May 2005

Lindsey's first haircut...

April 2005

Lindsey is supposed to be napping right now, but instead she is jibber jabbering in her crib to her animals. "Ah-body! Ah-body!" (everybody in Lindsey-speak) Then she proceeds to tell them all what to do. There are so many blankets and stuffed animals in her crib there is barely room for her. Soon we want to transition her to her toddler bed. We will eventually have a regular size twin bed for her and the crib for Allison, and then 2 twin beds for them when Allison is out of the crib. Lindsey is 2 years, 7 months, 3 weeks old - Ben was out of his crib right at 2.

Man I wish I had a pic of Lindsey with her pigtails! She looks soooo cute!

P.S. I just heard her say "Okay little doggie! Don't cwy!" Oh this is just hilarious all the things she is saying. But go to sleep little girl!!!! :-)

Okay....

.....I'll stay! Thanks again for all your kind comments and encouragement.

I wasn't sure if anyone really wanted to hear my boring thoughts and if I was just being a bragging mom with the pics of Lindsey. :-) I'm glad she is a reminder to those of you who are first-time adopters that it really does happen and dreams do come true!

I put Lindsey's hair in pigtails today for the first time ever but Ben has the camera with him in North Carolina! So I can't take a picture. I can do it another time but it was a BEAR getting her to sit still long enough to get the pigtails in. A talented hairdresser I am not. :-) But it turned out pretty good, the part is as close to straight as I can get it. Wish you could see her, it's adorable! Instead I will post an April 2005 picture soon.

What to do???

Besides the fact that it was a very crazy week and I haven't had much time to do anything with this blog, also I have had so many nice comments here and other places that you have enjoyed my blog and pictures of Lindsey, etc. So I'm feeling reluctant to delete my blog - it's just so final! I also like looking at my ticker every few days and seeing the time pass from LID. So I may just think about it some more.

My crazy week - Monday night we had our 17 year old Burmese cat put to sleep. Sniff sniff. Tuesday night I went to see my niece in her junior high school play, Cinderella. She had the lead, what a beautiful voice she has. Wednesday we had an appraiser come over so I spent the day cleaning up the house. After she left we went grocery shopping. Thursday morning at 6:30 am I spoke to an infertility group at my church about our adoption experience. Afterwards I came home, got Lindsey dressed, and went right back to church for women's Bible study. Thursday night was my once-a-month book club. Yesterday was spent getting things ready for my son Ben who left this morning for North Carolina to visit some friends (fellow travelers for our first adoption). Whew! He's flying by himself but he's quite confident so I'm sure he's doing fine. He's actually delayed in Detroit right now though, just 15 minutes so he'll be okay. He won't be home until Thursday afternoon! I'm going to miss him but hey he's a teenager and gone a lot these days anyway. :-) I'm going to my neighbors for a playdate in 1/2 hour. She has 2 little girls from China, 4 & 2, and is LID 8/30 for their third!

Thanks for your kind comments about my blog. I'm still here, for now anyway. Have a great weekend!

Saying goodbye

Hi everyone,

For some odd reason last night I was laying in bed just feeling very uncomfortable about all the personal things about myself I have out there on the net. Especially all the pictures of my precious little girl. I don't know why it came up but I wonder if maybe God is telling me something. There has to be a reason why I'm feeling like this all of a sudden as there was nothing to trigger these feelings, no incidents or anything like that. And then this morning I found out there are some security issues with one of my Yahoo groups and I wonder if that is confirmation of my feelings at this time. Now that I think of it my adoption agency group has just stopped putting pictures of our children on their group homepage. Just another piece to the puzzle.

So as much as I hate to do this, I've had SO much fun doing this blog and getting to know some wonderful people, I'm going to delete my blog in the next few days. I'll still visit yours :-) so hopefully I can keep in touch with many of you. Thanks for all the wonderful comments about my daughter and other things I have posted.

May the referral wait speed up as 2006 rolls on! I wish the best to everyone with their adoptions.

More March - Easter

I couldn't resist posting more pics from March. I love all of these from Easter. It was SO fun to finally be able to buy an Easter dress for my daughter after having a boy all these years! :-)

March 2005 - 21 months

3 months!

Today marks 3 months of waiting in the books!

I really haven't done much to get ready for Allison yet. I typed up my packing list the other day. I was "packing list obsessed" last time and for some reason I still love talking about them. :-) Awhile back I said I would review each category here in my blog but that fell by the wayside for now. I will get back to it when I get caught up on my Lindsey photos to date.

I am doing the Secret Pals and Cybershower with my September DTC group, and a bib swap with my October group.

With the slowdown I feel like we have so much time to go yet so there's plenty of time to get things ready. But now that we're in the second trimester :-) I would like to do a few things.

I sure hope another batch of referrals comes before Chinese New Year (a whole month this time too!)

February 2005 - 20 months

This is Lindsey dressed up for Chinese New Year with our Families with Children from China group in early February. We had gone to this the year before when we didn't have her yet. It was so wonderful to be there this time with my own Chinese daughter. She had such a blast this day, running around and soaking in all the activities. This year's celebration is this month on the 29th.

January 2005 - 19 months

December 2004 - 18 months

November 2004 - 17 months

My little Packer fan! I asked her the other day what do you say when you're watching the Packers and she said "Woo hoo!" Okay, not so much this year, but hopefully next year will be better! :-) One of the first things I taught her was to throw her arms up in the air and say Touchdown! She learned that one really fast. :-)

October 2004 - 16 months

September 2004

The first summer home is sort of a blur. :-) So I didn't do a very good job of labeling photos and I'm not quite sure which photos belong to July and which to August. So I'm skipping August and starting up with September when I started getting a little better at keeping track of which photos were taken when.

July 2004

June 2004

I've posted a picture of Lindsey on Gotcha Day, and some more recent photos. Now I'm going to post one of her from each month we've been home. We got home from China on June 10, 2004, and here are 2 pictures of her from later that month.



(Edited: I thought maybe Lindsey looked a little older in the picture of her with her Great Wall t-shirt on her, and I checked and the pic may be from July or August so I deleted that one for now.)

Proud mommy

I read a lot of blogs and so many people have lots of clever, witty, and interesting posts and mine are rather boring. So I will resort to posting more pics of my beautiful little girl for now. :-) It's late so I'm just posting this one and will do some more during the week. Background to this photo: for some reason Lindsey doesn't want me to take her picture most of the time. The little bugger will turn away from the camera so I have to be sneaky. Before I snapped this she was sitting on the floor looking snuggly in her jammies with her stuffed piggy and her blankie watching a show. "Oh how cute, I have to get a picture!" But as soon as she saw the camera she got up and started being goofy.

O Christmas Tree

We finally put up our tree last night. We have an artificial tree that we've had for close to 15 years I think. We keep the lights on and put the whole thing downstairs when Christmas is over. We don't care to have it up forever and ever so we usually put it up about 2 weeks before Christmas and take it down on New Year's Day.

Anyway, Lindsey had a great time putting ornaments on. She went back and forth, back and forth, from the box of ornaments to the tree. The bottom of the tree is loaded with ornaments where she put all hers. We have some rearranging to do when she's not looking. :-)

My favorite ornament is one I made in kindergarten, 36 years ago. We traced our hands on red felt, cut them out, and decorated them with glitter and shiny things (not sure what they're called!). I remember trying to cut the felt with the safety scissors, not easy for a tiny little 5 year old! I wrote my name on the back. It's my prized possession and the first ornament I put up every year.

Two Months!

Two months since our LID - 6, 8, 10 more to go?

Referrals

My agency (AWAA) got 22 referrals today! They're for 2 groups in April with LIDs of 4/11 and 4/14. Another half month's worth of referrals, but we're 2 groups closer nevertheless! We were expecting this again. The CCAA actually has put on their website now what files have been reviewed and up to what date they have matched. That is really nice of them to put that on their site now.

There's been a lot of whining and moaning (sorry folks!) about the longer wait lately and it was starting to get to me. I know the wait is hard, especially for first time parents, but we can't let life pass us by while we wait. I choose to focus on the fun parts and the wonderful opportunity I've been given (again!) to bring another wonderful daughter into our family. The waiting time *can* be a joyous time, focus on the positive!