Meet Stella Louise Skinner

Fritz and Melissa's little girl arrived on Tuesday afternoon. She was 6 lbs. 11 oz, 19.5 in. long and cute as a button! Sam and I visited last night and Sam got his first glimpse at baby poop! Notice the music on the playlist is 'Stella Blue' in honour of the cutie Stella Lou!

A few of my favorite things...

I love the fall, the river and my hubby.

Courts Re-opening in Ethiopia

On August 28, 2009, the courts in Ethiopia closed for recess. They were initially scheduled to re-open on September 28, 2009. However, after a two-week delay, the courts are finally set to re-open on October 12, 2009.

Priming, Painting, Carpet & Baby Furniture Emails

Christina is in full gear. She is driving some home improvements and in full "nesting" mode. She is quite the handywoman when motivated. And she is the definition of motivated to create a space for our new addition. We (she) is priming our upstairs for our painting project tonight and on Saturday. We have our adoption meeting in Hudson, WI on Sat 9-12.

She is even sending me space age designed combination cribs/beds/dressers. It appears "transformers" are still popular kids toys; however this transformer is much more expensive than my Megatron.

Mom's 60th Party

Just a quick note to post some of the pics that Brent had sent me from Mom's 60th Birthday two weekends ago. 

Sam and I also worked on some additional paperwork this weekend for the adoption. We have a class this Saturday and once that is complete the agency should have everything they need to start writing our homestudy! Yeaaahhh!

I spent this time this weekend re-desinging our blog. I hope you like it!

1st Meeting!

Today was a pretty big day for us, we had our first meeting with our adoption counselor in our home. We, or I, was a little nervouse for the meeting. Sam didn't think it was a huge deal until about Monday night when he said to me, so is this like our homestudy meeting?  I said, 'yes, that would be it.'  Overall, Sam and I really think it went great.

This last weekend we really cracked the whip on getting our paperwork completed. We have a big portion done (or so we think).  In all seriousness I think we have a good chunk out of the way. Our next step is to write a 10 -12 page paper describing ourselves, our family, values, beliefs, etc. We hope to crank that out this weekend. Once that is done we really just wait for the agency to write and approve our homestudy. Our adoption counselor said they like to have that written with two weeks of having all the paperwork.

We also have an adoption class on Oct. 3rd that we need to attend before our homestudy can be completed. Once the homestudy is approved we start the international paperwork which entails an I-600 and Dossier that will be sent to our country of interest for approval. If you can tell by the looks of the blog, we are hoping to adopt from ethiopia!

We hope to have everything finalized, approved and on a waiting list by December!

~Christina

We selected an agency!

It has been a while since I last wrote, but things have been somewhat uneventful until now. Sam and I have selected our adoption agency! We have decided to go with Crossroads adoption which is a local agency in Edina. We have submitted our 24 page application, which we are told is only 1% of the total paperwork! We are currently deciding between Ethiopia adoption and Domestic. If we choose Ethiopia, we would have to go through a seperate placement agency. We expect the total process to take between 10 and 18 months. We had our first edcuational meeting this evening. Our next step is completing more paperwork and then getting an apt. set up with our adoption counselor! It feels good to have the ball rolling! Sam and I like to put this phase of adoption in pregnancy terms by saying 'we are starting to try to get pregnant.' In three months we hope to have our homestudy completed which will be 'we are pregnant'!

~Christina and Sam