Chinese New Year!

Today is the first day of Chinese New Year. The house is decorated, but we won't be doing any serious celebrating today. I'm sure I'll wear red today, but our family party is tomorrow night. My sister Kachina and her two kids plus my dad and step-mom will be coming over for a big dinner. I'm going to make tea eggs (first attempt!), fried rice (new recipe!), egg drop soup (slightly altered!) and blooming tea (first attempt!). Should be fun! I intend on taking a number of photos tomorrow with the intent of eventually using some of them in our adoption photo book. That is exciting for me :)

Waiting, and Passports!

We are now officially less than 6 months away from starting the adoption process! This is very exciting to me. For many years we thought we would be adopting from mainland China, and thought we would have to wait until I was 30 (i.e. 2011?) to even begin. So to now be so "close" to starting.....it makes everything seem so much more real. We are leaning heavily toward the Florida Home Studies and Adoption agency, because a) they don't have any problem with PAP getting pregnant during their wait, and b) their upfront costs are lower - so the fees are more spread out over the almost 3 year period. That is very helpful for us, since we will have to be saving/raising/borrowing the money along the way.
Another piece of cool news - we got our passports yesterday! It took less than 3 weeks to get them, which surprised me. We didn't have them expedited or anything. Passports are one of the few documents/items we can collect ahead of time - unfortunately most docs are time-sensitive and we'll need to wait until the last minute to collect them.
Anyways, that's all for now!