WoW!! What a week!

This week has been filled to the rim! We started the week with sickness in the house. I went to bed Sunday (our 12th Anniversary.. more on that later!) congested and feeling groggy only to wake up Monday to more of the same. My work day was cut off short. We did however get to begin our online classes for AGCI. We plowed away two each night at the beginning of the week. We currently only have 1 left to go! Yippee!!

Notice the essentials of the night: caffeine (to keep this groggy momma awake), toilet paper (the "tissues" my hubby brought me), and ice cream (the only snack, we know of)

Wednesday night we spent over 4 hours working on rummage sale items to get them ready for this Saturday. We are having our second rummage sale fundraiser. I am so excited!!! Not only does it help us to raise money to bring our baby home, it also gives us the opportunity to talk to others about our adoption and why it is so important to us. We have had numerous people drop stuff off or call for us to pick up donations. We have once again been blessed to receive such generosity. I am not sure if everyone understands completely why we feel called to adopt but I think they realize we are passionate about it! HA!

Last night we had our final home study meeting! We completed all the hours of training required by Illinois!!! (Our state doesn't just accept the training we have to do through AGCI... so we have been trained and trained again!) We also passed our walk through!!! Each of our visits/trainings have been done in our home, this time though at the end of our session our caseworker walked through our house to check for state safety requirements and to check the layout. It went well! Our caseworker has been great! She has been so informative and has helped us to understand the whole process. Illinois requires adopting parents to have their home licensed to be a foster to adopt home. So we will soon been issued our license. We will not be put on the foster list at this time, since we are in the process of adopting. The license will be good for 4 yrs. (wink, wink)!

We now are placing our focus on the GIANT workbook that needs to be completed and sent back to our agency. It is 177 pages of reading and questions to answer. When it is finished, we will be done with the training portion of this whole process....wow that will be surreal!!! It has all been worth it. Even though I have done counseling and have worked with adolescents for many years I have still learned a lot. It has been an eye opening experience for both of us and I know this is only the begining of what we will learn!

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!! ~Andrea