This weekend rocked!

This past weekend, Mark and I had the privilege of going to Seattle to complete our training and orientation! We had a great weekend of being able to hit the town of Seattle Friday evening--which included going to Pike Place Market and Hard Rock Cafe. We LOVE Hard Rock Cafe and visit every one in every state we go that has it. So it was fun to accomplish adoption items as well as sneak in a date night in there :) We also got to stay in a great hotel at the base of the Space Needle. We left our blinds open so Saturday morning we woke up to the Space Needle-It was simply amazing!!

AND, to top it all off, we had a great time at our training and orientation. For the first time in this whole process, I didn't feel alone anymore!! We were in a room of people who understood where we are at emotionally and what it is like to be "paper pregnant". That's kind of a joke among adoptive families since we are "concieving" a baby out of paper (all of our home study paperwork and other documents that are needed) and then you stay "paper pregnant" until your baby arrives home with you...so sometimes I feel like I even have the hormones of a pregnant lady :) I met some great people and finally have some people to talk to through this process. Don't get me wrong--our family and friends have been very supportive in the adoption process, but it is different to have someone who KNOWS what it's like to be in our shoes.

We now are just waiting on getting our homestudy packet in the mail--I was hoping it'd be waiting for us when we got home from our weekend trip, but sadly it wasn't. So we will wait for that to come and then get hauling on it. I asked what the fastest time someone completed the packet is--and I was told two weekends...so my goal is to get it done in a month--because yes, I do want to get it done quickly, but I also want to take it seriously because this is for our child :) We get to turn in our fingerprints in on Tuesday as well...so now we just get to wait for the FBI to process that too--which takes about 8 weeks.

This past weekend, we found out that during the homestudy process and especially after the packet is turned in, we really need to get our nursery in order--which seems weird to me. I mean, I know it's because at any point after the homestudy is approved we could get "the call" telling us that our baby has been born and we were chosen, but it's hard to wrap my mind around it all. I was talking with a few of the other adoptive moms saying that it's to prepare for a baby that isn't growing inside of me, I may not know the gender (especially when we are making the nursery), or when they'll be born--so we'll be going gender neutral for the nursery and for a lot of the clothes. We plan on buying a crib, changing table, dresser, a few outfits, a couple of boxes of diapers, formula, bottles and pacifiers probably until our baby comes whenever that is.

We are excited to see what God has in store for us in the phase of life and we will continue to wait patiently to hold our little one for whenever God's plan comes to be.