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!!!