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.

On pestering your local notary...

We took 40+ pages to our bank today to get notarized after Dan got off of work. It felt great to get that chunk of papers taken care of, let me tell you! We have some documents to get apostilled and sent overseas ASAP (our coordinator approved them tonight, so those go out to Indianapolis for apostille the morning), the rest are regular old dossier/home study documents that we're compiling. The notary we had this evening was very understanding about the big stack of papers I dragged out of our 3" binder and flopped on her desk. While they didn't randomly provide cookies for Wylie to gnaw on like the last time we took a trip to the bank to get stuff notarized, he was largely well-behaved and cheerful while Dan and I scrawled our names... a few dozen times. ;) Now we just have our medical docs, home study/social worker docs, immigration approval form, state police background check forms, and Dan's employer letter left to work on for the dossier portion. And we can only get a couple of those things notarized ourselves - the rest have to be sent to us with the notarization/certification on them. Yay for progress! The "paper baby" is growing fast.

Actually, Wylie was a happy camper for somebody who went back to the audiologist and got things poked in his ears again (boy, was that ever fun for mama too :P). He got to go to the park TWICE today in return for being such an awesome Boo Bear. Once in the morning with my friend and her daughter while we all walked (we got sunburned!!!! OUCH.), then he got to go again in the evening with the new playgroup. Hopefully by the time Eileen gets here we'll have exposed him to enough other kids that he's cool with having somebody else his age in the house. Crazy talk? Maybe so. It's worth a shot though.

Tornado Tuesday

Crazy day today! And it wasn't just the weather. Wylie had a hearing test and he totally didn't want any part of it. He was so mad at mama for making him hold still for the doctor. Apparently despite the fact I used to muscle around horses, I don't do so hot holding an angry toddler who doesn't want his ears checked. :\ So anyhow, we have to go back in a week and try one more test -- hopefully he'll be able to sleep thru it this time! Fingers crossed.

After his failed audiologist visit, he went to visit Grammy Vicki so I could run to the county court house and get copies of our marriage license. My odyssey to the court house basement (which was leaking because of all the rain) only cost $10! Woo! The county clerk even put everything in an envelope so her ink stamps wouldn't get smudged on the trek back out to the car. Foreign governments don't mess around when it comes to messy stamping and I'd hate to have to come back and re-do everything. But don't worry -- I checked all the clerk's stamps again when I got to the car and there is no smeared/missing/overlapping/double stamped text, so we should be good to go on that! If only getting copies of Dan's birth certificate had been that easy. Note to the state of Wisconsin: for what we paid and the hoops we jumped thru, we'd better not be getting that same xerox of a copy of a mimeograph of a faded papyrus you handed out when he was born... ugh. I expect something legible and much more legal/official looking this time! Ha ha.

The next and final mandatory stop for the day was to the BMV to get dad's Jeep re-titled. My mom signed it over to us last week (which helps us out because we'll have plenty of room for 2 kids and their stuff now). So I met up with Dan and we did that. Yay for online appointment scheduling! After we got our temp plate, we went next door to Tuesday Morning to pick up a couple of girly goodies. Dan got a kick out of the not-so-girly tutus they had on sale. I think those are on his shopping list so that we don't have a house full of pink when Eileen gets here ;) Honestly, my mom made sure I had purple or blue instead of pink growing up, so I can't say I'm really attached to that color and don't blame him for wanting something different.

We ran over to my mom's to pick up Wylie and collected an awesome rocking chair. My mom's friend gave it to her after she had me. It's the same color as Eileen's crib that we got on sale last week, so it'll be perfect in her room! Dan and I are very happy to have it. We managed to get home before the bad storms hit St. Joe county where our parents all live. They had been under a tornado watch since around lunch time. When we got to Elkhart, the sun peeked out and Wylie got to run around the yard. Glad all the hail/wind passed us by!

The Starfish

"Why?" is a question we're expecting will come up quite a lot when we go public with our intentions to adopt a toddler from overseas. And that's okay! We can't expect everybody to understand at first. You care about us, you're trying to look out for us, you're worried we've lost our minds-- and we really do appreciate the concern. ;) Our intention isn't to become the Jolie-Pitt family, start our own reality show or end up with enough kids to have our own sports team. Plainly, we can't imagine our lives without Wylie and we'd love for him to have at least one sibling. We could have another one of our own, but we really want to do something that would make a difference for one small person who deserves a family just as much as any other kid. We have drafted a letter to our family and friends to send out at Easter explaining what we were doing and inviting them to keep up with us on this blog. Dan, Wylie and I are excited to share all of this with you. We know it will be a total roller coaster ride of craziness and we hope you understand how grateful we are that you're coming along with us.

There are many families adopting through an organization known as Reece's Rainbow who have online "homes" (including us). The Abell family posted this great story about starfish on their blog. In the end, we learn that the boy tossing starfish off the beach and into the ocean hasn't set out to save every single one. He knows that would be too large a goal. Instead, he endeavors to save just one starfish's life at a time. Each one he rescues has a second chance that it wouldn't have had otherwise. The boy is but a small part of a larger picture and he is comfortable in that role. So are we.