A fundraising intermission...family catch up

As our I Pad giveaway has been running I have used the time to take a blogging break and work on all our adoption paperwork.  Tune in Monday for the winners and a HUGE thanks to everyone who donated, prayed, blogged, FB'd and told their friends about it!  We appreciate it.  We are in awe of the total number of people who have helped us bring Dariya home.

***For those of you who have asked, we still have plenty of fundraising to do and will continue, no rest for the family that needs help with their adoption =).  You can always make your tax deductible donation at our link on our sidebar!  Tell your friends "skip a Starbucks and help bring Dariya home!"

So here in our intermission I will give you a brief run down to catch you up on what we have been up to for the past couple weeks. We have been SUPER busy!

Alayna and I spent several days under the weather and were thankful for Urgent care and antibiotics that kicked our sinus infections and coughs.  AHH we can all sleep again!  I don't function on very little sleep well.

I have been tediously doing paperwork, checking, rechecking, praying and having everything verified by our stateside team.  I think I have about driven Jason over the edge with my obsession to make sure we don't miss one thing.  I sure don't want a hold up on our dossier because I forgot something!

I have been working for nearly a month just to get documentation of our home mortgage from our mortgage company...ah you think it would be easy for them to type out a letter, put it on letterhead, notarize and send it to us. But, even though I am working with a great guy who is working as hard as possible to make sure this document is acceptable per EE standards we still don't have it in hand.

Jason & I both had our physicals and all bloodwork and compiled that paperwork for the dossier, had to go back and have everything renotarized due to a wrong date entered on the form.

My fingerprints were rejected by the FBI, so I had to make a trip over to Topeka (an hour away) late in the afternoon to get reprinted.  Thankfully those prints were accepted and I was cleared in less than 24 hours. 

We had our final meetings with our social worker and she came to meet the kids and do the home visit.  She has completed the homestudy and we should be ready to file our immigration paperwork early next week(once we clear immigration we can file our dossier with EE)!!!!

Adorable Gingerbread house

 Aidan & Grace ( my niece) had their 2nd grade musical, This Old Gingerbread house.  He was part of the camera crew and Grace was a beaver. 

Aidan & Grace pose before the show.

Seriously adorable!  One of the songs they sang was titled "Sorry" (for eating the house) and as they sang Alayna was dancing around and signing sorry.  Cute.  I have tons more pictures but, I will refrain as I don't want to put other kids on our blog without parental permission.



Molars...we have the bottom 2 in now just need those top 2 to hurry up.

Alayna has added many new words including her own name and many other people's names (even Dariya), she can manipulate tiny zippers, walk backwards (holding on to your finger of course I still don't classify her as a walker yet), identifying colors, and helps count to 10 (she adds 2,3,5,6,and 10 so far), she also is singing along with the ABC song and putting letters or their phoneme in, she has also mastered unrolling complete rolls of toilet paper in seconds.  =)

I see her morphing from a toddler to a preschooler right before my very eyes.  At school they have begun phasing the parents out and making it more like a preschool setting.  Two parents stay each week and the rest leave.  I didn't think she would have any issues with preschool but, this just seals the deal for me that I know next fall she will be super prepared to step out completely on her own and go to school.  She loves it and is soaring!

And as you can see from the video she has musical talent and is aspiring to be the conductor at the Boston Pops!