2 sets of fingerprints in one day!

John and I spent the better part of our day off on Friday having our fingerprints taken at 2 different places for 2 different reasons. As I mentioned earlier, we had our USCIS fingerprint appointment at the immigration office in Milwaukee at 9:00 in the morning to renew our immigration pre-approval. Our approval was good for one year and is up to expire in mid-December. That appointment went great. We arrived early and were actually in and out before 9:00!
Directly from there we headed to our local county sheriffs department to have a new set of fingeprint cards taken to send in for our FBI clearances for our dossier update. These are only considered 'valid' by Colombia for 6 months from their issue date, therefor we need to have them re-taken and re-submit them every 6 months. For these prints, they don't let you make an appointment ahead of time. You have to take your chances, show up and hope the booking department isn't busy right then. These prints took a while, including a trip all the way home and back for some additional paperwork that they asked for this time that they haven't asked for in the past.
I'm glad to have both sets of prints done though and not have to worry about it again for a while!
November 28th marked month 20 of officially waiting and month 5 of being submitted to Ayudame.
We also had a great Thanksgiving weekend:) I had my whole family over for an after Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday. This is definately the one time of year that I could use a second oven! My oven was weighed down with an 11 lb. standing rib roast, 13 baked potatoes, greenbean casserole and a sweet potato souffle all at the same time. My dad and both of my brothers zonked out in the living room after we ate, so as a chef I'll take that as a compliment that everything was good. I took a picture of the scene, but out of fear for my life from the wrath from either of my dear brothers, I'll refrain from posting it:) Instead I'll post some pics of my new front porch decorations I made over the weekend with the burning bush branches we trimmed off of our huge bushes. I decided to try to go all Martha Stewart on them:)














The bright red branches look really cool against the grey bricks. I filled the pots with sand, and after all the branches were stuffed into it, covered the sand up with trimmings from some other bushes to make it Christmas-y. I'm deciding if I want to add tiny white lights to it or not. I think it would look cool at night, but the cords would kind of ugly it up during the day. Thoughts?

A chef in the making.

As you all know food is a big deal in our house:) I love cooking. I can't stand most convenience and conventional foods and can't believe the disgusting artificial colors, sweeteners and ingredients in most pre-packaged foods. I make the majority of our food from scratch with wholesome, real and pronounceable ingredients. Don't get me wrong, I'll whip up the occasional batch of brownies from a box, but any type of frozen meal in a box has yet to grace our dinner table. Athena has been watching me cook like this for almost 4 years now and I'm happy to say that she has taken an interest in cooking and I think she has a real understanding of real food and how it's made.

Athena was playing in her play kitchen while I was making dinner the other day. Her play kitchen is right in the regular kitchen. I was making chicken cacciatore, cutting up a whole chicken, dicing the fresh peppers, onions and tomatoes. I looked over to see what baby girl was doing and had to smile at my observant little chef. Guess what she was making? Yup, she dug through all of her play food to find all of the ingredients she had seen me use in the chicken cacciatore and was trying to make the same thing:) That's a chicken, red pepper, onion and tomato.

She then proceeded to feed it to her baby:) Way to go chef Ena!

For the adoption, we have our fingerprint appointments this Friday the 26th at the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) to renew our immigration pre-approval (I800A). Our original approval was good for one year and is up to expire in mid-December. You don't get to choose when your appoinment is. You apply for the appointment and they assign you a day and time. I was very excited that it fell on a day that we both already have off of work and didn't have to take another day off of work! Worked out great:)

As if I didn't love November enough already:)

Fall is my favorite season and Thanksgiving is my mostest favorite holiday for sure! Any holiday that is all about eating great food, spending time with family and being thankful for the things we are so lucky to have will always be number one in my book:) Now however, I have another reason to love fall....off-season prices at the waterpark resorts in Wisconsin Dells! Last weekend we had a blast at the Wilderness Waterpark resort with some fabulous friends of ours. For some reason, business is slower for them during the month of November (not sure why November more so than any other non-summer month?) so they offer some super sonic deals to attract customers during the month. We had a little mini weekend vacation that was so much fun I'm sure it will become an annual tradition for us to do every November from now on.
Here's Ena & John going down her favorite green water slide for about the 20th time:) It was a pretty long slide, what you can see in the picture is about a third of it. By the end of the weekend she was going down by herself!














We also got to attend a cute little Thanksgiving gathering at Ena's preschool daycare. It was a fundraiser for the local food pantry. It's called the Turkey Trot. The kids get pledges like a regular fund raiser walk & then dress up in little turkey hats they made in school and march a few blocks around the school. They end up back at the school where all of the parents and families are invited to stay for a thanksgiving meal. Both John and I were able to make it to the event and Ena was so excited to have both mom and dad come to school for lunch. Here she is in her cute little turkey hat. Not the best picture of her & it doesn't do the cute little hat much justice either, but it's the only one I got that didn't include other kids faces in the picture.













Happy fall!

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween:) Here are a few pics from our fun day of trick or treating with friends and some pictures of Ena's pumpkin-gutting fun.

















Were were a wizard family. Dumbledaddy, the black cat "Sugar" and the pet baby fire breathing dragon:)

Here she is practicing her 'fire breathing dragon roar'.

She would climb all the way in if she could:) This is one of her FAVORITE things to do.

For the adoption, October 28th marked month 19 of officially waiting for a referral (in the estimated 15-36 month wait) and our 4th month of being submitted to Ayudame.

Hope everyone else had an awesome Halloween also!

~Nic:)

Mama's birthday dinner:)

John had off of work this week. We of course have been saving his vacation days all year in case we got our referral this year and needed to use them towards our trip to Colombia. We decided that if we didn't get the call by October 1st, that the chances of us traveling in 2010 would be slim, so he might as well go ahead and burn a week of vaca at the end of October. It has been a great week having John home all week. He has had fun experimenting with cooking and has had dinner ready every night. He also has been able to help pick Athena up from pre-school, something he is never able to do during the work week with the hours he works. He kept Athena home on Wednesday for a Daddy and Ena special fun day and we also kept her home Friday for a family fun day since I had off Friday also.

John and I have a tradition of celebrating special occasions with dinner at The Melting P#t, a fondue restaraunt. This restaurant can be rather spendy though, if you go all out and make an evening of it which we tend to do:) Anyone who knows how much the fees are for an international adoption, realizes what a financial stretch it is to do it a second time and that spendy dinners out are certainly not in our budget at the moment. My sweet hubs decided to re-create the same dinning experience at home for half the cost and it was so good!

We tried a new cabernet (since cabernet is my fave) and it was really good:)

We had yummy veggies with tempura batter. Beef tenderloin, shrimp, lobster & chicken breast. Also, gruyere, swiss & white wine fondue with apples, celery, carrots and pumpernickle bread for an appetizer.

One happy birthday girl. Ahhhh, 29 again:)

Check out the ticker in the upper left of the screen!

Yes, 2 years. It was an interesting chain of events leading up to our decision to take the plunge again:) Some major changes occured in the world of international adoption, including Colombia, very shortly after we adopted Athena. Most agencies with Colombia programs experienced an incredible decrease in the number of referrals they were receiving as a result of the changes and our agency was no exception. I began calling LSS in January 2008, right after Athena turned one to inquire about starting a second adoption. I was told they were not taking any new families into the program because of so few referrals and the high level of uncertainty they had about timelines and the new process. I called back in February and got the same answer. March the same. Each time though, they did tell me that the program was not entirely closed and to keep 'checking back periodicaly". I called every month for the next 10 months. Finally in October, I didn't get the usually response. Instead I got a hesitant "Well.........we were just discussing the possability of taking more family applicants in our last meeting.........call back again tomorrow" I called back the next day and they said they hadn't totally opened up the program to more family applicants yet, but they would take our application since we were a returning family who had already adopted from Colombia! They made it very clear though, telling me several times that the wait times this time around would be long and I had to understand that it would probably be a 2-3 year wait this time. Not the 7 weeks we had waited for Athena!
I waited until Saturday to drop the bomb on John. We had a date night on Saturday night since Athena was having a slumber party at my in-laws because I had class all weekend. I waited until John was in a happy place with a huge steak and pint of good beer in front of him before I told him the news. I was so excited that he agreed with me that we should go for it:) The following Monday I called LSS back to get the paperchase ball rolling:)

International adoption summed up in one phrase:)

I recieved an email back from our Colombia program coordinator today in response to a question I had emailed her. One phrase in her response actually made me laugh out loud. It immediately struck me that this one phrase should be the slogan for international adoption. Here it is. "Changes in procedure often change." Changes in procedure often change. Isn't that the truth?! Oh funny:) I"m sure that anyone who understands some of the 'changes in procedure' that we've experienced the last 23 months, especially my fellow adoptive parents, are laughing right along with me. Yes, it's been a hoot having our process this time around be dab smack in the middle of the learning curve for everyone that has come along with Colombia becoming a Hague compliant country. Changes in procedure often change.......I've been saying it to myself throughout the day and laughing about it every time:)
It's all part of the master plan that is out of our hands to ensure that the timing is just right for us to be matched with the child who is meant to be ours. The master plan for Athena just happened to be much faster;)

Here are a few fun pics from the weekend:)



Our little fire fighter.

Ena and daddy-o shredding potatoes for hashbrowns. John has been on a kick of making us sunday brunch lately. Nice!

Ena cut up a whole green pepper with a butter knife to add to the hashbrowns.