A dream NOT coming true

When Lee and I decided to go to a different adoption agency, we were so excited. Things seemed to fall into place and this was actually going to happen for us. Well, I jumped the gun on being excited, and now we are back to being disappointed.

We had gotten a loan to pay for the adoption. I wasn't proud of that fact, but we had no other way of paying for it. It was a student loan, since Lee is in school. We were just going to use it to pay for the adoption instead of to live on. Everything was good to go, then we found out today that the loan we applied for can only be used to pay for education and no other purpose.

My heart sank when Lee told me. I'm to the point of giving up on ever becoming a Mother. Maybe my dream of being a Mom is just not meant to be. That's a hard pill to swallow.

Adoption Update

Going through the adoption process has definitely been a very hard process to go through. It's been an emotional roller coaster! Lee and I started this process almost a year ago with LDS Family Services. We have not had any luck on "finding" our baby. I put finding in parenthesis because LDS Family services strongly encourages us to get out and promote ourselves, and to do whatever we can to help spread the word that we are adopting. That's not a problem, we just think it will be a long time until we are found. We are among hundreds if not thousands of couples waiting to be picked by a birth mother. Our odds seem very slim, and who knows how long it will take. It's been very discouraging.

Without going into full detail, Lee and I have decided to discontinue our adoption with LDS Family Services. We have found an Adoption Coordinator called Everlasting Adoptions out of California. They are a small company operated by Adoptive parents who have personally been through this process themselves. They only work with 40 families at a time and they have a great success rate of placing within the first year! The references I contacted had placement rates between 2 and 8 months and all highly recommended them. They all said they will use them again. That definitely helped answer 0ur questions about using them.

Lee and I thought that it wouldn't hurt to apply, especially since the application was free. We got an e-mail about a week later telling us that we have been accepted into their program! We can now move forward and feel like we are making progress on getting a baby. We still need to have a home study done since we moved and we need to have our background checks updated. Once we have those turned in, we can move forward, and closer to getting a baby. We continue to pray that we can be blessed with a baby. We are so thankful to everyone, who are so supportive of us. We will keep you all posted as we make progress!

The bone wasn't good enough

When we got home tonight, this is what we found. This is the third time Syd has shredded a comforter. Luckily for us it was our old comforter instead of our new one like last time. The funny thing is, we even bought him a bone today. Why couldn't he chew on that instead? It's a good thing we love him.

Hogle Zoo

Over this past weekend, we went up to the Hogle Zoo. It was perfect weather and we had such a great time. It was fun to get out and enjoy the day with my family.

We had some fun trying on hats.

This Bear was so funny. After his nap he sat up. It cracked me up the way he was sitting. It reminded me of a stuffed animal. It was so cute!
This is the new baby giraffe. He's only 10 days old. He was really tired and finally his head just fell over. It was really funny to watch.

This is the baby snow leopard. I love his blue eyes!

If it's not one thing, It's another.

Since we have moved into Grandpa's house, we have had nothing but problems. It first started with the leaking toilets. Lee got new fill valves and they were an easy fix. Needless to say, my Grandpa's water bill for that month was HUGE!

A few weeks ago, I noticed some water dripping from an access panel in the bedroom. Lee opened it up to see that the pipes were leaking. Because the pipes are more than 50 years old, a bigger leak happened when Lee tried to fix it. It was basically a domino effect that ended up with Lee completely re-plumbing the house. In order to to that he had to tear out part of the ceiling to access the pipes. We are still waiting to repair the ceiling, and that will hopefully happen in a week or so.

On Saturday, I stepped in a wet spot on the floor. My first thought was that Kota has an accident, but then I noticed the wet spot was much larger than what Kota would leave. We discovered that my Grandpa's water heater had a leak. The mechanical room has no drain so it had leaked out into the family room. Adam was able to get us a new water heater on Sunday morning (Thanks Adam!) and Lee and my dad installed it. Everything seemed fine so we went on with our day. We left for awhile and had dinner at my parents house then headed up to my Grandma's to give her a blessing. When we got home the wet spot had spread! There was a loose pipe on the new water heater, and it had been leaking the whole time! Lee tightened it down and the leak stopped, so then all we had to do was damage control. We ended up having to pull the carpet back and cutting the pad out so we could take it outside to dry. It was so soaked that water was just pouring out of it. Our new neighbor has some blowers he let us borrow so we left them running through the night. Hopefully it will be dry soon so we can get the carpet tacked back down and the room put back together.

Look how much water was soaked in the pad!