Saturday, May 28, 2011

So my week keeps getting more and more fantastic. Aside from the flooding in the basement, of which we are still dealing with, Owen busted out in this weird rash from head to toe that caused him to itch like crazy. Apparently he got it from some type of virus and there is pretty much nothing you can do for it other than keep your kids on round the clock Benadryl and Claritin. After 3 1/2 days of constant itching/whining, it is finally gone.

Then to add insult to injury, our cat decided that she was going to pee and poop all over the babies' room. When we cleaned that up and shut the door, she decided to pee and poop all over the rest of the house. We have never had any problems with her in the three years that we have owned her. Unbelieveable.

The only real positive thing that I am grasping strongly to is our kids' embassy appointments are only a little over one week away. The one shining bright spot that I can cling to while I literally deal with the other crap in my life.

What a negative post, sorry about that, but I am hoping that things will only go up from here.

Monday, May 23, 2011

We have lived in our house for 8 years and have never had water issues in the basement. Que the last two days where we got 6 inches, and our entire basement is flooded.

Every item we own down there has been moved out into the garage. We have pretty much sucked up water and gotten things out before they ruined for the last 18 hours. Chris and his dad are going to install a sump pump, while his mom and I basically stand in a certain part of the basement and continually suck up the water that is coming up from the ground.

Trying to remain positive about the whole thing- I was starting to get very anxious about all the crap down there with the kidlets coming, and now we have been presented with a situation that will force us to deal with it. I definitely would have preferred something less major, but I guess we will role with it.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Our embassy docs. are on their way to Kinshasa. I have been more than slightly freaking out about them because our agency hasn't been real proactive in asking for the forms, and then I looked up FedEx and it takes 8 days to priority them there, plus we will hit memorial day, so I knew that if they didn't leave today, chances are they wouldn't make it there in time for our doc. review on June 2nd. Then we would need to ask for new dates which would probably take a minimum of one month, and I would seriously freak out at a delay like that.

But the good news is, there was a miscommunication between one of the women who went on vacation at our agency, and the docs. had been sent Tuesday.

Huge sigh of relief!

Now I will have to find some way to cover up the lines around my eyes from seriously stressing unnecessarily for the last 3 days.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

I forgot to mention the best part about Owen's ear infection. We were told by the doc that he had so much wax and nastiness in his ear that he couldn't actually see the eardrum, so to help with that he wanted us to drop 4 drops of hydrogen peroxide down his ear at night and hopefully it would help disolve the gunk and then his ear would be clear and they could see everything and he would hear better (but he didn't seem to be having any hearing problems anyways- only selective hearing problems like when I ask him to pick up his clothes at night and put his toys away.)

You know how hydrogen peroxide bubbles if you put it on a wound or scratch? Imagine that but volcano style in Owen's ear. It is strangely satisfying to see it bubble up, and then amazingly, it pulls ear wax/gunk up his ear and I can get it out. Everyone in the family thinks it is super cool, and we all crowd around him at night to watch.

Ah, the joys of having kids and appreciating the simple things in life!

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

So blogger was a stinker the last few days and I had all of these totally awesome things to write about (not really!) and now I can't remember any of them. Plus my last post about overnighting our paperwork to our agency to hopefully get to DRC in time got mostly deleted. But I was too tired to write it out again.

Instead I will write about how my son had his third eardrum burst in the same ear and we spent Sunday night in urgent care until 10:45 after just getting home from 4 hours out of town. Lots of fun. We were going to try and wait it out overnight so he could see his regular pediatrician, plus it costs way less to see a regular doctor instead of urgent care, but he fell apart pretty quickly and was in a ton of pain up until the moment it burst and this nastiness came out of his ear and all over my shirt where he was trying to fall asleep in the waiting room.

We called his doctor on Monday who said lets see if has another ear infection and then she would send us to an ENT. Meanwhile I am thinking that if he needs tubes or something along that line that this is the perfect year for that since we will most definitely hit our deductible with the kidlets coming home.

Aside from medical woes we also planted the rest of our garden and then tried to cover it all up last night because it was supposed to be very cold. Didn't happen, but some of my plants don't look all that healthy and I have a feeling a few of them are going to bite the dust. This won't be all that surprising since I am newbie at this and really have no clue what I am doing. But I sure do have a big enough garden- 17X37 feet. We figured it would be a good way to grow some organic veggies that we know where they came from, I am just praying that something grows, aside from turnips which we planted about a zillion of, and lets be honest, I have never in my life eaten a turnip and so have no idea what they taste like.

The baby room is coming along, we have both little toddler beds up, and man they look absolutely adorable, but like my hubby said, how are we going to keep the kids in them? they are most definitely not like cribs, and Chris thinks we are going to have a major challenge with the kidlets and keeping them in bed. On the other side though, we just don't have room for 2 cribs in the small bedroom they have to share. Plus I figure if they are crawling/walking out of their beds to be with us, we should probably scoop them up and continue the attachment process, although this leads me down the line of thinking what happens when they are attached and still trying to sneak out of their beds at 4? Guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Embassy paperwork done- finally!

Well I just overnighted our embassy paperwork to our agency at the tune of $28.

Monday, May 9, 2011

I have a huge case of can't-decide-what-to-do-to-the-nursery.

I have admitted before that I may have a slight decorating problem. I am starting to call it decorating ADD. As in I change my mind all the time, the way I figure it, life is too short to keep the same colors.

This has not gone well for the baby nursery.

Having gone into what seemed like a million JoAnn fabrics looking for the just the right fabric to make blankets for the kidlets I came up empty handed. So I hopped online to Target. I found 2 different adorable cotton shower curtains that I decided I would order, see which one I liked best and then make baby blankets out of. This is where my drama starts. I got the one pattern right away, and in place of the other one, I got someone else's 3 tshirts they ordered. In the mean time, I found the perfect fabric online and had ordered that. So, my target order had become obsolete. Now I had to return one shower curtain, and 3 tshirts that weren't mine, and figure out what happened to the shower curtain I never got. 3 weeks later, 7 phone calls to Target and 5 emails, I finally got the refund of the shower curtains I ordered and never received. Whew.

Of course, now I need to order the toddler beds, and I think I may skip Target this time. It pains me to say that because I LOVE Target, but I don't think I can handle that whole scenario again. I don't know that I would normally mind so much, but I had ordered 2 of the shower curtain that never came, and it was around $65 and there was no way that I wasn't getting my money back for that.

In the mean time, I walk in and out of the babies' room about a million times a day trying to organize my brain with all of the ideas running through it. Chris talked to his mom last night and apparently she asked about what it was looking like, I heard the words eclectic from around the corner. I swear in my mind it all makes sense, but poor Chris is much more of a see it and believe it type person, so in the meantime, it pretty much just looks like a disaster!

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Embassy Appt!

We got our embassy appt! The kids will go in on separate days the first week of June. We are so pumped, especially considering we got a date within a month, we truly were expecting something much further out than that.

Probably looking at traveling sometime in July depending on how long it takes for a visa to be issued. I'm hoping we can be back in time for our daughter's first bday which falls in July. It could happen in country too, but to be home would be awesome!

I have a feeling that my baby nesting instinct might start taking over any day now!

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Well, we should be requesting an embassy appt. today! Everything has been taken care of according to the national visa center. Hopefully the embassy will respond fast and give us a very soon appt. date. (Not counting on that at all- in fact I will not be surprised if it takes closer to 2 months for the appt. given the last few families that had to wait.)

Our home study agency contacted us and said that we need to rerun our background checks for our state- we don't need new prints, just to spend $140 to do a search. It never ends does it?

I am frantically trying to keep track of all these receipts for the adoption credit, but that hasn't been going well for families either. I have read several news articles on it, and talked to a couple of families who are being audited. Apparently the govt. isn't sure what they are going to allow as far as fees to count towards the credit refund for us. I have not been able to find one family that has gotten the full amount from the govt. that their accountant said they would. I am only hoping that by the time it comes for us to file the paperwork next tax season they will have it all sorted out and it will be relatively painless for us.