Here is Laura and I at the Venetian… by the gondolas.
Here is all of us out front of the Venetian.
It was a lot of fun…. so working today really blows…. LOL 
Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category
Vegas BABY!!!
Sunday, November 19th, 2006So we are here in Las Vegas…. well actually we are in Henderson.. a small suburb of Vegas.. We came up a day early to spend some time with friends of ours who moved here from LA. It has been a lot of fun catching up and seeing thier new place… I drove around for a half hour this morning trying to find a starbucks, and thanksfully my nose for starbucks works as well in Nevada as it does in California. LOL
So, this afternoon we hook up with the Scott and Angie, and check into the Venetian. Pictures will be forth coming. 
So much fun lately.
Wednesday, November 15th, 2006We have spent a lot of time lately having fun… too much time.. I got sick. LOL
A couple of weeks ago, we went to Disneyland, and a week before that we were in San Diego to go to the zoo.
Every night of the week we have been out and about… Here are some pics..
Our group in California Adventure (the second part of Disneyland)….
This us at San Diego Zoo…
Saturday we leave for Vegas…..
Ruminations on the Wait…
Friday, November 10th, 2006No matter how long, or short the “wait” is, I think it is brutal for those who are waiting. It gets even more brutal though, when the wait is something more of an enigma and this growing monster that makes you wonder if it will ever end.
Those of us who are waiting, meaning that you are LID and have nothing else to do but wait for the referral, are learning tough lessons about patience and disappointment. A lot of us, especially those of us who are in the June LID group, originally anticipated a 6 month or so wait. That means, that we would have been nearing a referral right now.
We are 5 months into the wait. AS it stands now, we still have another 12 months to wait. Not only is that twice what we thought it would be, but added to the 5 we have already waited it is 3 tiimes. A lot of the “waiting” parents get very upset about this. Not me though.
Don’t misunderstand. I can not even wait to go get my daughter and have her be a daily part of our life. I am not upset though, because I know when the time comes and I look into the eyes of the beautiful little girl who is now going to know me as Daddy, I will know that this wait helped bring us together.
It also makes this all seem a little more like pregnancy. A part of pregnancy and birth is chance. You conceive a child, and everything about that child, even the sex, is determined at the moment of conception. So for us, we have a more “sterile” and methodic process that we go through, but the varying wait times make it seem a little more chancy. I am not sure “chancy” is a word, but whatever.
I am SO wanting my daughter right now… I yearn for her, I imagine the time we will spend together, I see the smile on her face when I walk through the front door, I dream about going to the park, and to Disneyland, and having our freinds and family fawn over her, and realizing each and every day that she is my precious one, my baby, my little girl, my beloved one…
Of course, until then, I can wait, because I know that my precious one is out there, and that when the time comes, and they put that little girl into my arms that all this time spent waiting, and hoping and dreaming will have all been worth it, and I won’t even remember it.
A new blog engine and a new look..
Friday, November 10th, 2006Well… Blogger got weird on me. I kept trying to post new entries and it would not upload to my server… I sent them several notices about it, but they never got back to me… so… I am now blogging with WordPress.
To be honest, I like this ALOT better. I have a local interface that I installed from the downloaded wordpress engine. It is all written in PHP which I am fond of. Switching the templates to create new looks will be alot easier as well.
Pictures will be easier to add and remove as well. I have opted not to have a seperate page for photos anymore, and instead will just be adding them in the main blog under a photo category (another feature blogger doesn’t have).
So anyway… I am back after a couple of months of downtime and I will be posting more and more now that I have nothing to do but wait.
Posted in Personal |
No More TV!!
Monday, November 6th, 2006Well, at least not for a few days…
Laura and I are trying something new for awhile… We began to notice that EVERY night we would end up in front of the TV, when we didn’t have plans, and just veg out for the night.
I used to love to read and would make time to do so, but lately I never seem to be able to focus on reading anything for more then a few minutes… I blame TV for that. SO as a solution, we are not going to watch TV on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Wednesdays. Day or night. The TV stays off. We have a few shows that we like to watch those days, but we also have TIVO, so we can just watch them later.
So… tonight I will be thinking about the book in front of me and trying not to think about the huge TV in the room…. LOL
Posted in Personal |
Our Backyard
Friday, September 8th, 2006So, in the never ending battle to get the house ready for a child, we have decided to tackle the backyard…
A little history. We moved into this house about 2 years ago, from a house around the corner. We rent from a GREAT landlord who keeps the rent cheap as long as we take care of the place and pay the rent on time. Well, the house we are in now, had a famiily in it that tore the place apart. They had a huge pitbull in the backyard that they used for fighting.. It was so sad. We reported them a few times, but without proof they wouldn’t do anything about it.
They also used the backyard to grow marijuana… They had rows of corn, and in between the rows of corn were rows of marijuana… NICE neighbors.. We finally convinced the landlord to evict them and then moved in ourselves. We completely redid the entire inside of the house, part of the deal we made for the rent.
The backyard was mostly dirt, with some nasty grass towards the back. We spent about a year, wanting to do something about it, but never got around to it. Finally about 8 months ago, I decided it was time, so I went in the back and used round up to kill all the grass. Did that a few times over a couple of weeks, and then used a sod cutter to get all the grass out. SO then I had this completely dirt yard. much better.. LOL
The I marked off where I wanted to put the patio, got a shovel and dug a 4″ deep 15 X 15 foot area for the patio.. WOW. I am not designed for this type of work.. LOL
Well, then work picked up and other stuff got in the way and I just couldn’t get to the yard. About a month later the backyard was all weeds. Then a month after that the yard was weeds that are taller then I am. The dogs would run back in to the yard and just disappear. It was hilarious. We would just see the weeds rustling where they were running around. I am sure they loved it, but what we didn’t love were the fleas.. They were infested quick, so I had to deal with it. So I got a weedwacker and went after the weeds. It was great. I looked like the Terminator with that huge gun that shoots about 1000 bullets a second… 5 hours later, you could see the backyard again..
So another few weeks went by and I started talking to a friend of mine who does landscaping. He says, “alright, were doing this. Get your stuff together and this weeked we are hitting it.”.
So over the next month we got the rest of the weeds out , took out the old cement slab (a 6 x 6 2″ slab that was just poured on top of the ground. I lifted it up and hit it with a sledge and it broke into about 30 peices..). I borrowed a tiller from a friend of mine and we tilled the ground up and put down some top soil, and then tilled that into the ground.
At that point we had a great area for the sod to go down on, but first we needed to put sprinklers in. So in 4 hours we trenched the area and laid all the pvc pipe and 9 sprinkler heads connected to two valves. In the front main section we have 4 sprinklers that shoot about 20 feet. They are in the corners and cover the whole front section of the yard. Then in the back corner we have 5 heads that cover that section. The patio area is not touched… so cool.. We could actually sit on the patio with the sprinklers going without getting wet at all. ( I imagine hot summer days, me sitting on the patio under the canopy drinking a beer, while my little girl runs in circles playing in the sprinklers… ahhh the good life.)
In my next post, I will tell you all about the nightmare that is ordering pavers from Lowes online….
How IKEA ruined my weekend…..
Sunday, July 23rd, 2006OK – well as some of you know, my wife forced me to go with her to IKEA to buy a new wardrobe thingy (called a PAX since IKEA doesn’t name anything the way it make sense.)
So Friday night at 7 PM we left to drive to Costa Mesa (about 30 minutes away) to buy this thing. Now mind you we had our eye on this for more then a year… We just have been waiting to get the house to a point where we felt comfortable buying it.
So off we go. Since I was with the wife and since IKEA is designed to make you walk through the ENTIRE fraken store before they let you escape, we were there until about 10 PM.
So 3 hours and $450.00 later I am loading 9 foot long boxes that weigh about 300 pound in through the back window of my Hyundai..
We get home at about 10:30 or so and Laura decides that after a year of waiting for this wardrobe that she just can not wait one more night for the wardrobe to be assembled…. OH MY….
Now – here in California, where it is supposed to be 70 degrees year round, we are in the heat wave of the century, like many of you… So for the next 2 hours in a 90 degree house I am try to put this thing together with the instructions they give you with the fat pear shaped guy who visually walks you through with no written instructions… I don’t like that little fat man!!!
At about 12:30 AM we have all the drawers assembled and the main structure of the corner unit assembled. I have drunk about 3 gallons of water, and then sweat it all out, and am just about wiped out.. We have all the pieces of our bedroom on our bed and in the surrounding area, to clear space for the wardrobe unit (which did I mention is 8 feet tall) to be assembled. So I tell Laura – “OK, help me stand this thing up.”
Now – if I were in a movie, I would have paused right there, rewound and spent just another few minutes giving that statement a little more thought. Of course I did not have that option.
So we go to lift this thing up, neither of us coherent enough at this point to realize that I had forgotten to put the cardboard backing on the unit.
So, let’s spend a moment discussing this cardboard backing. Here is a piece of furniture that weighs about 200 pounds (with out all the accoutrement’s) and apparently this flimsy, folded, molded, and veneered piece of cardboard is the vital lynch pin to keep the whole unit together. But I digress.
We go to lift it up and about half way to being in a standing position the whole thing flattens out and pieces of pressed wood go flying in all directions. The unit is COMPLETELY ruined and beyond salvaging.
LONG LONG LONG pause and Laura looks at the unit and then at me and her face reads like I have just broken all the legs of her puppy right in front of her.
At this point, I used all the words that my mother used to stick a bar of soap in my mouth for using in the past, and decided that that was a good time to call it a night and go to bed. Of course, as you read earlier, all the pieces of our bedroom are on our bed and in the surrounding area…. So where to sleep? We could have just moved everything, but at this point the only thing that we wanted to do was kill that little fat man from the instruction booklet….
So Laura slept on the couch and I slept in the recliner… Well slept is a subjective word at this point. I laid there a few hours falling in and out of consciousness.
Saturday Morning….
As I wake up to the sound of my phone ringing for the second time. It is 7 AM and I have not slept at all. I am not 20 minutes late for a meeting and the phone is likely the person that I am supposed to be meeting with. I let it go to voice mail since I am not sure the sound of me waking up will add to this person�s mood at this point.
So I deal with my business in the morning and that afternoon figure I need to have a plan on how to deal with this mess…
FORTUNATELY, IKEA has a wonderful return policy and since we have all blamed the little fat man from the directions they tell me to bring the unit back and they will happily exchange it for a new, none destroyed one. So at 2 PM I am off to IKEA again, with a 9 foot long shredded box filled with destroyed pressed pine, which sticks out the back window about 3 feet..
Return process is rather uneventful, although there are A LOT of people who have decided they didn�t like their IKEA purchase, so I am there for at least an hour. When I go to load my new non-destroyed unit into the car, the helpful IKEA fellow that helped me load up, who didn’t look anything like the little fat man from the directions, tells me that maybe I should attach a flag on it since it sticks out so far.. After three trips with these things in my car, I tell him, as politely as possible, that this will be fine as is.
So, Saturday afternoon at 4 PM I roll home again to start this whole nightmare process over again. Fortunately this time, I ignore the fat little man and his clearly sub par advice, and just build the unit as logic would dictate. Two hours, 3 gallons of sweat, and more curse words then I want to admit too, we have the frame of our new corner wardrobe unit up and standing proudly in our bedroom.
Now, we just need to install the drawers, shelves, and clothes rods and the corner piece and we are all set…. Due to my need for beer at this point and our prearranged dinner plans, we decide that can wait till Sunday.
Sunday Morning….
Since I didn’t sleep well on Friday night, and Saturday night I was up late drinking beer, and watching the lightening out over the pacific ocean on the balcony of the Belmont brewing company, I was more then willing to sleep in this morning….. My wife had other plans..
Still bubbling over from excitement, she has decided to wake up early and attempt to install the drawers herself….
So for the rest of today, I have been moving furniture, installing lights, drawers, shelves, and other such sundries.
Now… I have 6 empty Guinness bottles next to me, and wife who is still Giddy as she organizes all her clothes and makes a new list for what she needs at IKEA….
So help me if that little fat man shows up, he may not make it.
Posted in Personal |
Tales of a Moron
Tuesday, May 9th, 2006Ok so as you can read below, we went all the way to Sacramento to get our documents authenticated, and we were very proud of the fact that we were in and out so quickly. Hurray for us right. So now we move on to the next step — getting the Consulate of the People’s Republic of China to certify the documents.
So I spend all day yesterday making copies of our documents and I come to the home study. Our wonderfully worded Homstudy. Our 3000.00 dollar Home Study. The document that declares that we are fit to be parents.
The document that is NOT authenticated by the Secretary of State. DOH!
Now mind you, after our 6 hour drive to Sacramento, we did not forget to bring this document to with us. We simply forgot to have them authenticate it while we were there.
There are not words that can describe the horror, and the pain, and the anger going through my mind at the moment that I realized that we did not authenticate the Home Study while we were there.
Thankfully, my wife, my beautiful, wonderful, lovely dutiful wife agreed to drive up and back to get it done today.
So – thanks to rising gas prices our authentication, and my stupidity cost us another 200.00. ARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!
It is OK though. We are still on schedule. I fedEx’d our Marriage License to Chicago yesterday and the consulate called and let me know that they received it. Wooo Hooo.
Tomorrow I will FedEx Laura’s BC to San Francisco, and the rest of our Docs go to LA.
Almost there. Almost DTC. Almost LID….. so close…..
Posted in Paper Chase, Personal |
Of Adoption and Conception…..
Tuesday, March 28th, 2006WARNING : this post contains words like ovulation and date night, if these words or concepts make you uncomfortable, hit your back button.
So… we got our I 171H form… very very exciting for us, but for our friends, well they don’t even know what the form is or means, so the question we get everytime we tell someone we got it, is “So do you get the baby now….” NO!!!! Just kidding. I am not upset about it, but I do want to take this time to educate people on my view of adoption timelines and put them into an easily understandable standpoint.
OK — so Parents A decide they want to have a baby. They begin the process of trying to conceive, you know – date nights, candles, soft music and … well we all know the drill. During this time they may tell thier friends that they are trying. They map out thier ovulation cycles, find the best times to try, and do other asundry tasks to make sure that they get pregnant. One day, the woman realizes that she is late, and take a pregnancy test. It comes out positive. Wooo Hoooo. She tells all her closest friends, but she and her friends know that until it is confirmed by the doctor, it is still “up in the air”.
Eventually it is confirmed by the doctor, which is great and now family begins to find out. But still everyone knows that for 3 months there is a stronger chance of miscarriage, so there is still a reservation about telling everyone about the pregnancy. Once that 3 months goes by – baby showers get planned, and everyone finds out. Happy day…
For an adoption, the time lines are not a whole lot different, but people seem to think that adoption happens like this.
Parents B decide to adopt, a week later they are happy parents and the world keeps spinning. hmm. Not so much.
In reality -
Parents B decide to adopt — spend a couple of months researching adoptoin agencies and home study agencies. Finally decide on acceptable agencies and apply. Several freinds find out they are going to be adopting (especially those who may need to provide reference letters). The next 3 – 6 months are spent gathering every document that has ever been created with your name on it. Then you request permission from the US government to bring a child into the country (i-600A). Date night and candles are also apart of this process, but for different reasons.
After your I-600A is filed and processed you get fingerprinted and then eventually you get the I-171H. To me, this is the timeline equivelent of determining your ovulation cycle and realizing that today is the day.
not pregnant, but major accomplishment.
You get the I-171H and all the other documents that you need and they get sent around the country to various Secretary of States to get Authenticated. Once Authenticated, they go to the Agency from approval, and then they are off to China. At this point you are DTC. This would be the equivalent of taking the pregnancy test and having it come out positive. Wooooo Hoooooo.
Still – your DTC – not LID (logged in). So there still needs to be “confirmation from the doctor”. A couple of weeks later your are Logged in by the CCAA. This is the confirmation by the doctor. Friends begin to find out and a couple of months go by and the baby showers start to get planned and nurseries are created and all the other baby stuff happens.
So — to sum up this extremely long lesson in adoption and conception timelines. We are not yet pregnant, but we have determined the day of ovulation and we are ready to get the ball rolling.
Hopefully, if all goes well, we will be DTC (pregnant) sometime in May…. Come one May….
Thank you for your attention, we know return you to your normally scheduled programming.