Last night to celebrate our 14th week of our Dossier beingin Vietnam, we went out to dinner at our local Vietnamese restaurant. Of coarse the food was great. It is owned by a husband and wife, the husband is American and his wife is from Da Nang, they plan of retiring in a few years and move to Da Nang. They are very nice people.

This adoption has been a very long haul for us, we turned our application into an agency back in June 2005 when when Vietnam "reopened" and then we waited and waited.. Then in January of 2006 they finally started handing out licenses, in the 7 months we were waiting I kept researching agencies and found a second agency that I really like so I told my husband what ever agency (out of the 2) got their license first is the one we will go with. And of coarse they got their licenses on the same day, we ended up going with the 2nd agency, because I felt they did more work for us, they took care of all the State Seals and Authentications needed. So the day after they received their license our Application went out along with our Homestudy Application. And after a very long haul of gathering paperwork and waiting for our homestudy (she took a bit longer than what I wanted to complete....) and then waiting for I-171H (we all know that wait..). So our Dossier FINALLY left for Vietnam on June 29th (I was sooo glad to get that paperwork out of this Country). Some days I wish I would have started our paperwork earlier than January, but I was scared that something would happen and Vietnam would not open.

Oh well. I say I did the paperwork, because Rich and I had an agreement, that I would take care of the paperwork and he would be in charge of making sure we had all the money we needed. So our agreement worked out great as I took care of my part and so did he.

I now truly believe that God does provide the money you need, when we started this we thought for sure we would need to do a home equitly loan, so we talked to the bank and got everything set up so that when the time came we would have the money. However, things started working in our favor, last Christmas my husband got a LOT larger bonus than he had ever got, so into the bank it went. My husband drove a big truck, but it did not have a back seat and we were not comfortable with a baby in the front seat, so we bought a big Ford Explorer (needs lots of room for baby stuff). And we were then able to sell the truck (Rich paid in full for truck when he bought it) so more money into bank. We also had a Mustang (Rich has also paid in full when he bought that also) that we only drove in the summer time and decided that we did not need it (a baby seat could not fit in the backseat) so we sold that,even more money in the bank. So after our vehicle clean sweep and the bonus we had all the money we need for our adoption, without having to borrow a dime. I am so happy that we were able to come up with all the money. Now we have been saving because I am taking 3 months off work and I don't want that to interfere with my shopping and Latte's. We have also started saving to take Kitten to Disney World Fall of 2008. As you see we plan ahead...
FYI, if there is a Kohls department store by you, they have Carter's kids clothes 50% off and if you have a Kohls credit card you get an additional % off, very cute stuff.