Been a long time gone.

So I'm going to take advantage of having to sit in the doctor's office for 3 hours to take my gestational diabetes test and post a little update. Did you catch that? GESTATIONAL? We're having a baby! We found out it's a girl around the holidays. This has been a rough pregnancy, so we were afraid to post anything on our blog - even though we've obviously told people we see or talk to on a regular basis. I mean, it's hard to avoid. I'm the size of a house and my stomach is starting to drop already. ;D

Our doc thought we would be expecting a new kiddo around May 2nd originally, but then we started having problems and I ended up at the hospital. Twice. That's when we learned we had started out with what looked like fraternal twins, but my hormone levels were never right to reflect this. On our first ultrasound there was bleeding where one baby had vanished and the remaining baby was very, very tiny. Too tiny to be 10/11 weeks as we had expected. She was more like a 5/6 week sized baby. But she was still there with all of her fingers and toes and a good heartrate. We struggled thru monthly ultrasounds and doctor appointments, hoping she'd stay put. And she did! And we don't have much longer to go before we have another munchkin.

Sad News :*(

On Wednesday last week we were informed that we were not eligible to adopt Eileen. This is very frustrating and sad, since we have worked so hard to get out paperwork finished to submit to USCIS and SDA in Ukraine. We literally had one document left to apply for - the USCIS immigration approval. Then we could have submitted our dossier for translation and SDA approval. We had every other piece of paper either in hand or in process (i.e. Indiana State Police clearance and FBI checks that are down in Indianapolis right now). It has torn our hearts out to have to walk away from this little girl. If it weren't for our amazing friends who have checked up on us and coaxed us from our house over the weekend, we'd still be hiding out and crying.

Eileen's room is now "the spare room". Eileen's stuff is now earmarked for various relatives, since we're not really sure what to do with it all. Eileen's sweet little picture is still stuck to the front of my 3" thick binder of adoption paperwork, though. We would sort our documents and pat her picture on the head some nights, pretending she'd know how hard we'd been working. I can't bring myself to put that picture in the trash just yet.

We have parted ways with the adoption ministry we found Eileen through. We hope to find an alternative agency after we take a break and do some more research. We have appreciated everyone's support and look forward to sharing non-adoption family updates until we figure out what the next step will be.

Every Little Bit Helps

We just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has donated to help us bring Eileen home. Reece's Rainbow handles the donations, so we do not know who donated what, but we wanted you to know we noticed and we appreciate it! International adoption is a huge expense, so every little bit helps.

Kiri is working on updating out checklist, so stay tuned to see what's left. :)

Fingerprinted and Posted

Kiri and I made a trip to the Mishawaka Police Station yesterday on my lunch hour and each had two sets of fingerprints done. She then mailed them off to the Indiana State Police and the FBI for our police clearance/child abuse background check. USPS tracking says they should arrive at their destinations tomorrow.

We passed!

Score. We are one step closer to Little Miss Eileen! Our social worker came this morning and talked to us, gave us some more paperwork to fill out and then checked out the house. She also talked to us a little bit more about the international side of the process and the classes we'll take with the home study agency later on this summer. We're really glad to be working with somebody who is understanding and helpful because (as we told her) we'd heard a lot of home study agency horror stories lately. It was also nice to hear some encouragement about adopting from the country Eileen's in... it's notoriously tumultuous and often frustrating because of all the changes they make to the process. But we'll get through it and we'll have support through the agency afterward if we need it.

Ok, I don't know about you all, but I'm ready for a list of what's left to do paperwork-wise. Here goes:

-State police clearance (going Monday for fingerprints)

-FBI child abuse clearance (going Monday for fingerprints)

-Send application to USCIS for fingerprint date and orphan immigration approval (cannot do until home study is complete/printed/in-hand)

-Get cats updated on shots and send those records to the social worker

-Fill out financial background and send to the social worker

-Write individual autobiographies and send to the social worker

-Get a letter/statement of Wylie's general health and his immunization record print out (will call Monday to add to our other medical stuff we're picking up)

-Pick up medical forms from Dr's office (hopefully this week)

And last, but not least:

-Get ALL finished paperwork sent to Indianapolis for apostille.

Once that's all done, we can mail our dossier off! Well, once we do some fundraising too. More on that this coming week. Tomorrow's my 29th birthday and I'll be taking the day off from adoption paperwork and enjoying my two favorite boys, Dan and Wylie. We're due for some stress-free family time!

Happy Friday the 13th!

Luckiest. Day. EVER. We got our apostilled Child Specific Petitions (CSPs)and Power of Attorney (POA) forms back from Indianapolis today. This is especially exciting because they just left my hands on Monday. Now we're just waiting on the rest of the paperwork we sent in separate batches to arrive. Our stateside coordinator approved the CSPs and POAs to be sent overseas as soon as we can shuffle ourselves over to DHL! :)

Our home study visit is in the morning! Wish us luck. We're so nervous. There's probably no reason we'd outright fail it, but ya just never know what to expect when you're new to a crazy process like adoption. We'll update after our visit is over to let you know if we survived. ;) Ha.

On a bad note, our blog host (Blogger) had a system-wide failure on May 11th and was down until today, meaning they lost posts and comments made during May 11th and 12th. If you think you may have commented during this time and are waiting on a reply, please check and see if your original comment is still "alive". If it happened to get swept away in the Blogger crash, feel free to re-post it or email us and we'll get back to ya as soon as possible.

First batch sent for apostilles!

Sent out documents to Indianapolis on Monday for apostille. We'll see if I get an angry phone call/email/letter from the Secretary of State about any of our paperwork, but I really hope everything's OK! The notary signed off on everything and our coordinator double checked us so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Once we get some of the paperwork back from Indy, we'll be sending it overseas for the Eastern European Reece's Rainbow team to hold on to while we work on more documents. At least we're getting a good handle on paperwork we are in control of!

Dan and I hope to be getting our first big giveaway up soon. We got some great suggestions and hopefully after our home study visit on Saturday we can get that under way!