Don't Judge Me!

Today I decided that I needed to know how many more days until Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 is released.

164! 164 is the number of days until Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 comes out.

Don't judge me, you knew you were wondering that too!

And then I have 143 days - the number of days until I begin reading these for the last time before a midnight movie premier

Hmm... maybe after I finish our parenting education (last thing to do before homestudy... it's interesting and a bit tedious all at the same time) I'll sneak in an extra reading of my favorite books!

Until Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia was my favorite series. I'm re-reading that right now. I'm on Voyage of the Dawn Treader right now and it's taking me back to late nights of reading in my bed under the covers with a flashlight. Yes, I was (and am!) quite the book nerd :) Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia.... what's your favorite book series?

Sweet (stinky) Relief

Gabe is super excited to share that he is now cast free and after a warm, soapy bath; he is stink free as well! While Gabe loved having righty back (and I loved that lunch didn't take over an hour), he knows that using lefty will still be a priority and has a pretty blue removable splint to show for it!

Tubby time was once again a delightful adventure for Gabe as he was able to splash to his hearts content!

Our Adoption Story

Kelly at Kelly's Korner blog hosts a Show Us Your Life blog every Friday where readers can link up and share a little about their life. I've never participated before but this week the SUYL topic is adoption, and since that is an area of passion for me, I figured I'd give it a try.

Like many couples our adoption journey started with infertility. But not the typical road of infertility; before we were married we had talked about having a few babies and then adopting a few more, God heard our plans and laughed a little I'm sure.

After getting married we knew we wanted to start a family right away. "For I know the plans I have for you," says the Lord. "They are plans for good and not for disaster, go give you a future and a hope." This verse became our personal mantra that I repeated daily and sometimes hourly when we wanted our family to grow from 2 to 3 and nothing was happening.

Not being able to conceive naturally and knowing that infertility doctors and treatments were not an avenue we felt led to pursue the door to adoption was opened wide.

We explored a few different avenues before finding our adoption attorney MCB. After birth mother meetings led to no where we decided to adopt internationally while keeping our file open with MCB. We pre-applied to All God's Children International and were in the process of applying to adopt from Ethiopia when MCB called with a potential birth mother.

Miss B and Mr. C were the birth parents and after being turned from an adoption agency because their unborn child had a few unfavorable inutero diagnosis's, they found our attorney, reviewed our file and wanted to meet with us.

Matt and I anxiously met with Miss B, Mr C and Miss B's mother. And loved them! The best part was they loved us too! An adoption plan was made and Gabriel was born a little over 3 weeks later.

The first time we saw Gabriel

Our 1st family photograph

At court getting Gabriel's adoption finalized!

Our adoption story is not done yet though. Like our blog name says, this is a journey and our journey has now taken us back to Ethiopia in pursuit of our next child. We are almost through all our paperwork and ready to start homestudy meetings, then we'll file our dossier paperwork and get on the waiting list. It seems like just a few more steps but it's truly not that simple. While we don't know if our next baby will be a boy or a girl and when they will join our family, just like with Gabe, we know that God is in control and will add to our family in His time, not ours.

Thanks for reading our story... and feel free to come on back because our adventure is just beginning!

Covered in Hope

I have a slight addiction; it's neither bad, harmful to my health or hurtful to others. On the contrary, it's good for the environment, good for our checkbook, good for Gabe and super cute! Yes, my friends, I'm talking about cloth diapers.

I always imagined I'd use cloth but I never imagined I'd be so passionate about it. On my other blog I did a few posts about cloth diapers. Read it here, here and here. And I'm working on update #4 where I talk about love of pocket diapers and Rockin' Green detergent! (And don't worry if you didn't know I had another blog; it's a compilation from myself and 3 other friends on trying to live more green. It's been dormant for a while but we're working on rectifying that fact!)

Anyways, the reasons I love cloth are numerous but the cuteness, re usability (not just daily for Gabe but for his brother or sister) and the savings in my checkbook are my top three.

And while I realize the numerous benefits of cloth diapering and have even converted some of my friends, I never gave a thought to the idea that our next baby would be already using cloth diapers before coming home. In came Kristi and Covered in Hope. Her son Wes' adoption agency put out an email requesting cloth diapers for the orphanages and transition homes. Kristi posted on her blog and started Covered in Hope.

For obvious reasons, Pampers, Huggies and 7th Generation disposable diapers aren't readily available in Ethiopia and children there use cloth diapers. But even cloth diapers wear out and recently, on her December trip to Ethiopia Kristi blogged about seeing little ones with bare bottoms, with bodily fluids running down their legs or onto their clothes. And like many things, that just broke my heart to think of these little ones going without diapers.

Then I looked at our current diaper stash and knew we could help out too.

By sending some of Gabe's cloth diapers (and not even ones we use; but ones that we never used that I bought off of ebay and are too feminine or ones that are too tight for his chunky legs) we can help cover the bottoms of little ones half a world away. And ensure that they'll stay a little bit healthy by not being covered in urine or fecal matter.

While we don't have any of the orphanages favorites (Indian or Chinese prefolds) we can still donate what we can and help make a difference. Want to help too? Click here to get more information.

And a little bit of Gabe-cuteness in one of his FuzzyBunz! Yes, many cloth diapers do have super cute names (fuzzybunz, bumgenius, thirstie's, Happy Heinies).