Ok, this is getting to be a looooong wait! Every day's trip to the mailbox is a heart-pounding experience, and also a little let down that The Letter hasn't arrived yet. The last two weeks have been swamped trying to get everything accomplished before our trip. The biggest endeavor is trying to finish making the beds for the kids. John and I, along with my brother as Chief Supervisor, are sawing, sanding, and staining two beautiful daybeds that can be stacked into bunks. As soon as we buy a digital camera, I'll post pics of our progress. We're almost done with the fine sanding, so hopefully we can stain them next week. Mom Fisher has been busily sewing up the quilts. (Dr. Seuss theme... lotsa bright colors.) Can't wait to get the room put together and looking "DONE."

We've also been trying to take care of last minute projects like finishing up our contact list to leave with family and take with us to UA, researching MedJet insurance, shampoing carpets, talking to pediatricians, arranging things with our bank to start getting all the cash pulled. We've also been printing off important advice from our adoption group. I've been saving emails for the past eight months+ and now have been printing off the ones that will be important for our trip. "When getting off the plane, get into the red line, not the green line," etc.

John and I have also been thinking up some back-up names to take with us in case the ones that we have chosen "don't fit" the kid. Plus, we only have one girl's name that we both like, so "just in case" we get two girls, we should have a short list of names that we at least don't hate. After opening up the Baby Name book to the "O" page, John discovered that the name "Oz" is a girls' name... He said we could name a girl "Oz Dorothy." Gonna be a little more difficult than I had thought... (Any suggestions?????)

It amazes me that we're still getting "angel pin" orders out of the blue. In the last month we've sold a bunch more, but our reserves are low. I never in a million years would have thought we would have sold a thousand pins in just one year.

What else? I guess I just *had* to write something for my sanity. It has been a hard wait, and there have been a few hairy moments the last few weeks. So much to do, and all of it really needing to be done NOW so that if our travel date is the first week of June, (yikes, that's coming up fast), that we'll be prepared. No doubt about it, these last two weeks have been the most difficult weeks of the entire adoption process so far.