A little art...

Rather than paint a mural, J had the idea to paint canvasses, both small and large, for placement around the room. These are the small paintings which are complete at the moment. Each is an 8"x10" canvas painted in acrylic, and all follow the theme of some kind of "cute" bug. Another nice thing about this is that we've been able to involve friends and family in creating paintings. Even Dad-to-be got to get into the action.

J has a couple of 24"x36" canvasses that she's painting now. I'm looking forward to seeing those complete. I won't give away what they are at the moment but the idea is very cute.

Without further ado, here are the small paintings.

The first one here, of a dragonfly, was painted by our close friend, D.

The next one of a butterfly was painted by J's mom.

The bee and the ladybug were painted by J.

And finally, there is the caterpillar which I painted. I got to sign something as "Dad" for the very first time, which was cool. I've never painted anything before (unless you count watercolors in elementary school, or maybe latex paint on walls) so it was a fun afternoon of learning by doing.

Tiny turtle

I'm posting this mainly as a test of blogging via email from my phone. That's my excuse for the bad quality of the picture anyway! :)

Last Thursday evening I was leaving the office late and I spotted this little guy (or gal, as far as I know) hanging out on the sidewalk. At first I thought it was a lizard hiding under a leaf but upon closer inspection I saw that it was a turtle with a long tail. I haven't seen any around here except in the water. There is a wooded area next to my office building so we are occasionally visited by all sorts of little creatures.

Those are my keys next to the turtle for a size reference. Sticking to the theme of our blog, at the upper left you can see the USB drive containing scanned copies of all of our adoption paperwork which I carry all the time. This has proven to be valuable any time I have needed to look at one of them when away from home.

-G

Our story so far...

We started this adoption journey about a year and a half ago, in April of 2006. Back then we were still trying to decide on international vs domestic adoption, what countries, etc. It seems like a really long time ago now!

We ultimately decided to adopt two children internationally. A lot of research, thought, and discussion led us to China. We applied to a great agency and began the daunting paperwork process, the interviews with our social worker, and all of the various gymnastics required to be approved to adopt from a foreign country. A few months later we were finally logged in.

Somewhere along the line we named our daughter-to-be from China. Here we’ll simply call her “C”. In all likelihood she won’t be born for some time, but she’s already a part of our lives.

As we went through the process, we watched the timeline to adopt from China grow longer and longer. By the time we were logged in, there were 25,000 families ahead of us by some estimates. This process is going to be much longer than anyone could have anticipated back when we first made our decision. From beginning to end this will very likely be a four year process!

We haven’t lost hope. In all likelihood C won’t be born for quite some time yet, but she’s real, to us at least, and we’ll go and get her as soon as we can.

However, nearly a year after our journey began, we started to realize that we could potentially adopt from another country that met all of our same requirements but could complete the process significantly before we brought C home. We re-opened the books on the process that led us to choose China in the first place, and learned as much as we could about what had changed in a year (a lot, as it turned out).

That search ultimately led us to choose Vietnam. And that will lead us to “E”.

We found another great agency and went through the whole life-under-a-microscope process again. It’s not so bad the second time around, especially since we knew more about what to expect.

Now as I write this our dossier has just arrived in Vietnam, hand carried by one of the heads of our agency, and the next step is translation. That will be a few weeks, we’ve been told, and then it’s off to the DIA and we’ll officially have a place on the waiting list. It shouldn’t be long after then that we’re going to be on our way to Vietnam to pick up E!

-G

Finally...

We finally got around to creating a blog. J and I will share this one, which could be fun because she's going to have all kinds of cute things and artsy stuff and I'm probably going to be more techie (J would say geeky) about things. :)

One quick note on names: I guess I'm a bit of a privacy nut so we decided not to use actual names. The folks who we share this blog with will know who we are anyway.

-G