Busy Weekend

Whew! We were busy bees Saturday and Sunday. I rearranged Wylie's room a bit to make it easier to move around in there. We worked on the blog template. We organized our receipts and paperwork that we've done so far into a binder. And our home study social worker got our application documents to us, so we filled all of those out. Several friends and a couple of relatives have graciously agreed to act as our references (THANK YOU!!! xoxo). So first thing Monday morning we'll be sending out the first installment of our home study fees, after which time our social worker will set up our first meeting. We're looking forward to working with her. She seems very reassuring and explains everything well. That's exactly what we need, because I'm sure the going will get tough at some point.

This morning one of our cars sold on eBay. That should help us pay for some of our document fees while we're working on our home study and dossier. We plan to apply for grants and adoption scholarships once our home study is complete, but we still need to come up with other fundraising strategies. I'm thinking maybe we'll try a yard/bake sale in my mom's neighborhood to start. We did two yard sales last year at our place -which went great- but at the time we were just doing them to have some extra cash. Now our goal is a little bigger, so we'll have to think bigger also. We've been haunting the Reece's Rainbow message board and there are some great ideas. Time to get cracking.

In the last post I mentioned that Eileen's "real" name isn't Eileen. One of our friends asked what that meant. It's more of an alias. Each child that goes up for international adoption in Eileen's country is given a different name from what's on their birth certificate to protect their identity while they are listed for potential parents to choose. We probably won't have any idea what her birth name is/was for quite some time. So for our purposes we'll continue to call our little girlie Eileen until we legally adopt her. Once we're officially her parents, we'll start using which ever name we pick out for her. We're totally open to suggestions, by the way! Before we knew Wylie was a boy, we had a HUGE list of girl names and basically zero boy names. Now none of the names we liked before seem to fit Eileen. Funny how that works out, huh?