No clever title today.....just hope you enjoy the post!:)

   Happy (early) Thanksgiving Everyone! I have been trying to figure out what to say in this blog post. I have honestly started it about four or five times and erased everything each time. We have had a crazy two weeks since my last post and we are still digesting the outcome from it. As I am typing I am reminded of all the things we have to be thankful for and reminded that patience is a true virtue. That saying “Good things come to those who wait,” keeps running through my head. This adoption process has made us feel emotions we didn’t think it would. For the most part it has been super easy and not to many bumps…..but there are times when things don’t always go the way we thought they would and that is ok, we simply learn from it and move forward. And we just keep reminding ourselves that patience is a virtue and everything will work out just the way it should! So on that note let me fill you in on the last few weeks.

          Two weeks ago we started the home stretch to our big fundraiser Aaron’s Harvest Hoedown. We had spent these last two weeks busy rushing to gather the last of what we needed and to tie up all loose ends. When the 19^th rolled around it was game time! We woke up early and started our looooong day of setting up and preparing for the evenings event. As we put on the finishing touches, I felt relieved and had hopes it would turn out great. As guest started to arrive my hopes keep rising. I am SO very thankful for everyone who came out and showed us their support and got us a few steps closer to bringing home our boy. We are still a long way from the goal we had hoped to raise that night but it was evening I would not change for anything! The goal was just that, a goal, and not always do you reach it with the first try and that is why we don’t feel disappointed or anything like that. We spent the night surrounded by family and friends who really care about us and want to see us succeed in bringing our boy home! We are thankful for our wonderful family and friends who did show up and made the night special. Aaron is going to be one lucky boy, I know we feel loved and he will two when he gets to meet everyone who helped bring him home! So again thank to those who came out and made our night soooo special! We love each of you and couldn’t do this without all your support!

          Now I have been saving this for the end. If you’re my friend on facebook you have already heard the news but if not here’s the latest most up to date and exciting news about our adoption! We have received our I-171H also know as the “Golden Ticket” and are approved to adopt through the USCIS!!! WOOOHOOO!!!!!! This is so exciting because it means that we will for sure have our dossier finished by the end of the month!!!! Today or tomorrow I am headed to the state capital to have our first piece of paperwork apostilled and send it off to Eastern Europe! We are headed into the home stretch and I can honestly say we are feeling a little bit of everything! I personally am ready to be a busy mommy of two kids and can’t wait to have another wild boy running around the house! So please say an extra prayer for us and keep spreading the word about our adoption to anyone and everyone who wants to hear about it! We need to get funds raised so we can get our little guy home! I can’t believe the end is in sight and the best Christmas present we could ask for will arrive a little late but will be sooooo worth the wait..because good things come to those who wait!!!:)

          I just want to give a quick thank you to all of you who follow our blog and to all of you who stop by from outside links to read our newest posts. You all are reason I write and are the ones passing our story along to you friends and family! So Thank You and we wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving!

~Oh and just one last thing before I go is please go check out our fundraiser page. We have some new fundraisers going!! Please stop by and check them out, who knows you find a great Christmas present for someone special!:)~

Thankful

Hi everyone! I just wanted to write and give a quick update on our adoption and talk about something that was brought to my attention last night!

          First an update on our adoption, we are still hard at work compiling our dossier and hope to have all the paperwork together and finished before Thanksgiving!!:) I know some of you may think this is crazy and quick but we have a GREAT notary who is available whenever we need her and the paperwork that will take a little longer to get done has already been taken care of and will be finished within the next week or so!! So our next big wait will be for our “Golden Ticket.” We go in on Tuesday for our fingerprints and then the wait begins for that! Hopefully it won’t be a long wait but we are prepared to wait. This will be the final piece to our dossier; which is exciting and scary all at the same time!! When this is done our final stage of this process will be right at our finger tips….which means traveling to get our boy and becoming a mommy and daddy of 2 kids instead of 1!! So with all this excitement going on we still have to fundraise to get our little guy home. While I have been busy with our dossier I have been working even harder to get ready for our big fundraiser, Aaron’s Harvest Hoedown, it is in just 13 short days!! Which the planning and preparing for the Hoedown have been more stressful on us then the actual adoption process!! We are hoping and praying it will turn out well and bring us the much needed help to get our boy home!! Please check out our fundraising page for more information on the hoedown and keep an eye out for the Christmas ornament fundraiser we will be starting around Thanksgiving.

          Now onto the eye opener I had last night. As most people know David and I have struggled for a number of years trying to have another child of our own. And after a few failed tries with fertility treatments we then realized that if medical intervention wasn’t going to work then it was time to look into other ways to expand our family. We know that some people would most likely live with the fact that they can not have more children and some, like us, would look for others ways to expand their family. With that said, I had my eyes opened up to the side that would not be ok with adopting last night. While at my mom’s house running a Thirty-One party for her, I was explaining why I started selling Thirty-One and how all my profit goes towards our adoption. After explaining everything I was stopped and asked about our adoption and the reason we chose to adopt and after explaining it several different times to these wonderful ladies it hit me. One of them said that they too had thought about adoption, but their husband said “No, I could never love a child that didn’t come from me.” Now I have to tell you this comment does not offend me in any way at all, adoption is not for everyone and I totally understand that. However it was with this comment that I realized, how truly lucky I am. I have a wonderful husband who loves with everything he has. He has never once said no when talks of adoption came up, and then when it was time to make our decision about adopting he was more then ready to go down this road. The money factor scared him a little bit but his fears are slowly being put to rest with every fundraising effort we do!! So my eye opener was one that reminded me to be thankful to have a husband who can love without limits and is willing to walk hand in hand with me down this road!! I love you David and thank you for making me one lucky girl!!:)

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!!:)

Our Crazy Busy Life

             Well I can’t believe it’s been over a month since my last post!! I am soo... sorry I haven’t been keeping this updated like I should. But I have a VERY good excuse; life has been sooo… crazy busy over the last month!! So here is a quick recap of our last month and an update on our adoption process!!

             August started with David starting his new position as Open-Space Deputy, which he loves! He is getting to be out hiking in the hills and patrolling the open space of Marin County now and he loves the change of pace from being on patrol on the streets. I started back to school full time and am hoping that this is my last fall semester at our local community college! Hopefully if all goes well I will be at Sac State in the fall of 2012 and only a few semesters away from graduating with my degree so I can FINALLY start teaching!! Ryan also started school in August; he is officially a big kid now that he is in 1^st grade! I have to be honest and say that watching him go off for his first day of school was much harder this year then it was last year in Kindergarten. I did really well until I got to the car and cried a little bit. My baby isn’t a baby anymore and that hit me like a ton of bricks that day! Ryan has also been very busy with baseball over the last several months and every game he getting better and better! So between David working, Ryan and I in school and Ryan’s baseball schedule…..life in our house has been a little crazy but we wouldn’t have it any other way!

            Not only are we busy with just general life stuff but we are super busy with all aspects of our adoption process!! We had our last home visit for our home-study in August and it has become our little hang up in this process as we are STILL waiting to make our edits and to finalize of our home study. But I’m crossing my fingers and hoping we can do all that by the end of this week!! Other then this little issue we are going full force with all other aspects of our process. We will be starting on our dossier paperwork in the next few weeks, which makes me nervous and stressed all at once but I know it will be done quickly and ready to go when it’s time to send in everything!! We are also planning and currently selling tickets for our first big fundraiser. We are having a Halloween costume ball at our house on October 29, 2011!! Tickets are $25 dollars and all adults are welcome to join us if you are in the area and want something to do around Halloween you should come and join us!!:) We will be having a raffle, silent auction and costume contests…I promise you will have a blast and enjoy the evening helping us raise money to bring our little boy home!! We are also in the works of a couple other small fundraisers that we are planning to hold in November and December! And please don’t forget we are still holding “Aaron’s Lucky Stars” fundraiser, this will be one that we do up until we actually leave to go get our little man and bring him home!!

            Again I promise not to go so long without posting again and if you have any questions about our up coming fundraiser please feel free to send me an email at chellsonfamily@gmail.com. If you would like to purchase tickets you can pay using our chip-in and then email with how many tickets you bought and I will get them to you, if you want to pay with cash or check email me and we can work out all the details!! I am trying to get a page up and going for our fundraisers and the information on them, so be on the look out for a link to our fundraiser page on our blog!

Thank you for stopping by and reading our blog and I promise not to be a stranger anymore!!