Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone! Unfortunately I have been fighting a miserable cold for the past week and this was my first day out of the house for awhile. I am so sorry to have to miss my Uncle Randy's 50th birthday party as well as celebrating Easter with the Lura side of the family! We miss you all!

My first trip out of the house was to church this morning with Karlos. In the sermon today our pastor, Pastor Renee, was telling a story about her husband Ben (those of you who don't know, her husband died in the Haiti earthquake) and a mission trip he took to Ethiopia when he was 15. According to some of my Ethiopia reading Easter in some areas is a bigger holiday than even Christmas, and Pastor Renee told the story of how Ben and his dad where staying in a small village in Ethiopia and in the middle of the night while it was still pitch black they woke up to singing. They put on their clothes, rubbed the sleep from their eyes and took to the street with the people following the singing. The people of the village sang while they climbed a mountain and held Easter service on the top of the mountain. It was a great story and the great beginning to a wonderfully uplifting sermon. I feel Ethiopia everywhere I go these days. . .

We had our second homestudy visit on Tuesday and it went so well. Lindsey is just a wealth of information and although she technically is here to somewhat "judge" us, we feel so open to be able to discuss some of our more embarrassing parenting questions to her without worrying about her reporting us even before we have children! I had to laugh because I have been spring cleaning like a nutcase lately and it was very important for me to move all the cleaning chemicals up to higher cupboards. So when Lindsey didn't ask to look in the cabinets I was kinda sad! She quickly said, "well if you really want me to I can look in the cabinets." In other words we probably overdid it. We are also probably the only people in Bismarck who have child safety doorknobs on our utility room door with no kids living in the home. I also had my friend Laura's daughter Sydney color me a picture to hang on the fridge. See we are a child friendly home! We were well prepared and turns out it probably would have been ok without the over the top effort. Now we wait for Lindsey to finish all her paperwork and we have a bit ourselves to finish and then we can send the dossier once we get her report back from the government.

Special thanks to Kelli for becoming a notary for us! You are the best!

1st Homestudy Meeting Completed!

Karl and I were able to meet Lindsey, our homestudy social worker, for the first time on Thursday! We drove to Jamestown to meet with her. It was a bit scary because you really want this person to like you and think you will be good parents. Lindsey was very supportive and professional. Another small world story though! We were talking about where Karl grew up and he mentioned that his parents used to own the Wigwam resort in Baudette and Lindsey stated she had been there before! This made us excited and then she said, "The last time I was there a wedding party was taking pictures on the boat dock and the entire wedding party fell into the lake!" Before she had finished the sentence, Karl and I looked at each other in amazement and I shouted (literally, in a coffee shop, it was embarrassing!) "That was Jenny's wedding!" (for those of you who don't know Jenny is Karl's sister). What a tiny little world we live in! We all had a good laugh about that one.

Also exciting was last weekend we were out eating with my family and my good friend's sister (who adopted two children from Ethiopia 8 months ago and has been my mentor through the paperwork process) and her family came in to eat. Karl and I hadn't met their Ethiopian boys yet and was able to spend a bit of time talking with them. What an inspiration seeing how well they are doing and how bonded they are to their parents. Such cute boys!

So what's next you ask. . .  well still compiling paperwork and then off to get everything notarized and certified. We have to wait until the homestudy is completed and filed before we can turn in our dossier so our first priority right now is finishing up the homestudy documents and doing our adoptive parent training requirements. I have found that some organizations are kinda stinkers about helping us with paperwork!