I would like to send a special thank you to my secret pal for my gifts, I really appreciate it. Frankly, I can hardly wait to wrap a freshly bathed Kitten in her new ducky towel!!!!

In other news, today is our 7.5 month mark we have been DTV!

We got about 6" of nice powdery snow today, it looked so pretty coming down.

I really have nothing going on so this pretty random today....

The husband turns 30 in a few weeks, I am thinking about throwing him a surprise party!!!

And in most important news my beloved CHICAGO BEARS are going to the super bowl, I have been waiting 21 years for this. Now if only my CUBS would get to the world series, okay I would be happy with making it to the playoffs.....

GO BEARS!!!!!!!

Here is my new BabyHawk carrier, I love it so far. And the this is the lovely Miss G- being my model. I had her in it and she fell asleep while I was doing some things around the house. Now, I hope it works that well for Kitten!!!

Here are the husband and I messing around until our dinner reservations. We went to an awesome new restaurant in town. It is kind of Asian food but, with a twist. Very good food and I was able to finally find a Vietnamese beer, that was good too.

I was also exited because I did not wear sweat pants!!!! I wore dress pants and did just fine with them.

On somewhat shocking note Griswold took down all of the Christmas decorations including the outside lights!!!!

I spoke with our agency yesterday, the director is going to Vietnam next week. I asked if he could go ahead and bring us a baby home.... Come on she won't take up much room!!!!

Monday will be the 200th day that we were DTV.... Not that we are counting!

Today is the first day since my surgery that I have started to feel like myself, so I will spend a few more days riding the couch to make sure I am okay, then I should be able to go places and do things. Thank goodness, I am starting to get cabin fever!!!!

With all my time off, I was finally able to decide on what BabyHawk Mai Tei carrier I wanted..... I went with the cherry red straps and the material I went with is a black background with red dragons. I wanted something different, fun and Asian inspired. So, once it comes in I will post pictures of it.

Hopefully next week I will be up for babysitting G-, I have not seen her for a few weeks so I miss her. Her mom said she is loving her walk behind cart and she walks all over the place with it. I'll have to try my BabyHawk out on her, she loves being in a carrier.

We are getting close to our Dossier being in Vietnam 7 months, so hopefully we are getting closer to a referral. One can hope!!!

These are some clothes that I already had for my Kitten, but now I know how to post pictures I have some catching up to do....

Yesterday G-'s mom dropped off 2 HUGE bags of clothes that G- has out grown and she wanted me to pick out whatever I wanted for Kitten.... A lot of the stuff still has the tags on it... There is a lot of smaller stuff which is great because most of the stuff we have is 12,18&24 months.

Here are some pictures of a few really cute things.

I love getting packages in the mail. I ordered these for Kitten last week. I am thinking the cat is going to make the trip to Vietnam with us. With the cat, there we several sized available but I chose this size because I thought it was perfect for little hands to grab.

And how cute is this hat, I love kids in hats.

And of coarse another picture of our Queen Bee on her throne... She is so funny, I have to sleep on the couch because I am a stomach sleeper and can't chance rolling over on it in my sleep...... So needless to say, the dog in not going to be happy when I can sleep in bed again. The husband lets her out to go potty at 6:30am then she goes back to bed until about 2:00pm and then comes out and goes to sleep on her own bed in the living room..... Ah the life of luxury.

So here is my trusty sidekick doing what she does best..... Sleep!!!

So now that I have had this latest (and hopefully last) surgery, people we know have called to ask if we can now "have our own children".... (we all know that line). Last night I heard the husband on the phone and then all the sudden he says "Well Kitten will be OUR child and we will love her as much as any other child that comes into our lives". When he hung up the phone he came over to me and said "why can't people get the fact that Kitten will be our child"?????

We started looking into adoption about 5 years ago and came to the conclusion that we wanted to enrich our life with adopting a child. Now as the years went by I started to develop some problems my Doctor offered to talk to us about available treatments to get pregnant. I said thanks for the offer, but we are adopting. He said not a problem, but if you ever change your mind let me know, or if you need a letter about infertility to adopt I would be happy to write it for you. (He has been my all time favorite Doctor ever).

Am I disappointed with the fact I have had a curve ball thrown at me but, only with the fact that I have had to have a few surgeries. But, I have never felt disappointed with the fact that biological children are not going to be part of our future (not to say if we got pregnant we would be disappointed). We both know there are so many millions of children that need homes. We know we can't make a huge difference in the world but, we can make a world of difference in the life of our child.

So, to those who wonder if we are "going to have a child of our own" the answer is YES and she is waiting for us somewhere in Vietnam.....

Is adoption an easy way to start a family, H@ll no! But, we would not have it any other way.

We are a bit curious in what 2007 has in store for us. Is there a baby in our future this year? I hope so, but we also can't help to be a little bit skeptical. Because we thought 2005 would be our year and then again in 2006. We are trying to stay positive, but we all know that can get hard after a while.

However, we did buy a DVD camcorder in preparation for our trip to Vietnam, whenever that is.

I really do not have to much to say, because I am still on semi-bed rest, but hopefully after my appointment on Thursday I will be aloud to do a bit more...

Oh, I do have this little tid bit to give everyone a giggle.. My MIL called me today to ask me about BIL J- (he is getting married in March in Vegas)anyways, she was asking me all sorts of questions about the wedding. I kept saying "I don't know, why don't you call them and ask". The questions were like: What should I wear, what colors are the wedding and what time is it??? I really had no idea what the answers were to these question. Its not my wedding, I am not in the wedding and when it's someone else's wedding I just do what the bride tells us to do.

Then she said that she would pay for our plane tickets, I asked why she was going to do that. It took her a minute to come up with the answer, and she said call it an early birthday present for Rich.. The reason she offered to pay for our tickets is because we found out that she was paying for Rich's unemployed brother and his girlfriend to go out and she is also paying for their hotel. Now we never said a word to her about this, but she knows how mad Rich gets about her babying his 35 year old brother. Then she said all 5 of us can share a room..... YA RIGHT.... I told Rich that, he about keeled over laughing.

Now, I can't complain about the fact that she has been generous with her money on the past, however, you never hear the end of it.

When Rich and I got married a few years ago, she said she would give us $10K for our wedding to spend how we wanted, well when it came time for the wedding she decided she would only pay for the bar bill. We were like okay, we can deal with that, because my parents were paying for the reception and with Rich's work we got lots of stuff for free (he's in the party business) So we had a "My Big Fat Polish Wedding" (There is a very big Polish population here) about 300 people and the bar bill came, it was about $3500.00 she had a fit about that, Rich pulled out his credit card and said "I'll pay it since you are apparently backing out on that too". She ended up paying it, but the next day when we were opening up gifts she kept complaining about the $3500.00 bar bill. My mom finally snapped and said "well I just paid $10K to feed everyone and you don't hear me b@tching and if I recall there were a lot more of your people there than ours". (my mom is great like that) So that shut her up.... At least I thought it did.

Well, I found out from the BIL that is getting married, they did not ask her for any money because she is still complaining about our bar bill and he did not want to hear about it for the rest of his life.

However, the other BIL that is unemployed has had at least 2 DUI's that I know she paid all his fines and legal fees and still supports him financially in every way possible, right down to gas and cigarette money.... Yes folks cigarette money.

So with all that she does for him, Rich has no trouble with her giving us money. He says that he has had a job since he was 10 and has bought all his own stuff so she can pay for stuff now.

Enough complaining about her, I know the stories are endless with her... I hope that is able to make a few of you feel better about your own families.... Know you know why we are thinking about moving away from them!!!!