REFERRAL!!!

We have a baby!!! Her name is Tewabech, (which means beautiful)and she is 8 months old. Her birthday is October 10. I wish I could post a picture- she is SO BEAUTIFUL! She has the most amazing eyes I have ever seen. She is tiny- 14 lbs 3 oz and 21.7 inches long, but very healthy and she can sit up by herself. Now we just need to get through court so we can go get her! Court is usually 37 days from your referral date, and the courts close on August 6 until October! We need lots of crossed fingers and good thoughts! If you would like to see a picture, give me a call. I can't e-mail you pictures, but I can give you the password to my e-mail account so you can see her. Nathan said, " I can't believe we just tore up all the carpet!"

Nesting gone awry....

It started out innocently enough; we were just going to repaint the guest room.
Then we decided that we should see what is under the carpet in there, because the carpet has all sorts of stains on it...

It doesn't look that good, but the black goo scrapes off really easily and you can see lovely wood gleaming through in some spots.
Then....we decided to look and see what was under the carpet in the hall, because we didn't see any black goo.

The floor in the hall actually looks really good. We just have to sand and refinish. Then...

We decided it look weird to have carpeted stairs but no carpet in the hall. Giving ourselves a 'God hates a coward' pep talk, we pulled up the carpet on the stairs and found this:
We seem to have a lot of work in store for us, but we are excited to see how it turns out. I think, if we don't screw it up, it will look great. Anybody who would like to help pull staples out of stairs is more than welcome to come help. Apparently, whoever installed the carpet wanted to make sure it would be there for about a million years, as they are EXTREMELY well secured!

One more thing on the list of things you aren't supposed to do

So, for those of you thinking about branding children who aren't yours with the religious symbol of your choice...
I guess you aren't supposed to. Sorry. Story from the AP

MOUNT VERNON, Ohio - A school board in central Ohio voted Friday to move ahead on firing a science teacher accused of preaching his Christian beliefs in class and using a device to burn the image of a cross on students' arms.
The Mount Vernon school board voted 5-0 to pass a resolution of intent to terminate the contract of middle school teacher John Freshwater.
Board attorney David Millstone said Freshwater is entitled to a hearing to challenge the dismissal. A lawyer for Freshwater said he will request such a hearing.

A report by independent investigators found that Freshwater also taught creationism in his science class and was insubordinate in failing to remove a Bible and other religious materials from his classroom.
School board members gathered a day after consulting firm H.R. On Call Inc. released its report. The community is about 40 miles northeast of Columbus.
The report comes one week after a family filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Columbus against Freshwater and the school district, saying Freshwater burned a cross on their child's arm that remained for three or four weeks.

Interesting link...

Link to a profile of several different groups of people in Ethiopia. Some amazing pictures...http://www.pbase.com/sergio_pes/ethiopia_special

How good are you at geography?

Try the game over on the right hand side of the page. The better you are at geography, the more cups of water are donated. Nathan and I did 216. Let me know if you beat us!

No more summer house....

We are officially a one house family again. Yay!!! We closed on our house in Aberdeen yesterday, finally ending an almost year long process. We are really, really excited. Good bye little house... we loved you but are so glad to see you go!

Interesting...

After weeks of agonizing about the sibling vs single child decision, we found out that we didn't even need to decide! I talked to our agency rep today, and she told me that there must have been some mistake on our file. As far as she knew, we have always been open to 1 or 2 children of either gender under the age of 2. Wow. Would we ever have been surprised when we got a referral for a 13 month old boy.
For those of you that have asked, of course we would have been open to two children who were not biologically related if it were allowed. Our agency (and many others) does not believe in what they call 'artificial twinning.' The theory is that it is so important to have one on one bonding time with an adopted child that it is detrimental to add two children to a home at the same time. However, they do feel that the benefits of keeping biological siblings together does outweigh the negatives of placing multiple children at once.
Thanks for all of the advice. I guess we'll just have to wait and see how it turns out!

Advice needed...

Okay, we got some bad news from our Agency Rep. yesterday. She says that there just haven't been a lot of referrals for sibling groups coming in right now, and she thinks that the wait for referrals for siblings will be between 6 and 12 months, probably closer to 12. That means that if we wait for a referral of siblings, we might not get a referral until March of '09!
We are pretty sad. I can't stand the thought of another Christmas with no babies.
So... we have to make some decisions. At this point we are open to twins under 6 months or siblings under the age of 2 (with 1 under the age of 6 months) at least one of whom is a girl. That will make our wait longer, as it is more specific. We need to decide if we should open up the age ranges more (but we really do want to have at least one baby... it would be hard to miss that stage completely), say we don't care at all about gender (but we really loved having a daughter, and really want to have that again), or saying we are open to single infants as well as sibling groups.
It would be a bummer to not get siblings, because we didn't want our child to be the only one in the family who is African American. On the other hand, we have already been talking about adopting waiting children from the HIV+ orphanage (AHOPE). We would just really have to make a commitment to adopt again. But... if we adopt siblings now it will cost us $2700 extra to do the paperwork for a second child. If we pursue an entirely different adoption later on, it will end up costing the whole $20,000 to redo all of the court, agency, and paperwork costs again....but if we really do have to wait until March for our referral, all of our paperwork will have expired and we will need to do a lot of it over again anyway.
We really don't know what to do. We need some advice... anybody have any?

Obama '08

We went to an Obama Town Hall Meeting in Aberdeen yesterday, and we were so impressed! I don't think that there was one thing that he said that didn't make us want to cheer. I loved that he doesn't take any money from lobbyists and that all of his campaign gear is union made. I also love that he wants to give federal government contracts to small businesses to help boost the economy, and offer billions of dollars in grants to small schools to increase teachers' salaries and education. He also wants to give grants to college students in exchange for civil service. How cool is that?!
As we were leaving, both Nathan and I decided that we can't understand how anyone wouldn't want to vote for him if they heard him speak. I'll definitely be voting on June 3rd... keep your fingers crossed!

Making progress... on pillows at least!

I still have to sew them closed, but I wanted to try out our pillows. What do you think?