Secret Sister Gift

Yesterday I received the cutest book and duck puppet from my secret sister. The book is entitled "Someday" and reminded me of all the 'somedays' that are yet to come. Thank you so much for this thoughtful gift!

"The Memory Book" Dance Recital

This weekend was the big year end dance recital for Mackenzie. She had a couple of really late nights and lots of fun with her friends. The show was called "The Memory Book" and Mackenzie was a Flapper for Tap and a Lemonade Girl for Ballet. It was such a joy to watch all the smiles from the young girls. They had so much fun. This year I helped backstage during the evening show...allows for lots of photo opportunities...I wonder how many more years I will have until it is not cool to have your mom help out...well I will enjoy it while it lasts!

We are moving up!

We spoke with our Taiwan representative today and we were told that we are now number 9 in the NSN (Non-Special needs) line. We are number 6 in a stack waiting to be sent to Taiwan and there are currently 3 applications in Taiwan. Over the next few weeks we will be having a different social worker come and speak with us about revising our homestudy to make it Taiwan specific. As it is now, it is very China specific. We also found out today that our homestudy will not be translated until it is in Taiwan. We will continue to look at children with special needs as their profiles become available, but for now our application will stay in the NSN line. Keep praying for us, specifically in this period of waiting...some days it is really hard to wait.

Taiwan Update

Today we spoke with our agency who will be handling our Taiwan adoption. Apparently Chung Yi is now allowing them to submit more applications for those families who are requesting a child between the ages of 2 & 5....so this week they will be sending 2-3 applications to Taiwan for this specific age group (Almost like a separate line to wait in.) Good news for us as it moves us up to #7 (I think) in the line of applications waiting to be sent requesting an infant girl up to the age of 24 months. *Above is a photo of the entrance to the Chung Yi Orphanage* For more photos check out my link on the bottom right side of this Blog.

Here's is some math/predictions I read online today regarding our adoption through China...

"China has 536 days of dossiers to be processed before they get to your dossier. China currently processes about 5.7 days of dossiers each month.

Our best guess: 2015-05-11

Since China generally sends out referrals in a batch about once per month, your referral date could easily vary +/- one month depending on whether you just get included or just get missed in a particular batch."

YIKES! Lets hope that this isn't what happens. We are still holding out hope that things will drastically speed up after the Olympics! OK...now I think I need some ice cream and a lot of chocolate!

10 months closer to our referral...with no idea of how many more months of waiting there will be. Referrals began to arrive today and it appears that no one with a Log In Date later than January 12th, 2006 received a referral (Remember our Log in Date is July 2, 2007). So, if January 12th is the cut off, then the CCAA only matched 3 days worth of applications. That is a very horrible case scenario. At this rate it may be YEARS before we travel to China. On the Taiwan front, a Social Worker from our agency called today and left a message stating that she wants to touch base regarding their list of waiting children (Children with special needs and/or are over the age of 3). We have told her to let us know if any girls under the age of 2 come available on this list. I guess we will have to wait until Monday to call her back.

Today we celebrate our ninth year of marriage. As I reflect back on the last nine years, we are now at our third address, have 2 beautiful daughters

Today we celebrate our ninth year of marriage. As I reflect back on the last nine years, we are now at our third address, been blessed with 2 beautiful daughters and are still madly in love. Sometimes it seems like we have been married for much longer, but at times it seems like we were just planning our wedding. For those of you who didn't know us before we were married we held our ceremony on a rainy May morning at Blue Mountain Baptist Church in Coquitlam followed by a luncheon at the Pitt Meadows Golf Club. We had 3 groomsmen & 3 brides maids and two flower girls. The color theme was periwinkle and all us girls carried white roses. We had a gift opening the next day and on Monday May 3, we left for our Honeymoon at Walt Disney World in Orlando. We spent 10 days at the All Star Music resort in the hotel with the huge Cowboy Boot next to it. Drew was a good sport, even letting me give out cowboy hat shaped party favors at the reception. He had married a country girl at heart!