Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Keeping our mind off of the wait

Today is exactly 3 weeks since we got our verbal referral....but who's counting?! Our written referral could come any time now. I'd love to have it by the end of the week but if not it should be next week for sure. We're really pushing our luck to get out of here the 6th. I'm not feeling so confident anymore but we'll see...it's not the end of the world, just our preference. Anyway, we've been staying busy while we wait for the news that we can finally go meet our daughter.

The Shriners Circus is this week so we went to the parade over the weekend. It was a beautiful day! Oksana liked all of it except the little cars because they were loud! When I asked her on the way home what her favorite part was she said "The quiet part!"


My horse lover has been busy with his lessons. Evan has always been a painfully shy child. Actually I'd say it was beyond painfully shy and was debilitating. There's a whole story behind it that I probably wouldn't share here but you can just trust me on that! Being with horses has been life changing for him. He has come out of his shell (he's still shy, don't get me wrong but is MUCH better) and has a new love of life thanks to these horses.

This is his favorite horse, Tucker.


He is at a hunter/jumper facility and absolutely loves it. He's much more of a daredevil than I am! He dreams some day of jumping something like this...


Here he is jumping just yesterday at his lesson and even at this level I have to close my eyes sometimes ;)!


Besides that we are already starting to prepare for packing, the boys are busy with school and a Lego Robotics class as well as spending their evenings hanging out with the neighbor kids, and Oksana is counting down the days until her birthday! Of course I will be blogging about that very exiting day :). We are also preparing for spring break and planning some fun stuff for that week including Oksana's very first play date with a friend from her class which I will also be sure to blog about!

So as you can see we are managing to keep our minds off of the wait as best as we can while still looking very forward to meeting Miss Anya!

Thursday, March 8, 2012

VERBAL REFERRAL!

I've been quiet on here lately as I've anxiously awaited news that we have made it through the next step of our adoption and I finally got that news this morning! We got our verbal referral! So now the countdown starts to the written referral. The average time frame for written is 3 weeks but if for some reason the powers that be don't meet one week to issue referrals it will be longer. Still, let's pray for 3 weeks. At that time, when we are "officially official" we will set travel dates and head out to meet Anya! So...we are likely looking at April. I'd love to leave April 6. I wouldn't be with my kids for Easter but being gone that week would work well with a lot of other things that will affect our kids throughout April so I'm willing to give up Easter. If not the 6th we'll deal with whatever comes our way. The nice thing is that Bulgaria is flexible so we can choose what will work best for us.

Now I have 3 weeks to go insane...um I mean PATIENTLY wait for our written referral so I can finally love on the stunning beauty you see below...if she will sit still long enough to let me :)!