5 Year Anniversary

Yesterday Jen and I celebrated our 5 Year Anniversary. We went out to dinner to celebrate and spent a ridiculous amount of money dining at a local restaurant called Silks at Stonehedge Inn. We have been there a couple times and the food and wine is always great. The first time we went we had only been dating a few years and it was our first time in a fancy restaurant. We were so out of our element, funny how much we have changed since then. Someone once told me that life never really turns out how you expect it to. If you would have asked us on our wedding day where we thought we would be in five years, I guarantee we would not have said we would be preparing to travel to China to adopt a baby. I expect we would have said happily married with a couple kids. We are happily married, we are just going about having the kids a little differently than most. We are still working on getting the nursery set up. Our current project is cleaning out the closet. Right now it is being used as Jen's seasonal closet and various other storage, so we needed to get some more closet space. So off we went to IKEA and bought a new wardrobe. We needed some bookcases as well so I took a couple vacation days this week and have been putting together furniture for the past couple days. This prompted us to clean and organize our basement which is a good thing as we hope to use it as a playroom for Gracie.

I wish I had a before pic but this is how it looks now.

This is the other, unorganized side of our basement, where we are storing some of the big boxed baby items.

We are hoping to get everything done this weekend, need to go to Babies-R-Us as the mattress is on sale, which we think is the last big item we need to get. We expected referrals to come this week but they didn't. Looks like they will be coming early next week and will cover Log In Dates through July 13th as was rumored. Although this isn't official yet, the China Center for Adoption Affairs website hasn't been updated and we haven't heard anything from our agency.

Working on the Nursery

We finally have sorted through most of the shower gifts and have them pretty much organized. We have been working on putting the nursery together now that we have stuff to put in there. I will post some pictures when it is complete. We need to get a few more things but are waiting for them to go on sale. The difficulty now is having to look at a completed nursery everyday and we have no baby in there and no real idea of when we will get her. We may need to keep the door closed for a while so that we don't have to see it every day. The next batch of referrals should be coming out this week. There have been rumors that the China Center for Adoption Affairs building is moving and that could delay referrals a bit. The rumors also seem to be saying that this referral group will cover people with Log In dates up to July 13th. This would be 15 days which is 2 more days than last month but unfortunately not a full month as some people in the adoption community were expecting. So our best case scenario of getting our referral in January 2007 is probably not going to happen. We are now looking at getting our referral sometime between February 2007 and July 2007.

Baby Shower

This was a pretty busy weekend for us. On Friday we had a 50th Anniversary party for Jen's parents. Lots of family were up for the party and we had a really good time. Yesterday, Jen had a baby shower. It was so nice to have so many friends and family supporting us with the adoption. We got so many nice gifts, Grace is definitely not going to go without anything. We are still trying to sort through everything and probably will for the next couple of weeks. Today we went to Babies R Us and used some of the gift cards that we got on some of the registry items that were not purchased. I have enough toys and furniture to put together to keep me busy for months. Some pictures from the shower below. We'll post some more as we get them.

CAWLI Picnic

We had a fun day yesterday. We attended a picnic hosted by some families from our adoption agency. There were about 20 families there with children adopted from China as well as quite a few waiting families like us. It was nice to see so many happy families, some with more than one baby from China. We also got to meet a couple more families from our DTC group who we will probably be traveling to China with. We are now a year in since we started the adoption process last summer. It has gone by pretty fast. We hope that the remaining wait time goes just as fast. Hope everyone has a great holiday weekend.