A Shower and Travel Orientation

A lot has happened this week so I am updating two things in one post.

First off, my family threw us a baby shower this weekend. The food was awesome (Asian themed) the decorations were beautiful (thanks Jake for the sign)! And my sister surprised me by video taping herself doing a devotion so that she could "come" to the shower too. Of course I cried! We were overwhelmed by everyone's generosity! We got a lot of really nice stuff! Our little guy is going to be styling in all the cute clothes and he is going to have the best stuff to play with, to take a bath with, and to cuddle with! I can't wait to start using it!

We also went to our travel orientation on Tuesday. This was a meeting at the agency for couples who are waiting to travel to Korea to pick up their child. The program director gave us information on what to do when we get the call to travel. What to do when we get to Korea. We found out that a driver will come and get us from the airport (I am so relieved about that!). We also found out what to pack for us and for the baby. Since the meeting is for parents waiting to travel we were in the same boat as everyone in the room. We all had pictures and we were just waiting to go and get our child. It was fun to talk to other families and to see the pictures of their child, and share our experiences with each other. Every time I leave the agency I feel re-energized about our process and feel like we are getting closer to traveling. It could just be a little over a month now!

WINNER!!!

The winner of the first ever Norman New's blog contest is......


KELLEY!

Congrats! I will send you an e-mail with your choices for scents and I will get an address from you too!

Everyone put a lot of thought and care into their answers, and we will certainly use all of your ideas! Thanks so much!

Ever felt close to a stranger?

Today is September 10th, which means that our baby boy is 7 months old today. I feel like I'm praying for him all of the time, and Fawnda and I make a point of praying for him every night. I'm always looking at his pictures, and we have some limited information on him that I have read through a number of times. So, in a way, I feel that I am already close to him. Then there's a couple of facts that I cannot forget. 1) He's only about 6,221.2 miles away and 2) We've never met.

Among other things, these 2 points seem to continually ignite my burning desire to get over there to get him. I know that this is all part of the adoption waiting game, but I cannot help but feel like I'm missing out on his life. 7 months is a long time to be out of someone's life, and the first 7 months are incredibly formative. For example, at 7 months a lot of infants are experiencing the following:

• He's probably developing his own personality.
• His sitting should be getting better as his lower back gets stronger.
• He might be ready to get moving!
• He might be pushing up on hands and knees and creeping along the floor.
• He may try to stand by himself.
• He may try to balance himself and sit for a while with no support.
• He may like finger foods that let him practice picking things up and feeding himself.
• He may enjoy playing with a spoon and a cup, but will probably not be good at using them yet.
• Seven month-olds often like to be included in family activities, enjoy looking in mirrors and at pictures of other babies, and like to grab, shake, bang things, and put everything in their mouth.

This list makes me smile, but it also makes me sad that I'm not there for all of it. He will most likely be about 9 months old when we bring him home, and both Fawnda and I are super excited to get to know his personality. Rest assured, we plan to make up a lot of ground right away. In the grand scheme of life 9 months is a relatively small amout of time, and we will have plenty of opportunities to make our own memories after he's here.

It's just that on our little guy's 7 month birthday, I wish I was there to have some of the cake.

Please don't stop reading here!

The Travel Thoughts post contains an exciting contest!

Travel Thoughts- with a contest!

We got invited to our travel orientation today. The meeting is set for Tuesday Sept. 16th from 8-10 am so that means that I will have to miss a day of school (bummer!) At the meeting they will give us information on what we can expect once we get there, what to bring for ourselves and our child, information on tours and on how to get around while in South Korea. We are very excited about this and I will probably start to pack a bag for the baby. So since we are thinking about traveling TO Korea, that also makes us think of traveling BACK from Korea and how that trip will be a little more interesting. It will be about 20 hours on a plane with a 9 month old. We are very open in saying that we are a little scared about this part! So, it inspired me to have the FIRST EVER NORMAN NEWS CONTEST! The rules are easy:

• Leave a comment with an idea of how to keep a 9month old busy/happy on a plane.
• Leave an e-mail address for me to contact you if you win!
• US addresses only

Any idea will enter you into the contest. Names will be entered into an excel speadsheet (by the EXCEL master Jason) and a random program will be created to choose the winner. The winner will be announced on Monday Sept 15th after 9:30 pm.


Here is the prize:

• Homemade soap and bath salts by me!


• I will let you choose the scent from what I have and the color! I will mail them to you!

Good luck everyone!!

In Denial!

Tomorrow is the first day of school. You would think that I would be picking out my clothes, getting my lesson plans ready, and preparing my mind for the upcoming school year. BUT for this year, my head is just not in it! The fact that I will only be going back for 6-10 weeks is clouding my brain. I don't even have my seating charts done yet!

Last week we had teacher workshop week. The soul purpose of that week was to get teachers in touch with the reality that the summer is over and they have to go back to work. Trust me, we need this extra week! I know that students think that they don't want to go back to school, but teachers dread this time much much more than any student could! It is not that teachers do not like their job, or even that they don't like the students, we love our job for the most part! But if you had a choice from staying home or going to work, what would you choose?!? So, I came back to workshop week with pictures of our baby boy and I showed them to anyone who would look! Everyone asked what my plans were for the rest of the year and I said with a big smile, "I am taking the rest of the year off." Their next question was, "How can you focus on coming back?" And my reply was, "I am not... want to see the pictures of my baby again?"

So this year, I am sitting here on the eve of of the first day of school thinking about putting on the second coat of paint in the baby's room, ordering replacement parts for our new crib (it got damaged in the shipping process, so the parts are free), putting together the new little stool we bought from Ikea, and generally dreaming of the time I will (hopefully soon) get to stay home with our child! And I am OK with that!

10 years!!

I can hardly believe that I have been married for TEN years! I am truly no longer a newly wed (although I really think that newly weds are 5 years or less) I am now entering the double digits of marriage. WOW!
When Jason and I were still dating my mom told me "you either need to get married or slow down" well, slowing down was NOT an option for us (we were so in love) so a few months later we were married and I was telling everyone that it was my mom's idea! She used to deny it but now that we have been happily married for 10 years she is telling everyone how it was all her idea! :)

This 10th year of marriage will be the year that we become parents. I know that everyone is telling us to enjoy our last weeks of freedom, go out while we still can, watch whatever TV show you want, sleep in... And I know that our lives are going to change drastically! But, we are ready for this change. We are ready to stay home on weekends to play with our baby boy. We are ready to watch some silly kid shows, and we are ready to get up early with our son (or maybe I'll make Jason do that one!)

We have been on such a journey this year with our adoption. The adoption road is not the easy one, but the process has made us better people. I am not resentful for all the extra steps that I needed to take to get to be a parent, because I learned so much about myself, my husband, and my marriage. It really made me think about what kind of a parent I want to be. In the end I knew without a doubt that I wanted to be a mom. Becoming a parent was not something that just happened to us, it was something that was chosen!

I found this quote that I really liked:
Adoption means that you have the ultimate freedom of deciding to become parents. The question is not "will we", but "when will we?" And the answer is always "when we can no longer contain the love in our hearts."

It is a pity that not all parents have to go through this kind of process. I know that I have grown so much going through it.

So CHEERS to us for 10 wonderful years of marriage!

Some Changes

We have had some changes in our life recently. The biggest one is, of course, getting matched up with our baby boy. But we have had some other big changes too.

The first one is getting a new refrigerator. Our old one ran all the time and it was very loud. The new one is so quiet and has the energy star rating. We are hoping that it will earn its keep in less than a year. Here are some pictures of our new Fridge:



It has a bottom drawer for the freezer. I love it! I really like being eye level with the fridge, and having the fridge on top gives me more room to hang up pictures.


I also got my hair chopped off. I am donating it to Locks of Love in honor of our son.

Before:




After:







For those who are counting, this would be my 3rd time donating my hair to Locks of Love. It will take about a 1 1/2 - 2 years to grow out the 10 inches to donate again.

We are still working on the baby's room, and trying to set up the house in a way that will work for a little one. So, I am sure that these are not the last of our changes.

It's a Boy!

We are excited to announce that we got our referral this week. Our Baby Boy was born on February 10th, 2008. At the last Dr Appointment on July 9th he weighed about 17 lbs and was 25 inches tall. We are still thinking of names and probably will not tell what we decide until after we get back from Korea (To help you experience our waiting!) We also have pictures but we will not post them on the blog as it is not private. We would LOVE to show you in person! One of the pictures is of him sitting on a throne like chair so we call him our Prince and you can too!
We are beyond excited about our baby boy and I am falling in love with him more and more everyday. We can not stop looking at his pictures!

Baby's Room

Both Fawnda and I have been feeling that we must be getting close to receiving our long-awaited referral. During our home study process, we were told that the wait time for a Korea referral was 5 months, and our home study was finalized on March 6th. This time frame might have been extended since then, but we are still optimistic that we are getting close!

This feeling of being close has renewed my sense of urgency in getting the baby's room finished. That's been put on hold for a couple of months as we have turned our focus to our yard (in my defense, it's hard not to want to be outside when you live in Minnesota and it's finally nice outside!). Anyway, my projects this weekend included priming trim and removing a much dreaded border. This year marked our house's 45th birthday, and I'm sure that border had been up for at least 44 of those years. At first, I thought that taking the border down would be easy, and I might even have some extra time to float in the pool this weekend, but just like every other project in our house, I totally underestimated the amount of energy required. For starters, I'm pretty sure that this border had been adhered to our wall using the same type of glue that NASA uses to bond the heat shield to the Space Shuttle. Armed with only a spray bottle of Dif and my handy scraper, I was much like a kid taking a sling shot to a gun fight. I found that my only saving grace in this project was a faulty layer of paint underneath the border. As a matter of fact, I was able to take my scraper, catch some of the paint with the corner of the tool, and peel sheets of paint off the wall, which took the border off too. Has anyone else seen or heard of anything like this? Our walls started out with a grey paint color, and they are now white. This activity was much like peeling skin after a bad sunburn, and it definitely took much longer than I had anticipated.

Fawnda had to work this weekend, so I spent much of that paint-peeling time all to myself, which provided a lot of opportunity to think about this child coming into our home, and about my burning desire to be an awesome dad. For us, going the adoption route has been incredibly rewarding, and I feel that many of the things that we have gone through should be required for all parents, but we've had our difficult times too. I was reminded of one time about a year ago when we were still going through the infertility treatments, and weren't telling very many people about our struggles. One of the ladies at my work had just had a grandson through her 17 year-old daughter who was a junior in high school. This lady brought her grandson to a work event that Fawnda and I were at, and she brought the baby right up to the two of us and chided us with "So how long will it be before you guys have one of these?" I know she was kidding, because I hadn't informed anyone about what our intentions for children had been, but the first thought that popped into my head (after trying to shield Fawnda from this lady and the poor, innocent child), was "what, a bastard child? hopefully never. . ." As I sit here today, I must say that I'm ashamed that this thought even popped into my head, but I can honestly say that I remained polite: I smiled and did the "Minnesota Nice" thing (changed the subject).

I've also been thinking about how our culture seems to be generally kid-friendly, and it seems like everyone has their usual responses to seeing a child. Here are some of the responses that I have caught myself saying, "He looks just like his dad", "She acts just like her mom", "He's got his dad's laugh", etc. etc. Sometimes I feel sad that many of the "usual" sayings won't be said of me and my child, but I find comfort in the fact that we will find our own. For example, we might be able to say, "he/she likes to draw just like his mom", "he/she is good at math just like his dad", "he/she likes to swim just like his mom", or "he/she is brilliant just like his dad" (okay, so maybe I went a little too far there using my creative license, but it makes me smile so I'm leaving it in).

I could go on and on about the things that I thought about while peeling paint this weekend - both the things that make me excited about being a future dad, and the things that still make me a little sad. Even so, there was definitely a recurring thought about my work at hand, and that was, "wish YOU were here!"

Things I can't wait to hear!

As I talk with my sister, sister-in-laws and friends (who all have kids) on the phone I often times hear their little darlings in the background. Here are some things that I can't wait to hear my my child say:

• Mama hold me!
• Mommy watch this!
• This was the most fun!
• Thank you mommy, I love you!
• Let me help- I can carry the yittle (little) one.
• Look what I made!
• do you wanna play with me?

We are working on the baby's room now. We are moving furniture around the house and getting more "easy" storage furniture pieces to help organize toys and such, getting the house ready for a little one. We hope that we will not have to wait too much longer. We do not have a new number yet... Jason will not let us call to check until Aug 6th, I want to call now but I am practicing my patience I suppose!