The Suspense is Killing Me

Today is our court day in Bulgaria. I am so anxious. We have taken so long to get here, so many set backs and now we are so close. I actually wasn't nervous until last week when I was talking to the agency about booking our tickets and she was like umm maybe you should wait until after the 23 that way if there is a problem you won't have to re-book the tickets. Excuse me a problem what?....yeah her words...."with the luck your family has had you better wait and see if you get through with no more trouble"....not what we wanted to hear. So today I am waiting to get the news that we are legally the parents to Anna Sophia......calm my anxious heart oh God.

Quick Update

We have heard from our agency and we have been assigned a court date in Bulgaria. YEAH!!!! So we are moving forward and are very excited. We have Annas' bed assembled and I purchased her bedding it looks so cute actually the whole room does. We were told to plan travel for October 10 or so. I have been looking into flights. So happy!!!

A long overdue update

Wow 2 months since last posting. Most people probably don't even check here anymore, but here goes anyhow. We ran into so many set backs that it became very difficult to stay positive. So we wrote nothing because you know the saying "if you can't say something nice don't say anything at all" so that was the decision I made to say nothing I would regret later. All that to say we are finally closing in the end of the adoption. We needed to update our homestudy and INS clearence because Alex turned 18 so we started that in April and got everything in the middle of May took 6 weeks to get it all done and turned back into our case worker at USCIS. She sent everything to the US embassy in Bulgaria we are ecpecting to get the article 5 letter instead we were notified that our embassy wanted our homestudy re-written we were very upset, we had just done all that. So we tried to get our congressman to help us out but no go. We had to re-do our homestudy and get our USCIS approval all over again in June. And in case you are wondering there were no fee breaks every step cost us again. Oh wait while we are doing all this our medical and psychological checks had to be re-done because in all the delays they came close to being a year old and Bulgaria court was not going to accept them. Oh boy were we ever frustrated. But we complied, not with a good attitude but we did everything and we were issued our article 5 letter on June 28. Ohh happy day we were finally moving in the right direction. WHOA there not so fast in July while we are waiting to get the MOJ signature to move into the court phase it turns out that the only person who could sign on our paperworkk resigned from their position. Are you kidding me? NO we aren't. What can you even do? At any given time if we had not had the delays we would not have been affected by his reignation, God knew. So here we are waiting to hear our court date and making plans to bring our girl home still.....her 7th birthday was last week and if you had told us in January when we visited with her that she would not be here for her birthday I wouldn't have believed you. So on her birthday I went on line and ordered her some clothes....a little retail therapy. We are hoping to be in court in September and then travel 2 weeks after that. If we come to mind pease pray that we get to court without any more set backs, we just want to get her home and start our time with her. Even with everything we have been extrememly busy and the summer has flown by. We are switching the upstairs bedrooms around and re-painting and cleaning out so the girls room will be set when she gets home. Our three adult kids will be making moves her in thecoming weeks. This Saturday Matthew is moving back out into his new apartment, Beth goes back to college the next weekend and the

We have been very busy and there has been no forward movement on the adoption. Some backwards movement but not forward. It has been extremely discouraging. We recieved our I800 A approval and when it got to the embassy they rejected it and made us do yet again another homestudy update and re apply to USCIC and pay the fees all over again and wait again for the approval that we had all ready been given. We are currently in the empty space between being in Texas and getting sent to Missouri with the paperwork, it can take 2 weeks to go from one place to the other. We did however recieve new pictures of Anna and she looks good, so that was nice. Our son graduates highschool next week and Matt graduated college last month, and we had pre-school graduation last week so whew so many things coming to an end. Anticipating new things begining.

pictures

Phoebe and Ava with Phoebes' art work that was on display with our counties art council. My new grandson Jackson Howard. Born March 29,2013 weighing in at 5pounds 10 ounces. He is a tiny little thing.

Beauty and the Beast

Alex did a great job as Gaston in the school production. The whole cast did a marvelous job. We enjoyed the play and so many people have told us "we didn't know Alex could sing" SURPRISE ; just because his parents have no musical ability, doesn't mean he doesn't:) Actually all our kids can sing and play instruments, must be it skips a generation.

Sun!!!

So I am happy to say the sun has come back out. YEAH!!! all the snow has melted and this snowman was short lived.