Exciting times!

It's been forever since we've blogged....didn't make the priority list like I thought it would when it started. But, we've had an exciting few weeks:

-We had 3 of our 4 homestudy visits. The final visit is in a week or so when we get everything put together.
-We've completed our Dossier stuff and are waiting to get the homestudy to ship it all off.
-We got to greet our good friends at the airport when they returned with their adorable boy from Ethiopia. They looked REALLY tired, but also very excited.
-Chris got his passport in the mail and thinks the picture isn't as dorky as he thought.
-We've cherished times with our girls and have been thankful that God has blessed our family so much. Lord willing, there will soon be 3 girls in our home and God has given us a waiting period so we can get to know them and their personalities more and more every day.


Paisley starts preschool next week. Ugh. It kind of makes me nauseous that my first is old enough to go to preschool. She is really excited. She has a super cool Tinkerbell backpack for the first day. Majil is busy...had her second birthday. She has been talking quite a bit since she got her tubes in her ears earlier this year, but in the last few weeks has exploded with a . It cracks me up..."Daddy, Daddy....swimming pool....come!" Ok, so that's not an example of a sentence, but it's really cute to hear her say it.

So hopefully on the waitlist soon. We're excited to see what God has in store for us.

Oh...and, we're reading "There's No Me Without You"...it is a MUST READ for anyone adopting through Ethiopia. The statistics in the first two chapters are mind-boggling. If you haven't heard about it, click here.

Parenting...

Yesterday, the girls were busy at the table and Jana and I were deep in a discussion over something really important, but I can't remember what exactly it was. Usually, it's something super cool like, "if I were an 90's rap star, who would I be?"

It's kind of a loaded question, but we usually settle on me being Vanilla Ice (yep yep) and Jana being Biggie Smalls (because of his talent as a lyricist, not his appearance or message!). Anyway, we look over and see this:Why wouldn't a marker end up in a water bottle? So of course, we ask who did it:

She was pretty proud. It dawned on me that this is something a young couple without kids would never see. I thought about all the crazy things we do as parents that would be quite inappropriate if it weren't for the kids involved:

Smelling a child's rear end to see if they need a new diaper comes to mind...

But for the most part it's wonderful. (Even the disgusting stuff, right!?) So I took my camera on our walk to try to capture the great parts of parenthood:


Some day, our children will grow up, but still give us the same looks.

"For mommy."

I can't wait for #3 to arrive!

(Yes, there are more pictures of Majil because Jana was up ahead with Paisley...)