Great News!

My Thailand background check has been received by our social worker!!

Thank you, Jesus!

Our social worker said she will add it into our home study over the weekend and then our home study will be complete! This means we can now send in our next set of paperwork (I-600a), apply for a grant and keep moving forward in the process. I am so thankful to be able to move ahead!

In other good news, there are only seven more days we have to wait until we get to see Leti!

While We Were In

I didn't do a "While You Were Out" (I have no idea if that show is even still on) make-over to our guest area in the basement, but I did redo it last weekend.

Jason and I have had a handful of renters live in our basement for a good portion of our married life (coming up on five years!). While our house is pretty small, it has three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs and a bedroom and a bathroom downstairs, so it works well for renting out the basement. We have known almost all of our renters very well so that has made it a smooth process.

But, we are done with renters (at least for a good while). While we could technically still have arenter even with four kids living in our house in the near future (!), we are not going to. Our three kids from Africa will have enough new things to adjust to (us being the biggest ones) that we don't want them to have to figure out who the "extra person in the basement" is.

A note to all of our former renters: Sorry for having to endure the nasty burnt orange paint color in the bathroom while you lived with us!

I have hated the color ever since I put it on the walls nearly six years ago (the picture below doesn't do justice to how bad it was). I was trying to go for more of a corally-red color that the Wallaces' have in their bathroom but I ended up way off. I had a very limited budget back then (I was single) and in the past six years I have rarely spent time in the bathroom. So, it remained burnt orange for a long time.But, the orange is gone! Replaced by a very calming grey (surpise, surprise!). It is the same grey (Vessel Grey from Lowes) that I used in Abram's room.

Yikes! Look at all that orange.

Much better!The shower curtain is from Walmart. I was able to use the purple rugs and towels from the previous "burnt orange and purple" theme.

Here is our guest room sometime before or in between renters.
And now. I haven't decorated much in here yet, but I still like it a lot better. It is painted High Speed Steel (Lowes), the same color as our kitchen. I bought this bedspread at a garage sale probably eight years ago. I have tried to sell it at about four garage sales of my own! I am absolutely not a pack-rat, but when I really like something and think there is a possibility of using it down the road, I hang onto it. I'm sure glad I did that with this light teal bedspread!

I don't have a good picture of the closet in this room, but you can barely see the closet on the right side of the picture below. It had two bi-fold doors that were hard to open with the carpet.

So long hard-to-open bi-fold doors! There are fun, dark grey, shimmery curtains now in their place. I love them! I found these curtains on clearance at Target for $10 each. I wasn't sure what I was going to paint the guest room at the time, but I knew I loved the curtains. I thought I would use them on the window in the room. But, I love using them with the closet.

I wasn't planning to paint the closet, but when Jason saw the three different colors of off-white in the closet, he encouraged me to paint it (and he helped me paint it). I'm glad we did.I had decided to make the closet of the guest room my project area. My project area (for lack of a better term) was formerly in our office and I was planning to keep it in that room (the baby room) when we were going to adopt a baby. Now that that room will have two African girls in it, my project area had to go. I don't scrap-book or make cards or crafts, but for some reason I really need a place where I can store wrapping paper, ribbon, bows, gifts I've found super cheap, extra picture frames, etc.

Here it is (I should have zoomed in a little).

The bulletin board in the middle is where I keep the pictures/stickers/necklaces/etc. my neices and nephews give me.

Left side of the closet. I found the two sets of organzing trays/wire baskets at Goodwill and a garage sale. When I find good organizing items super cheap, I get them!

Right side.

The right side has my extra gifts (some are even for Christmas gifts!), extra frames I've found at garage sales, etc., wrapping paper.

I'm such a nerd that I think this little project closet might be my favorite part of my entire house (well, maybe second to my closet-turned-locker). Everything fit so perfectly in it . . . and there is still organizing space to spare.

My last little repurpose project was this shelf below. It had glass doors on it, which were great for the first few years of its life (see last picture).

But, now the doors are gone and this once-cabinet is now a more useful shelf. It is much deeper than a normal book shelf. I love it!

Here it is in its cabinet glory days.In just one weekend I was able to completely change the look of a whole area of my house. So fun! And besides paint, I used almost everything (except towels and two decorations found on clearance) that I already had.

Lastly, in case you haven't figured it out already, we are trying to do everything we need/want to do to our house before our three kids arrive. Tomorrow we are installing a new toilet in our upstairs bathroom. That will definitely not be as fun as redoing the guest room.

Family Pics

A friend of ours (thanks Stacey!) took some fun family pictures (including the one that shows up on the blog now) last month to go along with Abram's story that will be printed in our church's upcoming Intersect magazine.

Every couple years, Cornerstone puts together a magazine full of God-stories . . . retelling some of the awesome things God has done in the lives of Cornerstoners.

Abram's adoption story is definitely a God-story!

Mr. Big Eyes.

Priceless.

Lots of Cousin-Time Lately

Yesterday Kate picked Abram and I up for lunch at a park in Ames since it was the kids last day before school started.This morning: Mya, the 1st grader and Brady, the 2nd grader.
They were quite giggly, very excited for their first day of school.
[I need to interrupt this post with a "when-did-Brady-and-Mya-get-so-big-breakdown!"]

Okay, I'm better now.

Here they are waiting for the bus at the end of their driveway. Since Kate ended up being sick today, I stayed at her house and hung out with the three little ones.

What is cute about the pictures below is:

1. Abram actually asked to ride in the little cart and Greysen wanted to push it - usually they want to do the same thing at the same time, so this was a great set-up!

2. That little yellow shopping cart was my sister and mine when we were these kiddos' ages. So fun!

Been Thinking All Day . . .

About a very special person.

Abram's Momma Amber.

It is her birthday today.

I'm incredibly thankful that God created her and brought her into the world 24 years ago today.

I hope she knows how very, very much we love her.

A Couple Updates

Update #1: The Blog

Here's the deal: I read all the blogs I follow from Google Reader, so I only see text and pictures. Therefore, I don't really care about the look of my blog. But, I wanted to put labels on my blog and in order to do so I had to choose a new template. It was hard to see the templates and I was trying to get it done quickly so I just chose one. Seemed fine to me. A week or so later I got an email from my husband asking, "Did you change the blog template (hummingbirds)?" I literally laughed outloud. He hated the hummingbirds. So, I've made another update. (And he approves of the purple.)

Update #2: Our Adoption

I don't have anything exiciting to report, but rather a prayer request.

As part of our homestudy, we each had to have background checks from all the places we've lived since we were 18 years old. Just so happens that I lived in Thailand for two years! It took a few days to figure out how to get a background check from Thailand and a week to get everything ready. I know that all my paperwork arrived at the Royal Thai Poice Station in Bangkok on July 22nd (because I tracked the shipping).

Background checks in the US take about six weeks, which means there is no reason (yet) to think that there is a problem.

The only problem at this point is that I am beginning to get impatient!

Because I lived in Thailand ten years ago, I didn't have all of the information the paperwork asked for. I am hoping and trusting God that what I sent will be sufficient.

Instead of relying on the Thai police employees to process my clearance correctly, I've decided it is time to ask others to pray with us that my background check will be processed and received back to us quickly. (Thanks for praying if you would like to.)

Once my Thai background check is received, our homestudy will be complete and we can move forward with a lot of other paperwork (that we have filled out).

Some great news is that our friends (here in town and from our church) - who are as far along in the process as we are - got their first referral a few weeks ago. This means they received a picture of one of the two boys they are going to adopt. Jason and I were so thrilled to get to see a picture of this precious boy. Oh, the joy to know this orphan is going to have a family and our friends are going to be parents. And we were all very surprised at how soon the referral came. Jason and I are so excited for them! It is so wonderful to have friends to go through this journey with (AGAIN - God has been so good to us in that way!).

Where Have We Been?

Painting, cleaning, painting, painting and helping my sister and her family move to a different house in Huxley. It has been a crazy two weeks!

About a month ago, Jason and I prayed for God to provide us each with a part-time job so we could make some extra money for our adoption and all that we will need to buy to get ready for three more kids. God was more than faithful! I have had two painting jobs (with two more lined up) and Jason got a cleaning job for apartment turnover and he is starting a weekly cleaning job next week. We are very thankful!

My painting job and Jason's cleaning job happened to land right around the time Mark and Kate got access to their house two weeks ago, so that all kept us very busy. But it was very fun getting Kate's house ready to move in (because it is my second home!).

Here is a sneak peak at Mark and Kate's new back yard:

The backyard is mostly a pond and the owners left a paddle-boat (which we were on in the pic) . . . so FUN!

Here is the little man sporting his big boy shoes.Abram has a new obsession: BALLS. He calls them, "da," and spots them everywhere we go.

Here is a picture from one of my painting jobs. The ladder didn't make it far enough up the 18-foot wall so I ended up renting scaffolding (made me feel like a professional painter!).

We are home more this week, which is good since Ames is incredibly flooded. We are thankful to have a dry home. Even though we don't have water (due to a water main break and possible contamination) we are thankful to have a full bathtub of water (for flushing) and bottled water on hand.