3 Days Left at Home

Well, this blog is giving me trouble....it won't let me upload pictures.....ugh!  So it has been an amazing few days!  We are running around getting everything ready for our trip to Bulgaria to pick up sweet Maria.  While we have been going crazy some terrific friends on the Reece's Rainbow fb page has been advocating for us.  They have been amazing!  One woman even set up a last minute fundraiser for us called Dollars for Rita https://www.facebook.com/events/389625864513635/.  Then yesterday we got a matching grant for $500......it is truly unbelievable!  We are so amazingly grateful to everyone for all of the support of our adoption.  You all are Maria's village and you have been instrumental in getting her home!  We will be forever grateful!

Woooo hoooo Figured Out How To Change The Picture

Ok so it only took me a year and a half to figure out how to change the picture at the top....yes I know, I am soooo tech savvy!  So now Angelita is no longer blurred out...Woooo hoo!!!  Speaking of Angie...she is growing up so fast. She is now potty trained.  She literally tells every person she meets.  She walks up to people at the grocery store "hi, I'm Angie and I'm potty trained." I will say people as good sports.  Pretty much all have them tell her good job or way to go...it is pretty funny.  She started preschool at the end of January.  It was a little rough at the beginning but now she loves it. It is hard to believe she is already 3... Time flys!

So here are some pictures of all of the kids being their crazy selves ;-)

Daniel and Jack shaved their heads for St Baldricks day.  It is for pediatric cancer research.  

before picture

While they were cutting.

after!

Grace was in the chorus for the school play...the girls enjoyed the cupcakes at intermission

Mikey attempting to get a plastic bag out of our tree....sadly it was unsuccessful...bag is still there

Some St Patrick's day fun 

We Are Getting Close

So the suit cases are open in our room.  We have gotten several outfits for Maria.  We are going to be there 13 days with no washer or dryer...so lots of clothes for her.  With the amount of space left I am pretty sure I am wearing the same thing every day ;-) I am trying to anticipate every need and possible freak out (impossible, I know). I bought a metal cup because that is what she drinks out of at the orphanage. I doubt that she has ever seen a sippy cup lol. It is so hard with the language barrier.  We are trying to keep things as normal for her as we can.  We really, really hope that they are preparing her that we are coming.  But honestly we have no idea.  We don't know if she is being medicated to sleep which we have heard is common. We have also heard that the withdrawals can be awful.
So we are super excited , scared, happy...every emotion you can imagine!  We just want to get our girl  home and start our lives as a family!!
 We're coming to get you sweet girl!



I'm sorry we weren't able to get you out while you were 7...in this picture.  But we will be there to celebrate your 9th birthday with you on the 18th!!

OMG We Have Travel Dates!!

It is so excited to finally be at the end of this process and the beginning of our new journey as a family.  This has been a very long process for us.....and the pick up trip is no exception.  Sadly, last Fall the USA added a new requirement of TB testing.  The children are already vaccinated for TB in this country so we are hoping that it doesn't mess up the testing.  Because of this new requirement our trip will be longer then we thought when we started the adoption process.  We also are traveling over Easter so this is making our trip even longer.  I am really ready to be done with the adoption process.  I hate being away from my other kids, so this is going to be really hard. Missing Easter and Daniel's birthday is hard.  But we have amazing friends who are helping us with the kids and we are so grateful!!Another downside of it now being Spring is the ticket prices have all gone up... a lot.  But enough whining.....

We are so happy to be going to pick up our sweet Maria!  We are really hoping that they are preparing her for her upcoming journey.  I am sure this is so hard for her to wrap her brain around.  She has only known orphanage life, so this is a big change for her.  The kids can't wait to get her home.....we all are ready to find our new normal!  Even Angie walks around saying "You go pick up Ria?"  We can't wait to get her here and see her blend into our family.  We have the suitcases out and the packing has started.  We are leaving in less then a month......it is so hard to believe it is finally here!!

Thank you all for all of the support, it means more then you can imagine!  Adoption is hard and it can be lonely, but having supportive friends and family really helps!!

On the home front, Jack and Daniel are shaving their heads for pediatric cancer research.  It is called St Baldricks Day.  We haven't seen Jack with out pretty long hair since her was 7 or 8, so we are interested to see what his eyes look like now ;-)

I am not sure if this will work as a link but it should get you to their page if you copy and paste it.  We would love some donations towards cancer research.  The boys are doing this in honor of our old neighbor Austin.  He lost his battle to pediatric cancer a year ago this week.

http://www.stbaldricks.org/participants/mypage/697672/2014/fb_action_ids/10151959012941451/fb_action_types/og.likes/fb_source/other_multiline/action_object_map/%7B%2210151959012941451%22%3A1396530027281318%7D/action_type_map/%7B%2210151959012941451%22%3A%22og.likes%22%7D/action_ref_map/%5B%5D/


So once again thanks for everyone's support!  We are so grateful!

WE PASSED COURT!!!!

We passed court at 10:30 am in Bulgaria.  Our lawyer over there represented us!  She is now legally ours!!!  So now we wait for 7 days to get the court decree.  Once our lawyer receives that we will be given travel dates to go pick up our girl.  It is finally real!!  It is such an exciting day.  We were also so lucky to receive another matching grant from my amazing parents for $1000!!!!  We would love to be able to match it to pay for our flights.  Because we won't have more then a week or two notice to book the flights....they are very expensive.  Also the second trip is now longer because of newly required TB testing, so this adds more days of hotel stay.  But in the end it is all worth it to get our girl out of that orphanage!
So I am happy to introduce

##########. Maria Caroline Mayr  ##########


On another fun note....it is Grace's 14th birthday!  She got another sister for her birthday!  This is awesome because had we not had Grace, I'm not sure we would ever have looked into  special needs adoption! Thank you all for your support for this part of the journey!!!!

COURT DATE!!!

Sorry for the lack of posts.  Honestly, our adoption has hit so many slow downs that I was getting kind of depressed.  Finally, today I got the magic email.....we have a court date!! It is February 25th!!!!  This is Grace's 14 birthday, how perfect is that!!!  "Rita" becomes a Mayr officially on February 25th.  We are so excited......but now I am in panic mode LOL.  It means that we could be traveling to Eastern Europe in a few weeks......time to get organized for the trip!!!  I will write a longer post later, but I wanted to keep everyone posted!!!

Wonderful News!

Adoption is such a strange journey.  There are so many highs and lows.  Sometimes it feels like we will never get our girl home.......but we have to have faith and keep moving forward.  Today was an amazing day.  I was feeling kind of low....fighting off a cold that my generous son shared with me.  I was on Facebook when my amazing friend Jen messaged me and said that there was a family that wanted to give us a matching grant!!!  This was such an amazing pick me up to my spirits.  This awesome family doesn't even know us......isn't that unbelievable!!  We are so grateful to them, Jen and all of you who have helped us in our journey!


So we have passed our article 5 interview (ok honestly I have no idea what this is, but it is part of the process)  Our dossier was submitted to our sweet girls country for the next step.  Now it gets bounced around getting signatures from two different locations.  Once those are complete we will get a court date.  Our amazing lawyer Toni will represent us in court.  That is a really important day because after court she will legally be a Mayr.  We are hoping to get a court date soon.   This has been quite a marathon but we are nearing the finish.  Well, then we start a whole new journey of getting our girl here, helping her become comfortable with us, her new family.  We are excited to get to that point.  Once again, thank you so much for all of your love and support!!!

As 2013 Ends

It is hard to believe that 2013 is just about over.  It was so exciting to officially add Angie to our family in 2013.  Now I am excited for 2014 to finally get our sweet girl over the sea home.  We had a wonderful 2013.
On the adoption front......earlier in December we were notified that we passed our Article 5 interview.  I am not exactly sure what that means, but we were assured that it was good news .-)  Once that was completed our dossier was resubmitted to the government of the country of our daughters birth.  There is one judge out of six who is now requiring a new FBI background check in between trips one and two.  Since we don't want to be delayed once we get a court date, we went ahead and got new prints done. So this added more fees.  We sent those out to the FBI channeler last week.  However, because of the holidays they are taking a while to get back.  I am hoping that they come today.  Once we get those back we will send them to Washington DC to be authenticated.  When that step is completed we will send them over to join the rest of our dossier in country.

  So now the wait in for a court date.  That will be so exciting because it means she is legally a Mayr.  What an amazing day that will be.  Typically, you travel about a month after court.  So we are really hoping that court happens soon.  We hope to travel to pick her up by the end of February, but it may be the beginning of March.  Either way, it is hard to believe that after 18 months on this journey.......we are only 8-10 weeks away from the end!!

  We sent our sweet girl a box for Christmas.  We know it made it to her country and we really hope that it was given to her.  We sent her a book called "Guess How Much I Miss You."  This book we recorded reading it to her.  We also sent her a teddy bear that we recorded "I Love You" in her language.  We also through in some Christmas candy.  I just wanted her to know that we miss her and can't wait to get back to her.  I am sure she thinks we were some crazy people that went out to visit her for a week and then disappeared.  I am sure it is hard for her to imagine that we are still coming back for her.  6 months is such a long time for an 8 year old.  I am so glad that the wait is almost over! 

Everyone have a wonderful New Year!!!

I800 Approval!!!

Thank you all so much!  We have reached half of our matching grant!!  Hopefully we will have met it by Christmas!
The day before Thanksgiving we received a request for evidence for from USCIS (us immigration).  It was asking for a form that we were just sure was in the paperwork that we sent to them.  But since it was the day before Thanksgiving our officer was off.  So we scrambled and got a scanned copy of the form from our home study agency.  We emailed it to the officer and sent one snail mail to her.....we wanted to cover all of our bases.  Then we just tried to enjoy our Thanksgiving since we were pretty sure we wouldn't hear from anyone until the next week.  Well on Monday afternoon the officer called and said that she received our email and voice mail and that she would look at our file again.  The next afternoon she called again and said that sure enough she found the missing paper in our original paper work.  Go figure ;-)  We received our I800 approvals by the end of that week in the mail.
So now that approval joins up with our paper work that is already in  our daughter's country.  The next step in the process is an Article 5 interview.  We are hoping that happens in the next two weeks or so.....then we wait for a court date (ok I think there are more signatures and stuff between the two, but I am just hitting the highlights ;-)  A month or so after court we get travel dates.  So we are still hoping to travel in February but with all the delays it might not be until March...ugh.
So this matching grant will really help with paying for some of our three flights for the pick up trip (2 round trip and 1 one way)  Also, because of the added TB testing we will be in the country longer that we knew when we started the process.  So hotel/food etc will also be more then what we budgeted.  But we know it will all work out in the end.  Our girl is totally worth it!!  Thank you all for your love and support!!

Thankful!

Well, it is Thanksgiving week......we have so much to be thankful for!  We have another MATCHING GRANT!!!!!  We are so grateful for this. Giving to our FSP is tax deductible.....this is a great time of year to get your contributions in before the end of the year.  We are waiting on one paper to come back from USCIS.  Once we get that it will be sent to Eastern Europe to join the rest of our papers.  It will then be time to wait for a court date. So this matching grant is perfect timing.  Once we pass court we will be invited to travel.  Flights will most likely cost around 4000 for the three of us.  Some things have changed while we have been in this adoption process.  The USA has added a tb testing requirement.  This is most likely going to extend our time in country on our pick up trip.  So this will up what we thought we would need to cover hotel/food while there. This will probably be another 1800.  It is all worth it.  We can't wait to get her home!  This week we have been packing up a box to send to our sweet girl. I am sure it is so confusing to her.  We were there with her for a week and then we disappear for 6 months.  We are sending over a new photo album (we already left one with her), a teddy bear that we can record 'we love you' in her language, and a book that we can record so she can hear our voices.  The kids are drawing her pictures to put in the box.  This has been an amazing experience for our children!  So once again thank you much for all of your support and good thoughts during this incredible time in our lives.

 

My Heart is Breaking for Angela's family

The Noonan syndrome family and the Arthrogryposis family lost an amazing person this past weekend.  Angela had her fourth child a few years ago and they thought that she had Arthrogryposis.  It turned out that she had Noonan syndrome.  So I was able to learn about Angela and her family from both groups.  Angela died unexpectedly this weekend.  My heart is breaking for her family.  She was the most amazing mother and advocate for her daughter Aubrey.  Aubrey is medically complex and Angela was a rock star in dealing with doctors and therapists and keeping all of her facebook friends updated on how things were going.  It is just such a loss to everyone.  Please keep her amazing family in your thoughts and prayers.
Angela's passing really drove home to me how fragile life is.  You never know what is going to happen.  You just have to go for it and live life to the fullest.  I am so grateful for my amazing family and friends. 

THANK YOU!

Thank you sooooo much to whoever gave us some more donations.  We are so grateful.  International adoption is expensive......very expensive, but so worth it.  People go into debt to buy cars, go on vacations, buy furniture etc. We feel that our girl is totally worth it.  But we are amazingly grateful for the help we have received.  Our girl was aging out of her orphanage.  She didn't have time to wait while we saved more up to adopt her.  So we saved, had garage sales, and took out a loan.  It is all worth it!

That Was A Wild Ride

Well, we have had about 20 people visit our blog today.
 That is pretty normal for us.  However, last week after the article on yahoo shine came out about us, it spiked to over 4000 hits on the blog.  It was great having the article raise awareness about foster care and international adoption.  But I made the rookie mistake of reading the comments section....big mistake.  While most comments were very nice and positive, there were some down right creepy ones.  It really is sad what some people believe about foster care and international adoption.  One comment said that we were being paid 10,000 per month by the government to care for our children......anyone who does foster care knows that is soooo not true.  We actually don't have any foster kiddos any more now that Angie is ours.  So no money is coming in from anywhere.  Not to mention that where we live foster parents are given between 14-23$ per day for most kiddos.  So in other words you could work about 2 or 3 hours at a minimum wage job and make more then foster parents are given for a 24 hour day. So I don't think anyone is doing this for the money.  It was weird having strangers make comments about our family, but at least people were talking about adoption and fostering so that is the important thing!  We were grateful for the opportunity to talk about these topics!

On the international adoption front.....all our paper work is out of our hands now.  So now is just the waiting game.  it is really had to guess how long it will all take.  We are so hoping that everything goes quickly and we get back to our girl as fast as possible!

Thank You So Much

We are so grateful to you all for helping us meet our matching grant!  Fundraising is hard.  Having people donate money to our adoption journey is humbling. This whole journey has really pushed us out of our comfort zone......and it is a good thing.  We get a lot of questions about how much adoption costs.......and yes it costs a lot!  Our adoption is costing us about 28,000.  Yes, that is a ton of money, but we figure that people spend that much on a car.  We think  that our girl is worth more then a car. :-)  People have asked us where does the money go: well some goes to the local agency that did our home study, some goes to the placing agency in the USA, some goes to the country where are girl is currently living, some goes to pay the translator that stays with us during our two trips, some goes to the driver that takes us to and from the orphanage while we are there, some goes to pay for the visa for our daughter, some goes to the medical appointment for her before she can leave her country, some goes to our governments immigration department, and quite a bit goes to travel costs ie:flights, hotel and food while we are in country-twice.  So yes, adoption is expensive...but so worth it! We are so grateful for all of the donations we have received.  We can accept donations to our FSP account on the right of this page until we finish our second trip to pick her up. We have sent in our I 800 to immigration.  This was the next step in the process.  We have a few papers that we need to get notarized and appostilled this week and sent to Eastern Europe.  Then we wait and wait and wait for stuff to happen over there.  Eventually, we will get a court date and then once that is completed we will be invited to go pick up our girl.  It is a very long process....usually about 5-6 months between trips.  We can't wait to get her home!

Now on the home front

We are so amazingly happy to announce the adoption of our daughter Angelita Jane Mayr!  (formerly known as Baby A ;-)  It is so exciting to know that she is ours forever!  We had a wonderful day in court on Oct 9th.  All the kids sat in the jury box in court.  The judge had them all raise their right hands and swear to tell the truth. Paul and I just tried to not cry our eyes out.  It was an amazing day. She has been with us since March of 2012 but now it is forever! 

Woot Woot We have a matching grant!!

I'm so excited to announce that we have a $200 matching grant!!!!!  So,the way this works......for every dollar we raise....they will match a dollar up to 200$....... So we will get $400 !  That will cover 3 days of our hotel in Eastern Europe on our pick up trip!!!!!   We are so grateful! ( thanks to my amazing family!)
We have the donation button on the right of this blog, or checks can be sent to Reeces Rainbow for the Mayr family fsp.
I'll leave you with a picture of our sweet girl when she was 6 1/2
               
Thank you, thank you thank you!!!!

One More Picture

This was the last day of visits....she really started to love having her picture taken......she would ask us to take her picture in all different locations :-)

Woo Hoo I got the ok to post pictures...

Some pictures.....of the beautiful capital

Our First Trip

Hi All,
Sorry for the delay in writing a post about our first trip.  We left on our first trip on August 31st.   We flew from Denver to Toronto to Munich to were our girl is in Eastern Europe.  Once we arrived and filled out paper work for our one missing suitcase....we drove four hours to her orphanage.  It was a long day of travel, but it all went well.

We got to the hotel in time to go to sleep in order to get up early to meet our girl!  When we got to the orphanage we were led into an office that they use as a doctors office.  As we were sitting there Paul asked me if I was as calm as I appeared....I said that I am about to throw up I'm so nervous ;-)
A few minutes later she walked in with one of her caregivers. Yes, you read that right....she walked in!  We were so excited to find out that she can walk.  The video we have of her from two years ago, she could only walk a few steps before falling.  So we were really happy to see how well she is walking.  She was appropriately shy for the first few minutes that she was in the room.  We had brought some glow in the dark bracelets and necklaces....she thought that they were pretty cool.  After a few minutes we brought out our newly purchased Ipad.  Well she loved that!  Even a kiddo who has lived her whole life in an orphanage figured out the Ipad faster then I did ;-)

She was able to move things around on the Ipad using her fingers.  She doesn't have much movement in her arms, but she can move her fingers and hands somewhat.  So she found it easiest to use the Ipad when it was flat on the coffee table and she was standing up.

Another surprise was how much she is talking.....like non stop.  She will fit in fine at our house LOL.  She was asking all sorts of questions in her native language.  She got used to asking me a question and then looking at the translator for a response.

We were able to see her every morning for 2 hours and every afternoon for two hours.  We were quite lucky that we were able to take pictures of her.  I am going to check if I can post them on our blog....there are a lot of rules about that sort of thing.  We were also lucky in that we were able to take her outside to their playground.  We saw were she sleeps and eats in the orphanage.  It was a clean although quite old building.  They really seem to care about her.  They seem very happy that we are adopting her.

It took them a few days to finally tell her that we were adopting her.  Her teacher (who was awesome) finally took out our photo album that we had brought for her.  He went through each picture with her.  At the end he asked her if she wanted to come live with us.  She said YES!  We were all sad at the last visit but he told her that we were coming back for her, so she was ok....I was a mess, but I held it together until we left.  Sadly, she doesn't understand that there are 4-6 months between our first trip and when we can go get her.  That just seems like forever!  We are going to send her another photo book and a communication book that they said they would work on with her.  Everyone was very nice and we are very grateful.

Since there was a holiday the last day and we weren't allowed to see her, we came back to the capital on Thursday night.  We had all day on Friday in the capital.  We were soooo happy to meet and hang out with Erin and Cliff.  They are adopting two angels from a different orphanage.  They were amazing and we were so happy to have had the opportunity to meet and hang out with them!

All in all our trip was amazing!  We are so grateful to our friends at home for helping with our kiddos.  We were able to skype with them, which really helped with the separation.  It is hard to believe that our first trip is behind us....it almost feels like a dream!  Once we got home we updated our homestudy.  Since we are adopting Baby A on Oct 9th (WOOT WOOT)  we needed to update it and send that to the state for approval.  So we are waiting to get that back and then all of our paperwork is sent to USCIS.  We are really hoping that the time in between our trips goes quickly.....we want our girl home with all of us!!

4 Hours Until We Leave!!!

So I feel like we are as ready as we will ever be!

The schedules for each day are made and posted on the fridge :-)

The fridge is stocked and there is pizza money on the counter for the bigs.  All the littles are packed and their stuff is dropped off to the various places that they are staying.
I haven't slept more then four hours per night in a few days.......this will be great because I can sleep on the insanely long flight and then not have jet lag....right ?! ....this is my theory and I am sticking to it!

I will try to blog while we are in country.  But wifi can be spotty and I need to find out if we can post pictures of our girls (some places are ok with it, some aren't)  So I will do the best I can.  I am very excited to meet "Rita" and begin this amazing journey!  I am also more then a little sad leaving the kiddos at home.  I am glad that it is only a week because I know that it will be hard (way harder on me then on them I am sure ;-)

Once again thank you all for your support during this amazing adventure!!!