GOT IT !!

We got the call today, our LOA is here! (day 111)
Praise the Lord, I'm SO thankful for ALL He has done.

Hold on baby boy, mama's coming!!!

Good news and bad news

We did not get our LOA in this batch- that's the bad news.

The good news is that I found out we should be next in line. I believe LOAs are coming once a month so it will probably be early Jan. before we hear anything.
BUT keep praying because He can move mountains (and mountains of paperwork!!!)

Thanks for all the sweet comments and the prayers!

Update

(this is for you Sabrina)

We received updated pictures of Yu Jun today. Someone has been feeding this boy some major grub. He looks SO big! I'm afraid all my shopping is going to be shower gifts for future Athens FCC family members. I'm so glad he appears to be healthy and looks like he's ready for mom & dad to come get him :)
]Note to all you waiting moms: I highly recommend the photo service from China-Babies. The cost is great and we received 8 pictures in a very nice format that we can print out and save for the memory book!!

Gimme

me: "Give me a L"
you: "L"

me: "Give me an O"
you: "O"

me: "Give me an A"
you: "A"

What do we want? L - O - A
What do we need ? L - O -A


No news yet. Tomorrow will be day 90.

All I want for Chirstmas is my L O A, my L O A, my L O A......
All I want for Christmas is my L O A, then I could go get my baby booooy.

Ugh, these crazy little tunes in my head. I could go on and on but I'll spare you the rest of them.

Reed come home !!

We have 2 babies that are waiting patiently for someone to play with. They are the biggest babies. They LOVE to play and LOVE to be cuddled and are LOVING the idea of a bubba to play with!!

How long ?

111 days!

Happy Thanksgiving

Today was our last Thanksgiving dinner as a family of two. Today I am thankful for many things. I am thankful for our Savior and for the many blessings He has given us.
We have a wonderful supportive family, a very special church family, and the most carling and loving family of friends. Our lives are rich because of all of you.

We had a great trip to the mountains. The best part was that our new I-797 was in our mailbox before we left ! Here's some of the pictures I took from the cabin, as you can see we were at the tippy top of the mountain and the view was just gorgeous!!
I also did a little shopping;

Children are a gift

Children are a gift from the Lord; they are a reward from Him. Psalm 127:3 NLT

Heavenly Father,
Please bless the children in our homes and those around the world. Grant them good families to be nurtured in and loving communities to grow up in. Give them enough to eat and positive attitudes toward life and learning. Help our children to grow strong and confident and trusting.
Help them to desire more of Your presence in their lives and help us to be good examples of all that You have taught us and all that You mean to us.
We are all Your children, Lord, and we all need You. Give us wisdom and strength to be the guardians and the guides of our children. If we don't have children of our own, then remind us always to watch over and guard the hearts and minds of children in our families, our church, or our communities for they are all placed in our care.
Help us to do what we can for children in other countries and other cities, for we know that each child was born with a purpose You meant to have fulfilled. We ask Your help in caring for all of Your children each day. Amen.

Worthy thought: We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us. - Goethe


WOW, this one is good.
I pray you have a Blessed week! We're off to the mountains on Thursday.
Connie and Emily; I'm sorry I won't be there for your showers. I hope you get lots of goodies and hope to see you soon after we get back.

Waiting for Him

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in His word I do hope. My soul waits for the Lord, more than those who watch for the morning- Yes, more than those who watch for the morning. Psalm 130:5-6

Heavenly Father,
So many times we bring our requests before You, hoping for instant answers and easy direction. Sometimes You meet our needs generously and quickly and spoil us with Your great love and kindness.
Help us to understand that when we have to wait longer, when we must be patient before the answer comes, that it is not that You have withdrawn Your favor or that You delay the answer out of some desire to simply make us wait, but that You are working all things together for good and that the process itself takes time.
Help us to always speak our hearts and minds to You with a genuine faith, believing that You want the best for us at all times. Grant that we might rest in Your hand until the measure of our faith and the grace of Your will for us brings the blessing we hope to receive.
In all things, Lord, keep us ever mindful that You hear us and are already moving before us to answer.
Praise You, O Lord!
Amen.

Becoming a Woman of Worth Prayer Book, By Karen Moore


What a beautiful fall we have had this year. I took some pictures today of some trees near our house.
I hope you have a wonderful week and can take a moment to see God's beauty around us when you're out and about!

I have never been good at tests!

As you can guess, I'm usually talking to myself when I post encouraging thoughts. Today I've started to (I hate to use this word) worry about our I-797.
For those who are not hip to the adoption process, here's how this much-cherished document works:
The I-797 is the approval document that is issued to families by the US when an application is filed to adopt internationally. This 'golden ticket' is good for 18 months. If you do not complete your adoption before the 18 months expires, you must complete more paperwork and apply for a new 'golden ticket'. To further complicate things, families must be fingerprinted and the fingerprints must be valid when you travel (fingerprints are good for 15 months- we have had our fingerprints taken THREE times during our wait)
Here's my dilemma: our I-797 is good until Sept 2009 but it states that our fingerprints expire this month.
We were reprinted over a month ago and still have not received an updated I-797 reflecting the new fingerprint expiration dates. We've called the customer service line and they said we must email our branch office. Well, apparently they do not return emails ..........What to do? PRAY, eat chocolate and PRAY some more!

If anyone has any info on how to get through to the Atlanta CIS office, let me know.

My prayer book

I have this prayer book that I study each week and I LOVE the book so much I thought I'd share it with YOU (don't you feel special?!) It is titled "Becoming A Woman Of Worth Prayer Book" By Karen Moore.

So, each Sunday night I read a new prayer and make that part of my prayers for the week.
Here's the first one:

Walking in prayer:

If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. Galatians 5:25

Heavenly Father,
When we were young, You helped us learn to walk. You protected our steps and applauded our efforts to grow so that we could not only walk, but run and leap as well.
As we've learned to walk closer to You, Lord, we've grown to trust that You are always beside us, always near to guide and support us on the way.
You are indeed a loving friend and our relationship with You can be as intimate and as real as we choose it to be.
Lord, help us to choose to walk with You in all that we do. Help us to seek Your advice and Your wisdom for our lives. Help us to admit when we've fallen down and need You to pick us up again. Help us keep steadily on the path, moving always in the direction You would have us go.
We're not as young now, Lord, but we still come to You in childlike faith, holding out our arms for Your kindness and Your embrace. Help us stay close to You always, learning to trust and obey with every step we take.
Let us walk the walk with You every moment we live.
In Your Spirit we pray. Amen.


Isn't that a beautiful prayer? How much stress and worry would we save ourselves if we could always keep that childlike faith and hold out our arms for His embrace!

still waiting

Please click on the picture and lift up this precious family in prayer.

Balloons galore!

I've been wanting to have a mural of hot air balloons painted in Reed's room. I left a couple messages with a few people that friends suggested and never heard back from them. I'm glad my calls were not returned because we decided to try and do it ourselves and we're having so much FUN. (ok, I'm having fun and Tim is doing most of the work). I came up with the bright idea of printing out a few balloon pictures and enlarging them on a copier...........we taped them to the wall, traced around them, drew in the lines and walah- balloons galore!! I LOVE it. It is SO cute!! I haven't figured out how to do the clouds yet, but the balloons are really cute. Here's all we've (Tim's) got done so far.........
It got dark outside and I forgot to turn on the flash so the wall color looks funny but the blue with all the bright colors looks really good.

Who's got the best hubby EVER?!

more shopping

Shop till you drop, right? I found some of the cutest outfits over the weekend. This is so much fun!!! Now all I need is for Reed to COME HOME

FCC Halloweeeeen

Tonight we went to the waiting families dinner, which happened to be the Halloween party also.
All the kiddos looked SO cute!!
(Gotta go check on Tim, he's making friendship bread- too funny!) Have a great weekend!

Dry, dry eyes!

I haven't been able to wear contacts for about 2 months now because I've got dry eyes.
The ophthalmologist said it could be a side effect of an auto immune disease or low estrogen and he wants to plug my tear ducts.
The blood work is back today and no auto immune disease was detected (yippee!) so I've got to go have my estrogen checked. Any of you ladies had this problem?
I recently found an old friend on Faceb()()k and she made a comment about us getting old.
I'm really feeling OLD now :)

Ordered a care package

I received permission from our agency to send a care package to Reed.

We quickly ordered a package from Ladybugs N Love. We also sent some pictures of us and a letter to the nannies to share with him. Here's a shot I received of some of the items being sent:

I wanted to send more goodies but I'm just not sure they will let him have too much stuff.

PS: Day 29 waiting for LOA!!

Retail Therapy

Today was our fingerprint renewal appointment in Birmingham.
We checked in at 9:02 (glad I don't have to drive in that traffic every day) and out at 9:24 so it was the perfect opportunity to do a little retail therapy at the Summit!!
We got a few cute outfits, a sweet pajama set and a book. I'm trying not to go overboard until I get more measurements but I couldn't resist a few things. They are all 18m but they look big!

What's in a name?

I guess I never explained our name choice:

William is my dad and granddad's name
Reed is Tim's middle name and his dad's middle name.

William Reed covers dad, granddad, Tim and Tim's dad.
I never had the chance to meet Tim's dad, but I know he would be proud!

L I D !!!!!

We have our log-in-date !!! Sept 10
Only 5 days after DTC (dossier to China).

We also got out paperwork in the mail today from CIS . Our fingerprints expire in November so it looks like we'll be getting them done again (3rd time).
Lisa, you should be getting yours soon too!

Care package

I really want to send little man a care package but I don't want to do anything to upset the apple cart. What do you think? Is it ok to send a package before getting LOA ?

DTC

Tim just spoke with the agency and we will be dossier-to-China today or tomorrow!

Tonight I was thinking about our journey and everything we have been through to get to this point and I realized; Yu Jun was born almost 9 months after we started our adoption process.
All this time we have been waiting we did not realize that he was conceived only a month after we started our paperwork. I pray that his birth mother somehow finds comfort and peace and could be reassured that we love him dearly. We will always be grateful that she chose life.

Another update!

We received a nice surprise today, look how cute he is !!! He looks so good, I just want to hold him and comfort him and tell him how much he is loved. I wonder if I pack my bags tonight would they let me leave tomorrow? I'm ready!!

Happy , Happy Day !

These last few weeks have been tough and tonight when I got home I sat down at the computer to read emails as I always do, but before I opened my inbox I stopped and prayed.
"Lord, I love you with all my heart and I trust your plan. You know the desires of my heart; you know we want so much to bring this child home to love him and to share your love with him and to help teach others of your love. I trust that you would not have taken us down this path if it were not in Your plans for our lives. If it is Your will Lord, please help us to complete this process.........."

After I had been online for about 15 minutes checking emails and starting to think about what we would do if we did not get approved I noticed a new message from Heritage. The CCAA has given official approval for the transfer of files !!!

Thanks Monica for always listening to my craziness, please tell Lily Mei that everything is going to be OK :-)

Room for Reed

I've been waiting for this day since we sent in our adoption application in May of 2006.
One might think I could have narrowed down my choices for color, bedding, etc. - Not! I looked online and in stores for 4 days before picking out the bedding.
I also have a really hard time picking out paint colors. The problem is that I get a picture in my mind of how I want something to look and I don't stop until I find it. We painted the room 4 different shades of aqua on Thursday and today when I went in the paint store the guy at the counter said "what do you need Mrs Hammond?". Not good morning or how are you, just "what do you need". So, I got 2 color samples and went to a different store for my next 2 when those did not work out!
Anyway- 7 shades later I found the perfect blue (as you can see the first 2 pictures show one of the colors that didn't make the cut)
I don't have any pictures or decor yet, but here's the wall color and the crib. I can't believe we finally have a crib in the house! How exciting!!!

oh, our dossier is back from Houston so I hope to send it to the agency on Monday. The CCAA has still not issued the official approval to transfer the files yet so we're still praying everything gets approved and we can continue without delay.

The paper chase is never dull

Just when we thought we were through with the paper chase; I got a call today from the courier and one of our county certifications is incorrect. Ugh! I don't know how it happened, but the court house listed the notary's name wrong on Tim's employment letter. The state did not staple anything so we will only have to re-do the county level.
All those adoption mama's out there know what I'm talking about. To my family members that are looking at your computer screen right now scratching your noggin, China is very particular with dossier documents and after authentications are attached to your documents you can not make any changes to anything or remove the staples. So, we should be ok as long as Tim can talk the lady at the court house into certifying a notary seal that is not in our possession. Hum.....this outta be good!

We finally managed to get everything notarized and certified. Next step: authentication.
For a mere $410 our documents will be hand delivered to the Consulate- General of the People's Republic of China in Houston. The proper authentication seal will be added to each document and returned to us. THEN we can send the complete dossier to our new agency and the real wait begins. Hold on baby boy, I'm coming!!!

Thanks for the prayers!

We just received an email from Stacey. The CCAA has agreed to transfer all files to Heritage.
Thanks to all our wonderful friends and family who have had us in your prayers.
Now our next step is to see if they will accept our home study since our SW is not with a Hague accredited agency.
PRAY, PRAY, PRAY!!