Counting Down

Today I woke up and told Larry "Do you realize that now we can say we are leaving next Friday?" That sounds SO close and I feel SO overwhelmed with all that needs to be done before we leave! One step at a time. That's what I keep telling myself. Really I jumped on here to blog to assure you that we will be blogging daily from the moment we leave. When we adopted Oksana I blogged regularly and at the time I was doing it for all of our family and friends back home, but now I realize it was just as much for me. I can't tell you how often I need to know a date of something that happened in Ukraine for one reason or another and all I have to do is go back to my blog to see what day I wrote about that event. I also love to go back every few months and read those blogs again. I get to smile at the fun parts and be happy that the bad parts are now long behind us! All that said, I will be blogging as much as I can and I will also be posting my blog on Facebook. In other news, we got some updated information on Anya. She has had 3...yes 3 surgeries for her gastric reflux. I don't understand all of the terminology but I understand enough to know that the GI doc will be one of our first stops after we arrive home. The other first stop will be the cardiologist. I had our pediatrician review her file and she is not overly concerned about what she saw but we will need to have her heart checked out soon. On top of that we got new height and weight, fairly detailed info about her birth family, and my favorite part was that it said she can differentiate between strangers and people she knows. In the report we got when we committed to her it stated that she showed no understanding of strangers. The new information was very encouraging to me! OK I'm off to try to get something done today. In the middle of all of this we have some friends coming in town tomorrow night! My friend Karyn was one of my dearest friends in Little Rock. Her boys and my boys were inseparable but we haven't seen them in a few years since Karyn's husband got transferred to Omaha. We are excited for their visit!

Travel dates!!!!

We finally know when we are going to meet Anya! We will be leaving May 4th and arriving in Bulgaria on the 5th. Once we arrive on that Saturday we will settle in for a night in Sofia. Sunday we will start the journey to the city where Anya is. I'm not sure I can say where that is at this point. Just know that the drive is going to be a long one and I am not a good car traveler! After we arrive we will spend a night in that city and then on Monday we will meet her and begin our visits with her. We will visit with her Monday -Friday. I think we will do morning and afternoon visits but I'm really not sure about that. It might just be once a day. Tuesday is her 5th birthday! How cool is that?! We will be there to celebrate her birthday! On Friday I believe we will do a morning visit and then head out around noon to go back to Sofia. I'm dreading this. We have to leave her knowing that we will not see her for 5 more months. That is not going to be easy. We will spend Friday night in Sofia and then start the journey home on Saturday. Like I said, it will be about 5 months before we go back to bring her home. I'm thankful that those 5 months are over summer. We have a very busy and fun summer planned so I think that it will help to keep our minds off of the wait and make it feel like it is going by faster. But that's not to worry about right now. Right now I have a trip to plan!

Birthday Celebration Day 3 and some great news!

In typical Erin fashion I stop blogging and then go blog crazy! So today was part 3 of Oksana's birthday celebration but FIRST I have to tell you that we got our WRITTEN REFERRAL!!!!! I should hear about our travel dates tomorrow so I'll be sure and update yet again! I will be so happy to finally have those dates on the calendar! OK, back to the birthday. A couple of weeks ago Oksana came home with this in her back pack:

She told me that it was from her friend Olivia. She talks about Olivia quite a bit so I knew this was one of the little girls in her class that is very sweet to her. That week Oksana's teacher e-mailed the classroom newsletter to all of the parents and I noticed Olivia's mom's email on there so I contacted her. I told her who I was and a bit about Oksana. I told her about the picture that came home, that we had hung it in Oksana's room because we thought it was so sweet, and that she has a very special daughter. She emailed me back and told me that Olivia talks about Oksana all the time. She asked if we would be interested in a play date! I was SO excited and I knew Oksana was going to flip out! I told her that Oksana's birthday was over spring break and that she had been wanting to go to a place with inflatable bounce houses so we set up our play date and then we began counting down to this day! The girls had a blast together and I loved getting to know Olivia's mom. I only got a couple of pictures and if you've ever taken a child with CP to one of these bouncy places you will know why...I spent most of my time hauling her around inflatables! Here are just the couple of pictures that I got.

See this slide? By the end of our time there Oksana could climb the stairs to the top independently! I, of course, stayed behind her just in case but she could not do that when we went to a place like this over Thanksgiving.

Oksana and Olivia

Crazy boys :)

If you think the celebrating is over you are wrong! On Tuesday, when spring break is over, Oksana is bringing cupcakes to her class to celebrate her birthday. That will be later...for now I'm just anxious for some travel dates!

Birthday Celebrations Day 2

Today is Oksana's actual birthday and she has spent the day making sure that every random stranger she walks by knows that! She has received many "Happy Birthdays"! Her day started with IHOP pancakes, which was her request. As soon as we left IHOP we headed to an inclusive playground in our area. We have 2 of them and this one is fairly new so it was our first time there. It was a blast! The disc swings you see below were a huge hit. My kids want them in their back yard!

After the park we came home and enjoyed some time outside with some of her new birthday presents.

The fun continues tomorrow with her very first play date with a friend from her class! Pictures to come!

Birthday Celebrations Day 1

Oksana's birthday is tomorrow but the celebrations began today with a party! It was just a small party with our family. Oksana has prepared for this party for MONTHS now. She has planned every part of it which has been so fun since last year she was clueless as to what was going on. I know you will be shocked ;) but her theme was balloons! She had a balloon cake, balloon plates and napkins, and we let her choose 7 balloons to decorate the house. This was one excited little girl! Here are some pictures of her awesome day: Here are some pictures of the house all decorated. You can see the balloons that she chose hanging up. Her favorite was the HUGE #7!

The birthday girl and her awesome balloon cake. It was so yummy!

I'm 7!!!

She got lots of fun gifts. This indoor swing is what we got her. Here she is swinging with her balloons!

It was a great day and the fun continues tomorrow on her real birthday but I'll tell you more about that later!

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 ;)!

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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!

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 :)!