Drama!

I have been somewhat silent on here, but that only reflects the chaos of my life right now. I have been putting in many 8-12 hour days painting, cleaning, painting, and cleaning with trips to Home Depot in between. Thank God it's right across the street. And now I know pretty much everybody who works there. Two of our neighbors work there too and say hi to me. I really miss my kids who I barely get to see, but am so grateful that my sister has been here for the last month (She's been putting up with a LOT of drama- mostly involving a 2 year old). My first baby turned 9 on Friday. It was also our 11th wedding anniversary. Yes, she decided to be born on our anniversary!  My sister says the 9 year old now is acting like a teenager (yes, more drama).  We had a low key birthday celebration- went to a restaurant for dinner, came home and ate cake and ice cream, opened presents and played Mexican Train. We got Reyna an American Girl Beauty Salon kit for her doll and it came with an instructional DVD. The next day she was already doing braids and hairdo's. She is so talented and learns new things very easily. We love you Reyna!

As far as our adoption process goes, I made a little booboo and we now have a couple of weeks setback.  I forgot to recheck our last couple of docs when I sent them to the Secretary of State and my notary forgot to stamp two of them. Darn! Luckily, they will refund to me the $40! So I went back over to her house and then she signed one of the docs in black ink (big no-no). So we were going to print out a fresh doc and her printer wouldn't work (of course!). I had to drive home and back and we finally got it right. The next day we fed-exed them to Sec. of State. That was one week ago and they haven't yet completed the request, so we keep checking the tracking number on the website to see if they're on their way yet. As soon as my agency receives these last two docs, we can be registered in Maria's country to adopt.

As anxious as I am for this to happen, I am SO confident that as long as I'm doing everything in my power to get to Maria, God in His infinite power is laying out our path to her. I rest in the assurance that His timing is always perfect and no amount of fretting or anxiety will get us to her any sooner. So we wait and pray and work hard to get our house ready to move in and welcome our newest member of the family.

God provided the $500 we needed to send to our agency in order to process our dossier. Thank you to our friends who have given and supported us. Thank you for your continued prayers for our family. We still need to raise A LOT more and we know God will keep His promise to Maria, so pray we will have faith and rest in Him.

We have some fundraising ideas swirling around in our heads, but with the move, we have no extra energy or time left. We would love for someone to help us with that! One very cool idea someone shared with me was to have a 5K/10K. I really want to do this, but will need lots of helpers and don't exactly know where to start (and don't have the time!)

Oh, and please pray we can move in soon. The water pipe under the kitchen sink starting spraying this afternoon (mini crisis) and we hope fixing it won't set us back. Thankfully we were there when it happened and were able to shut off the water quickly. But, that means we didn't have water for cleaning or washing out our paint rollers and brushes and maybe no water tomorrow.  Today was a bit of a rough day, but I did spend the morning at the zoo with my kids and sister. Gigi's favorite part of the zoo are the "ephanants", Diego's are the giraffes, Reyna's are the snakes and my sister and I liked the otters.