Summer has arrived...

With the celebration of Memorial Day last weekend, summer has arrived for us. That is always the first weekend we head down to my parent's lake house and start enjoying the water and the sun. It was too cold to do much outdoor stuff over the holiday weekend, but Shawn and I took a really quick trip down on Saturday to get in some skiing. The conditions were perfect...warmer weather, smooth water, and we had almost the whole lake to ourselves all day. Usually we have to get out on the water by around 7:30 am to avoid the crowds, but we were even able to ski in the middle of the afternoon yesterday...a real treat!! Shawn is a much better skier than me and he likes to show off by using only one ski, but we both have a great time and my parents seem to enjoy watching us.

On the adoption front...we are plugging along on the paperwork for the dossier. We are hoping to have everything done that we can by the end of this week or early next week. We are still waiting on some things to come back to us from the FBI and US Immigration, but we have no control over that and just have to be patient. We have both been working very hard to gather everything up and it will be a big relief to be able to mail it off and stop thinking about all the little details!

Visiting with Friends

This was a weekend that I had been looking forward to for a long time. My college roommate, Cindy, was coming in from Missouri for a visit. Cindy's sister has been attending college here in town and graduated on Saturday with her Doctorate in Physical Therapy (way to go Becca!!) and I had the pleasure of hosting Cindy and another college friend, Kristin, at my house for the weekend. Shawn was out of town with our Sunday School class for a mission's weekend, and all of us girls took advantage of having the run of the house on Friday night. It was like college again...talking until the wee hours of the morning (okay, I didn't really do that in college since I went to bed at 10:00 every night:), giggling like school girls, and just thoroughly enjoying our time together. Cindy and I don't get to see each other very often, but when we do, we take every opportunity to catch up on everything that we have missed. This time I was also able to spend time with Cindy's parents, who I haven't seen since college graduation in 2002! And the even more exciting thing is that the next time I see Cindy, it will be at her wedding this September in Missouri. There is nothing like being able to share life with great friends who know you almost better than you know yourself!

Big Adoption News!! Dossier Requested!!

We received word today from our social worker that we had moved to the top of our adoption agency waiting list and that the main office is requesting we submit our dossier!! That means that in a few short months we will be on the official waiting list!! For those of you following along closely with our adoption journey, this event has happened 6 -12 months earlier than expected. Due to some other families switching to different countries, the list moved very quickly. We will spend the next few months preparing our dossier which includes things like physicals, marriage and birth certificates, photo pages, fingerprints, psych evaluations...I hope we pass:), and lots of visits with the notary. After we gather everything we need, it is sent to the main office for review, to Colombia for translation, and then to the orphanage where we wait for the call that we have a child. After submission, the wait is estimated at 8-12 months. All of a sudden, this is all seeming very real. Before we know it, Babies R Us will be our favorite store!

Washington, D.C. Trip

Shawn's mom has been visiting us for the last week and a half (from St. Louis) and one of our outings while she was here was a long weekend trip to Washington, D.C. Originally our plan was to see the cherry blossoms, but due to an early peak this year, the picture to the left was one of the only trees we found that still had blossoms on it! We were all a little disappointed to miss the peak, but we still had a great time. We did all of the tourist-y things...Smithsonian, National Archives, the Mall, taking the Metro, Arlington National Cemetery, walking until our feet about fell off! One of the highlights, though, was our trip to the Newseum. It is a museum all about news that opened the day before we arrived. There is an interactive news area where you can give news reports and try to solve crimes and get the story out in time, a whole section on how 9/11 changed news reporting, and a special exhibit of Pulitzer Prize winning photographs and the story about how they were taken. We didn't get to spend nearly enough time since we had so many other things we wanted to see, so Shawn and I are planning a return trip this summer just for this museum. We also did a "Monuments by Moonlight" tour that was really cool for 2 reasons... First, I think the monuments are the prettiest at night when they are all lit up. And second, this way you didn't have to walk to each one. You were dropped off at the front, given a set amount of time to look around, and then picked up and driven to the next monument! On our way home from D.C., we stopped off and did a tour of Mount Vernon (the home of George Washington). Everything was in bloom and it was a beautiful day to spend on the grounds overlooking the Potomac River. We had a really nice time and then a good lunch including peanut soup (their specialty) at the Mount Vernon Inn. We had a great time on this mini-trip and a really nice time the whole time Jan was here. I don't think there was a day when we didn't do something...or go to the mall to buy something! Jan is a great mother/mother-in-law and we were both very happy to spend the last several days with her.