Getting Ready

We will be switching over to a private blog while we travel, so please email us this next week if you'd like to receive an invitation. We'd love for you to join us for our upcoming journey as we finally travel to complete our adoption. In some ways its been a long time, in some ways we can't believe it is almost here!

We travel in a little over a week! So we are busy doing lots of things to get ready.
I think I did much better last adoption in journaling the steps of our adoption (feel free to look back at older posts for our first adoption details if you are looking into adoption :) but I guess we've been pretty busy.

Today we did our last fed ex--to the secretary of state to apostille a notarized Power of attorney for when I have to leave, and our revised I171H with extended expiration date. We had to overnight it to them and back to us to make sure we have it to take with us next Saturday.

I need to get organized as its starting to hit me that a week is not very long at all to get everything ready. We've been preoccupied with looking for a new home as we will be relocating to the East coast in the Fall so we've got a lot on our minds right now. We'd greatly appreciate your prayers for all that lies ahead for our family, and for God's direction, provision and direction.

I want to make sure that I spend quality time with the children and also prepare them for when we'll have to travel. If any of you have gone through this and have good ideas for that, let us know! Here are some things I hope to do:

-spend some fun summer days with the kids
-put together a bin of fun activites they can do while we are gone (any good ideas?)
-write letters for them to open and little surprizes too
-tape record our voices talking and singing to them, especially for bedtime
-find the adoption story book I wrote for them last year (which talks about what we'll be doing over there and is written with them being the main characters :)
-make little album of the kids for me to take & take a few videos of them so I can "see them" when I miss them too much
-find the album with our pictures for those staying behind
-get the house in order
-write out caregiver information
-make some freezer meals and freeze baby food
-get together activity boxes for the little ones
-make sure safety things are up around the house
-check out books at library and maybe borrow some videos
-make sure Skype is set up

Last time our 2 daughters really enjoyed opening a surprize and note each day from us, which the big girls helped me to do this year. We also had a family blog, separate from our general adoption blog, where we could blog special notes to the kids at home and pictures just for them. Another family took pictures of a stuffed animal at differennt places on their travels, so that is something we may do for them too. Our older girls are excited to blog back to us and hopefully will send pictures of the kids too.

I'm also trying to think of some activities that are easy to pack that we can do at the orphanage...so far I've thought of bubbles, a musical card, blow up beach ball, baby doll, little book, wipe off board, egg shaker...any ideas are welcome!

Well, I guess I better get busy!