Goal failed!

HA!  So much for my goal of keeping up with this blog.  Whew!  I give kudos to you blogging mamas who find the time to do this.  Between homeschooling, church commitments, adoption paper work, and...well...LIFE, I just can't seem to find the time.  So, here is an update:

Adoption:  We are finally home study complete!  Woohoo!  Only took a year. :\  What's next?  Well, we are waiting just a bit to file our first official form, the I600a.  Basically we are waiting on some medical reports.  Our home study needs to be very specific regarding any medical issues with the children so we may have to update it.  Rather than send in all the paperwork and then have to send in more because it changed we are waiting a week or two for some results and then we can send in everything we need.  Once the I600a is sent we will get a notice in the mail for fingerprinting.  Hopefully that wont take long and we will get our approval quickly.  While waiting for the approval our agency will be working on our dossier.  I find this rather redundant since our home study has basically the same information as the dossier.  What is with governments and massive amounts of paperwork?!?  So, those are the next steps.  It is definitely getting closer and starting to feel real again.  My excitement has been renewed.  I.CANT.WAIT.TO.MEET.MY.BABIES!!!

I think we will be bringing this boy some manly flip flops! haha



You may notice the "bump" under her shirt.  She has an umbilical hernia.


Life:  We are pluggin' along as usual.  Kyle will be having sugery this month.  He had surgery in February to remove a tube that was placed in his ear over 5 years ago.  That tube left a hole in his ear drum that needed to be patched.  The doctors made a small incision behind his ear and took some fat to stuff in the hole.  Well, at his 4 week check up the fat did not "take" so there is still a whole.  So, little man goes back in on the 17th to redo the fat stuff.  Praying it works this time! 

Homeschool:  Since deciding to adopt I have been changing up our curriculum a lot.  I wanted to get my oldest two working independently so that I could devote my time to the younger and "newer" kiddos.  So, Jake and Lauren are now using Christian Light Education for Language Arts, Reading, and Bible.  I just recently ordered their History workbooks as well.  It has been hard on all of us switching to a workbook type approach but it needed to be done and it is definitely allowing me to focus more on the younger two right now. 
Kyle is still struggling to read.  We see a developmental pediatrician in a couple weeks.  I am hoping we can figure some things out and this will help me to know how to teach him.  Since I have to sit with him and "do school" we are using Heart of Dakota, Beyond Little Hearts for His Glory.  It is mainly literature based which works well for him right now.  I am hoping to get him reading soon so he can start doing some work independently as well. 
I really like the CLE curriculum.  It is very God focused and it fits the needs of our family.  We will most likely be using this for Hannah and Isaiah once they are home a while and I can assess where they are at developmentally.

Last but not least, I want to give a shout out to all my Korea adoptive mamas....CONGRATS ON EP'S AND TRAVEL CALLS!!!  I am so anxious to see facebook light up with pictures of mama's holding their precious baby's after a ridiculously long wait!  ADOPTION ROCKS!!!