MERRY CHRISTMAS!

We wanted to wish all our friends & family a very Merry Christmas. Thank you for all your prayers and support in 2007. We look forward to welcoming our baby home in 2008. Jake and Faith just can't wait for a sister! Then maybe they'll be off the hook for family photo time... hahaha! All our love, Colette, Don, Faith, Jake, Rocky & Sawyer (the cat brothers were not available at the time of this photo)... ;)

So Sad :(

Well... referrals came out on December 6 and they only matched another 6 days of LIDs. I was so disappointed. I had heard somewhere that all of December 2005 LIDs would be caught up this month. So I had my hopes WAY up. I guess that is what I get for listening to rumors. I was really upset last week when I found out. I know my agency says we'll receive a match between April & October of 2008 but I just don't know how that is going to happen at this rate. If they keep only matching a week at a time it will take 14 more months to get to our April LID date. I spent 2 days moping. But then I was given a wake-up call when a co-workers husband was lost in the mountains and when search & rescue found him he had been killed. I am so blessed to have all my loved ones safe and sound. Please pray for my friend Carrie & her 4 children. They have lost so much.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

We'd like to wish all our friends & family a Happy Thanksgiving. Even though we don't have our darling daughter yet, we have so many things to be thankful for. We have our loving family and friends that are so special to us. We have our fur-beasts.. Jake & Faith. Our dogs are like our kids to us and give us so much joy. For example when I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm sleeping diagonally across the bed, with my feet smooshed up against Don's because Jake (our Golden Retreiver) is sprawled out taking up most of the bed, I think to myself.. now, why did I start letting him sleep on the bed when he was a puppy? I guess because he is warm and fuzzy and such a cuddlebug, althought now he weights 80 lbs. We are also so blessed with our jobs and our home. God has blessed us so much and have a lot to be thankful for this year. Here are some a pic's from our camping trips last year.

Upper Photo - Mom & Jim. Lower Photo - Wendy & Steve

Last night Don and I went out to dinner with my mom and her boyfriend (Jim) and Wendy and Steve and some of Wendy's friends for Steve's Birthday. We went to New York Teriyaki, my personal favorite restaurant. We had a great time! I'm really looking foward to having Steve join our family he and Wendy are great together and I can tell they are totally "in love". Now we just need to get Jim to pop the question to mom and things would be complete! Here are some photo's of our evening.

We were notified that there would be an "important message" from our adoption agency (CCAI) posted on their website today at 4 pm. Well I was so excited, I just knew they were going to tell us when we could expect to be matched with our daugther. But you know how "pollyannaish" I can be. It was a nice message :) just restating that they are here for us during this wait to give us support any way they can. But they still can't predict how long we should expect to wait. Right now there are 30,000 dossiers in China waiting to be matched with a baby. Of course, most of those are behind me (I hope). All they have to do is refer babies to all the families with LIDs in December 05, January 06, February 06 & March 06 and then it is our turn with and LID of 4/3/06. They said they are referring about 700 babies per month. A few weeks ago my adoption agency said we should expect a referral between April 08 - October 08. I'm hoping that it won't be any later than October 08. I've also heard rumors that once the wait hits 24 months, which it has, it will stay at that. Well that would mean a referral in April 08 (24 months from April 06). I can always hope & dream :) I know God has this all timed out, I must trust in his perfect timing for this. I know of other parents that have waited a lot longer than Don and I to have kids, so we should feel blessed that we haven't gone through 10+ years of trying to have kids. I just wish I was a couple years younger!!!

I wanted to say great big THANK YOU to Danielle who made our blog so beautiful. As you all know my computer design abilities are non-existent. And when I stumbled across Blogs by Danielle it was a blessing. She is donating part of her fee to Half The Sky Foundation, which is a great charity that helps Chinese Orphans. I am always looking for ways to help all the children in orphanages in China. If you are interested in finding out more about them vist www.halfthesky.org. Another good one is www.lovewithoutboundaries.com.

Now, I will try to keep this blog up-to-date so you can keep up with what is going on with our adoption and our family as we wait for our angel baby from China.

7/12/07

We had a blog & website on yahoo, but it was just too hard to maintain. So we are going to give this a try.

The current news is we are still waiting. Haha. Well I guess that isn't news.

We did have some good news last week. The immigration office passed a new ruling that anyone who has a current I-171H (paperwork allowing you to adopt from china that only last 18 months, ours is expiring in August and we would have to pay the fees all over again $1000) will receive one free extension. So yahoo!!! We can extend our paperwork for 18 more months for FREE. With all the costs associated with the adoption, we really like free stuff!!

I had to fight a little bit for it. Our local office tried to tell me that we didn't qualify. Well I took the regulations in there and they had to admit we did. Now we just hope we can be matched and bring our daughter home before our extenison expires. Oh please, it can't take more than 18 more months!!!