Things I've learned with this Adoption...

We submitted our paperwork to be Apostilled today and we'll pick it up on Tuesday! Very exciting.  Just a couple things I've learned.  You have to have a certified copy of your Marriage Certificate and Warranty Deed.  We got copies notarized and they won't Apostille those.  The date was wrong on our Marriage Certificate and the adoption agency said to just notarize our original, but they wouldn't accept that.  So we had to go get it changed and new ones printed out.  Also for those who live in Davis County, the County Assessors office doesn't have letterhead to go with the forms they print out (for property assessment) so I had to type up one similar to SLC for them to fill out. (If anyone needs a copy let me know and I'll send this one to you).  Good Luck to everyone out there doing the exact same thing.  I'm so relieved that I won't have to go get anything else fixed or notarized again (with correct wording... don't use original or copy of original, they will only accept True Copy), or at least I hope I don't!

Now the waiting game begins : ) or : ( I don't know if it will be better or worse.  I'm tired of running around getting documents, but it has kept me busy.

Jazz Game

Troy and I went to the Jazz game last night with my sister and her husband.  As you can see we had front row floor seats!  Justin and I had our cameras out for most of the game.  We could even read all of Darren's Tattoo's.  It was a great game and great fun to be a couple feet from all of the players!  They kept about a 10 point lead against the Mavaricks all night and won 97 to 88.  

Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve

Tingey Family Chirstmas Party

Last Saturday was the Tingey family Christmas Party.

Lots of yummy food to eat and lots of family to share it with.

The kids put on a talent show (all pics on moms page).  Morgan sang her songs from Annie.


Grant played "Leaving on a Jet Plane" and Ethan sang his Hanukkah song.



All the kids sang lots of Christmas songs and then we had the privilege of listening to Kathryn for a while (till the kids needed adult supervision).

Merry Christmas!

We've had a wonderful Christmas Day!  

For some unknown reason our two youngest children woke us up at 5:30 am.  We've always told them they can get us up after 7 am and they usually can wait later than 6 or 6:30.  But I guess it was too much this year.  So we sent them to eat breakfast and slowly got up around 6 to see what Santa brought us this year.

Christmas morning....

As usual we headed over to my parents home for the Christmas Day brunch.  My dad makes omelets every year for family and neighbors.  They are big and filling omelets, full of whatever you want!  So we spent our afternoon eating and visiting and then bringing cousins back to play with us.  Tricia and Justin came to pick up Grayce and the snow came with them and it hasn't stopped yet.  It truly is a white Christmas this year.  Grant will have his work cut out for him tomorrow, lots of shoveling!

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

A Letter

I'm so excited to share this.  Another child at the same orphanage as our children asked Anna (helps the children with writing letters to pen pals) to help him send a letter to the family he stayed with in October.  So I emailed Anna to see if she would help us get in touch with Marina, Ivan and Anya and this came in her email!

And I do have a small surprise for now :)
Ivan gave me a letter. Kids always give me a whole bunch of letters
when I'm there. And some time ago, when I sat down to translate, I saw
that he wrote to "family Keller, house number 96" :)
At that time I knew nothing about you, and this family wasn't in touch
with him thru my project for pen paling. So, I marked the letter "I
need to talk to Ivan and ask what is that family, because I don't have
their address in my database". :)
I went back thru the letters and I found it :)
So, here it is!

Hello Mother and Father!
It's your children writing to you from Ukraine.
We miss you so much, and we want already to be with you. We missed
Inton, Morgan and Gwen //(I have no idea if I'm spelling the names
right, sorry! Anya)//
We would like those 6-7 months to fly buy very fast! We would like you
to take us there forever! Mom and dad, maybe you could also invite my
best friend, Ivan? He is such a nice boy and I love him. I think you
will like him a lot, too. I don't know if it's ok to ask about this,
though.
How's Persi? We miss him.
How's everyone? We miss you so much. We hope this letter gets to you.
We will end it here!
with lots of love, Anya, Marina and Ivan!
good-bye!

Now I am sure that Keller family, house number 96 is you ;)

I was so excited and happy I just had to share!  Merry Christmas (to me)!

Morgan as Annie

Morgan's acting class (with the 3 other 3rd - 6th grade acting classes) had there mid year performance.  Morgan's class did a scene from Annie and Morgan got to be Annie!  Here is her little clip.  Darling.

Thank you for the music

15 YEARS!

I got an awful sore throat, turn cold, this week and have been a little slow to post.  But..

...Yesterday was our 15th Wedding Anniversary!  Tuesday I had picked up my vases that I had made in pottery and so Troy sent me a bunch of flowers for each vase for our anniversary (I didn't realize that at the time of the picture, thus the two empty vases).  SO SWEET.  I was so impressed that he noticed I had brought home 5 vases!  

Yes the thought has gone through my head that when we adopt Marina, who will be 15 in June, anyone who can do math will think we had to go to Vegas to get married.  Maybe we should get a vegas wedding picture just for fun : )

Christmas Surprise!

Sunday, Grandma and Grandpa came over with a basket of goodies for the kids to open and eat/play with.  What a fun Christmas surprise!  They said they came to see our tree and all the presents under the tree.  

We only put up one tree this year.  The small living room tree with all of the kids ornaments (the kids ornaments are usually on the big tree in the basement).

Grants choir concert

This song was as many Christmas songs as they could sing in three minutes... can you guess how many songs they sang?  For the correct guess Grant will sing you a solo and give you a big kiss under the mistletoe!  (I'll double check on that)

Approved

We found that you can email to find out if you have been approved by homeland security before you get your letter.  So.... we have been approved by Homeland Security to adopt internationally!  Yeah!  Then we got our paper work to fill out for the Ukraine Government and it looks like the home study paperwork, except everything has to be notarized.  So, here we go again...

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

We got snow today!  Not tons, but it did snow pretty much all day long.  When there is snow, who can refuse a good snowball fight?  Well, I did, but all the boys in the neighborhood spent about two hours out front throwing snow balls.  It was pretty much everyone against Grant.  Grant was a good sport about it and let the littler kids totally pelt him with snow every now and again.  


Morgan was actually out for about 3 1/2 hours playing in the snow.  I had to drag her in so she could go to piano lessons.  

We may just have a white Christmas after all.

Last Pottery Class

Today was my last pottery class for the fall semester.  Here are some of my finished projects.  The kids needed hot chocolate as soon as they saw the mugs and Ethan did a little water coloring, the bowls are the perfect water bowls for water colors I guess.  Then we used everything with dinner tonight.  I didn't know it would be so exciting for them to see what I've been doing for the past three months.  I now have a couple weeks to figure out what to do next semester.