Zhenia - Christmas

We haven't gotten any further with the process of getting Zhenia. We are still waiting to hear back from immigration. We did send him a package for Christmas though. We sent him a package of 3 transformers, a blanket, a spinning light toy, jelly beans, two different lego cars and a book. We hope he got them but we can't be sure. We also got him a cell phone so we can call him, but he doesn't have that yet. So we sit and wait and fill out any form we can in hoped to speed the process along. It's a very slow process but well worth it I am sure.

December

December is my favorite month. If only it would slow down! I love Christmas, the songs, the lights, the snowfall. All of it, I just love the season. But more than anything I LOVED watching the kids' faces Christmas morning. They were SO cute. They were so surprised and so happy that Santa came and brought them just what they wanted. Or as Trinity said, he brought me just what I didn't even know I wanted and needed. They were so impressed. They had a great time up at their Grammy and Papa's opening presents a week earlier and they had a great time Christmas day opening them with their other Grandma and Grandpas. I have pictures of both, so I will post those later. What a great month.

November

November was without a doubt a "game changer" month for us. We met a little boy named Zhenia at the end of October. He came over from the Ukraine with about 32 other Ukrainian children and were hosted by families here in Utah. My sister Julie and her family hosted him and my family met and fell in love with him. Long story short (or shorter) we have always tossed around the idea of another child but with the age gap between a baby and Trinity decided adoption might be a good alternative. Also we wanted to be able to offer a family to a child that needed one. Anyway, so we met Zhenia, we fell in love and decided to start the paperwork to make him part of our family. Man is there a lot of work. We got our home study done this month and sent in our paperwork to immigration. We will keep plugging away at this until I can post that we have brought our son home.

October

October was great. We all went to visit my sister in Maryland. While we were there we saw Washington D.C. and drove up and hit New York. We had a blast. Susan was fantastic about driving us all around D.C. it definitely made the trip a lot easier and we couldn't be more grateful. They are such wonderful places to visit and it was great getting to show Austin and Trinity all of the monuments and statues and fun sites.

Later that month we had our annual Halloween party at our house. Jeremy and I were Vampires (rather good looking ones if I do say so myself :))

We had a great time and loved having all of friends with us. I don't have any pictures of it on this computer so I will have to come back and post.

September

September was a great fast paced month. Mid-month we took my neice and nephew with us and the kids down to Disneyland. They had been once before but they couldn't remember it so this was kindof their first time. They had a blast and so did we. Disneyland was awesome, but I think the beach won the award for favorite place. Amy and Kerry were great about letting us stay at their place and the kids LOVED their pool.

Catch Up

Wow, did I get behind or what. I thought about posting, I really did, but well you can tell school started in August because I haven't posted since then. I had a heavy school load and focused on that instead (Calculus, Statistics, Business Law, and Philosophy). But that is over so hopefully I can do a little catching up now before Spring semester starts.

First Grade here I come

Her first year of all day school. She was a little nervous but a lot excited. She walked right into her class and started looking for her seat, the teacher was pleasantly surprised to discover she wasn't shy and was comfortable just walking right in and getting started.