Feeling a little emotional....

   As I start this blog post, I realized I’m filled many emotions tonight, from excitement to nervousness to worry to stress. Excitement kicked in today because we received our appointment letter in the mail to go get our fingerprints done for the USCIS!!! This is great news, since most of the blog posts I have read from other adopting families it took awhile for them to receive their letter and then once they did receive their appointments they were about a month or so away....ours however is in 2 weeks!! This is so great and exciting!! We are going to try and walk in to see if we can get them done sooner but if not 2 weeks from today we will be getting that done!!:)  Along with the excitement I am feeling a little stressed, this part of our process is going by VERY fast and I just hope and pray we are going to be ready to go when the time comes. I hope to finish compiling our dossier in the next 2 or 3 weeks so that once we get our “golden ticket” we can put it in the box and send it off to Aaron’s country! This is where the worry kicks in, as most of you know adopting a child is VERY expensive and I am really worried about not raising enough funds to get to our boy. I am truly praying that our Harvest Hoedown fundraiser can bring in the funds we need to cover the last part of our adoption; which is the most expensive part! So please if you get a second can you say a little prayer for us? We’ll take all the prayers we can get!:) The nervousness is from reality setting in; in just a few short months (hopefully in January) we will be traveling to a far away country to get our little boy. And the unknown is really making me nervous, from the language barrier we’ll face to riding the metro to living in a different country for 4 to 6 weeks…..don’t get me wrong I’m super excited to get to our boy and bring him home but no matter how much information the families before us give to us, the unknown still makes me a little nervous. But the biggest emotion I am feeling is excitement, excitement over meeting our son, excitement to finally get to hold him in my arms and of course the excitement to let him know his mommy and daddy are here and we are not going anywhere!! I just wish there was a way to let him know we are coming and will be there soon! I hope he feels our love for him even though we are thousands of miles away…..

As this blog comes to and end, I wanted to share this song I have loved since Ryan was born and I think about every night as I go to sleep and can’t wait to sing it to our little man once we get to him…..I have posted it below, please enjoy it!:)

Godspeed (Sweet Dreams) By the Dixie Chicks with lyrics

Just a quick little HELLO!!

Hello everyone, I just wanted to write a quick little post for everybody! Nothing has really changed since my last post, which is good. We are still working on compiling our dossier and will hopefully be getting our first piece of it finished this week!! We hope to get everything else done and completed quickly. We have a great person who will be doing our notary and is available whenever we need her…so hopefully we can get this done quickly!!:) I have tried to check on our USCIS status already and for those of you that know me well, know this is no surprise. I have a very hard time with waiting and this part of our process is going to kill me, I’m sure. However when I did call and talked to the people at USCIS they said one way to check to see if our packet of paperwork had been accepted was to call the bank and see if the cashiers check had been cashed…..so I called the bank and guess what it has been cashed!!!!!!! WoooHooo!! I know this is a small step but it’s still a relief to know that our paperwork was accepted and is getting processed! This means its time to buckle down and work on getting our boy home!! With that being said PLEASE check out our fundraising page and see all the fundraisers we have going! The finished paperwork won’t mean anything if we don’t have the money to get to Aaron and bring him home! So anything helps, no matter how small or big we are sooo grateful for all the support you have already shown and hope that it continues while we get through this process!!:)

It's actually happening!!

Hi everyone! Just wanted to make a quick post and update everyone on our process in the adoption!! We have FINALLY finished our home-study!!!:) We received the big packet in the mail on September 30th! I can honestly say it was such an awesome feeling to come home and find it sitting on our doorstep. It has also made this whole process soooo… much more real! I know I have said that exact statement in the past but now there is no going back, we are doing this and we will have our boy home with his family in the next couple of months!!! It’s so exciting, crazy, scary, and joyous all at the same time! On Friday 10/7/11 we sent in our packet to the USCIS!!!!!!! For most of you, you may not understand but USCIS stands for “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services” and this is where our “golden ticket” comes from. They are the ones who give us the approval to adopt our little boy!! So while we wait for this to be approved we are now working with all systems going. We are preparing our dossier and getting all the needed documents together for that, as well as planning our big fundraiser! On my last post I had talked about our Halloween Costume Ball fundraiser, and unfortunately we have had some changes to that. We were going to hold the fundraiser at our house when we realized that we could not accommodate the large number of people we would be having at the event.... So we have changed everything about the fundraiser! We are now having Aaron’s Harvest Hoedown on November 19^th and have new venue to hold our event at! David’s National Guard unit has been so very supportive and kind in allowing us to use their facility; which is WAY bigger then our house and allows us to accommodate everyone!  Soooooo…..if you’re in the mood for hoedown you show join us on November 19^th from 6-11. I promise you won’t be disappointed!!

And finally I am working on the fundraiser page. Who knew it would be so hard to figure out! If you are interested in coming to our fundraiser email me at: chellsonfamily@gmail.com and I will get all the information to you. If you are my friend on facebook you should have received and event invite on there which has all the details. I am working on some homework for school after I post this and then I will be back to working on the fundraising page…so be on the look out for the fundraiser page in the next day or two!!:)