our friends welcomed their second child into the world today at 6:17pm. A little girl to join her 3 1/2 year old brother makes them their own "Party of Four!" We hear that mommy and baby are doing well and wish all of them congratulations and much love. Can't wait to meet her! So many blessings and things to be thankful for today!

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Huge Apologies To........

Anyone who is here for the first time because of the 95,000 messages you received from a yahoogroups board. Our blog is kind of fun but we're not THAT excited about it...now come on folks...

The whole saga is that, in addition to introducing myself on a new board for an adoption group, I also put a message on our own "Natalie May" group to supposedly inform those that didn't get an email last week about our new blog. I never intended for those of you that already know about this place to hear it again and had removed you from my list of recipients to receive the email. Yahoogroups did not like my idea... This is exactly why we switched to ye old blogger... you won't ever receive an email from me. You just come by anytime you want to and check it out. I guess you can do that as well with yahoo groups but most of our peeps were set up to receive daily emails.

I was so freaked out yesterday when I saw my "new member intro" post over and over again on the new group I belong to. This a group of folks who are all submitting their dossiers at the same time and will be sharing the long journey together as we wait for our referrals. I told Phil that it appeared that I had introduced some kind of virus into the AprilDTC group. He just laughed at me and said that he was sure that it was some kind of problem on yahoogroups end. We went back and forth for a few more rounds of discussion. How was I supposed to believe the guy that had kept insisting that there was something wrong with our bbq to which I replied "I bet it's out of propane"...."no - it should be full..." "honey, check the propane..." "no, that's not it..." We had our first bbq of the season last night after my sweetie went to fill up the propane tank. I guess there was less than a gallon left. Hmmm... Shortly after our bbq, I saw a note at the top of our yahoogroup that they are aware of the multiple posting problem and are working to fix it. Hmmm... lol

So there you have it folks... this time you CAN shoot the messenger...just don't hate on the author!

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Maybe He's Still Here Because Of This...??




I'm just not lovin AI this season...there is no one that I can really get into. I guess Blake has had a few songs that I have liked but nothing that exciting. LaKisha and Melinda are good, but again, not that exciting. There really aren't any performances by anyone that have stood out to me. I know lots of people liked LaKisha's first performance but I wasn't that impressed having just seen Dreamgirls. I really don't understand why Sanjaya is still around!? I guess there are lots of teenage girls out there text messaging their votes... what was up with his hair on Tuesday?

I am excited by this however... It should be hilarious! Loved Talladega nights too...Starts Friday..



26 Days Until


We Are At The Happiest Place On Earth....

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Weekend Wrap-Up

Another busy weekend was enjoyed by all at Casa De La Crazy. Our neices stayed with us for a few days as Mommy was in Napa and Daddy got a break. In the past 6 months, their mommy has been to New York City, Las Vegas, Palm Springs and now Napa for a little spa time and wine tasting. Granted, I went to NYC with her but I think the rest of it is a touch excessive don't you all?

I had asked the girls ahead of time what they wanted to do and both said bowling and roller skating. Being the awesome auntie that I am, I delivered. Bowling with the bumpers up is awesome! There is nothing more fun than getting beat by a three year old! My 3 old was ahead for a good amount of the game and then my friend's 3 and 5 year old took the lead and won. Everyone had a great time....roller skating is another story.

Our first hint of what was to come should have been the fact that there was a police officer standing inside the doorway as we walked in via the metal detector. Our innocent little neices didn't even know what the metal detector was but they knew they saw a police officer and were starting to wonder (as was I looking wide-eyed at my husband who plays hockey at this establishment every Wednesday night until 12am) what they were getting into. There were plenty of tweens there so I thought it couldn't be that bad could it?...I realized when we were inside that there were probably 4 parents there and we made up half of the parental force. Okay, so the next hour was spent trying to convince my soon-to-be 9 year old neice, who IS having a roller skating birthday party next week, to get out on the floor and give it a try. She kept insisiting that it was the skates so we tried three different pairs on to see if that helped. First, she didn't like the quad skates and needed inline...well, the inline didn't really fit right so we needed to get the quad skates again...Finally, we think we have the right pair on and we're headed to the skating floor and then, of course, she has to go to the bathroom. I kid you not - this was an hour after we got there. Now I don't know about all of you, but back in the day when we went roller skating we had our cool red striped shorts or Jordache jeans and rainbow shirts on and were jazzed by the fact that the white part of our clothing glowed when the black light was on. We skated for hours on end to K.C. and the Sunshine band or Shaun Cassidy and tried to "shoot the duck" and/or worried about who we were going to skate with when the "snowball" sign lit up...Remember? My neices will have this awesome memory of their skating childhood... I have my 8 and 10 year old, catholic-school-going, little neices with me as we try to push our way through a gang of girls in the bathroom, sobbing and reapplying make-up to their 11 year old faces, because some other girls just threw a few punches out on the rink. They were plotting how they were going to &*!#$%! get those &*!#$%$^ back etc... one of my neices counted the number of swear words she heard in that conversation...I think we left it at 10 in one sentence. 10 year old kids were out on the floor pushing other kids down as they were skating and then would skate up behind other kids and pull those poor kids pants down. Gone was the idyllic shoot-the-duck contest only to be replaced by a speed skating competition with kids flying around the rink, pushing each other down and crashing on the floor. Good times... Needless to say, I think we went around the rink once and then were out of there. It was $30 well spent I would say! The rest of their time was luckily uneventful and fun.

We bid adieu to the girls on Saturday afternoon and then had a fun evening out with our friends that night. It has been quite some time since we have closed a place down on a Saturday evening. We were having so much fun that we didn't even notice that we were the last ones in the place. No wonder our waiter and the bussing staff kept looking at us so anxiously...they even told us not to worry about paying for the last minute port and coffee that we ordered...through gritted teeth we were told "no problem" which traslates to "just get the hell out.."

Brunch Sunday with a friend and a brother-in-laws bday celebration Sunday night wrapped-up a fun and busy weekend.

Figuring This Blogging Stuff Out



So I'm posting this becase a)It's cute and from one of the blogs I read... Natalie loves the song and b)I'm still figuring all of this stuff out so this is my first attempt at embedding video...

Just click on the play button in the middle of the picture. You can see the blog this is from here .

Enjoy!

Friday, March 23, 2007

Our Ultrasound Photo


Progress Update

We officially completed all of the pre-adoption paperwork yesterday and turned our dossier over to our adoption agency yesterday afternoon. Our agency will review all of our paperwork one last time and then it will send it on it's merry way to China on April 1st. Woo Hoo!!! I think that we completed this much more quickly this time around. The magic date that we will be waiting to hear now is our LID date or Log-In date in China. This is the date that will mark the start of the official waiting period, which is currently at about 15-18 months as I write this. Arrgh... Oh well, we have plenty to do to get ready for little miss Sophia Marie.

Once our paperwork arrives in China, it will be in a review process for many months and then will go to the "matching" area where we will be matched up with our daughter. After that, her info will be sent to us and then we wait for a travel date. It all sounds so simple...why does it take so long?

I have faith that it will happen when the time is right. We have been having ladybug sightings again. For those of you that don't know or remember, ladybug's are seen as good luck in the Chinese adoption community. Last time, close encounters with ladybugs seemed to happen at key points along the way. In fact, the night before we received Natalie's referral, a ladybug landed on Phil and his book as he was reading outside. Little did we know that our lives would change forever the very next day as we were finally able to see a picture of our daughter for the very first time. Another memory is mailing off our documents to the San Francisco consulate on September 4th then heading off for a 10 day trip to California. All along the way, we saw ladybugs and were constantly talking about Natalie. I really remember feeling her presence and that she was alive. Her birthday is September 10th... So last Monday a ladybug flew into the car and landed on Natalie's car seat. It's the first time in a long time that I remember seeing a ladybug. We received our 171-H last Tuesday (the last important document from the US government)...I think that little sister is trying to say "hi" to us.

The Beginning

Welcome to our blog... We had a "yahoo group" for our first adoption and thought it was time to update and start a blog to record the process this time around. Who knows what will end up on here and it will be fun to see how it develops. Obviously, you will see many posts regarding our adoption progress and you can also probably count on seeing posts on anything from trips, to crafts, to recipes, parenting/family events, geocaching, hockey, etc.... We hope you enjoy taking this journey with us!