Something different

Well today I was tagged by Kathy another Angel family who would like us to try something new. So today I will tell you about my past instead of my family.

20 years ago

Well twenty years ago I was in my sophomore year of college at the University of Rhode Island. I had just become a Resident Advisor for my dorm and pledged Alpha Chi Omega Sorority and I was happily studying Political Science with the intent to go to law school. It would be another seven months before I would meet Michael and he and his career as an officer in the Coast Guard would totally change what I had expected my life to be.

15 years ago

Michael and I have been married just a year and a half we had moved again that summer from Virginia to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. I am desperate to find a job and put my degree to work but what do you do with a degree in Political Science if you can't go to law school and you move every couple of years? Well, the Sault is no place for 0outsiders so a job is very hard to come by. Eventually I get hired on as a Black Jack dealer for the Kewadin Casino. I work from 8 in the evening to 4 in the morning so Michael and I are not seeing a lot of each other and the smoke is killing me. Eventually I give up on the crazy hours and smoke inhalation and get a job as a sales associate at J.C. Penney's. What a great way to use that degree I worked so hard to get. One year from now I will be six months pregnant and waiting with great expectation for the birth of our first child.

10 years ago

It is 1998 and we have a three and a half year old and we have moved three more times Sault Ste. Marie, MI to New York City to Garden City, New York to Juneau, Alaska. In that time I have been raising our son Jacob, working in the Insurance industry and going to Graduate School to earn my Masters in Elementary Education. As we leave for Juneau, we find out we are expecting again, which is wonderful since we had suffered a miscarriage at the start of the year.

5 years ago

We now live in Novato, California we have three wonderful boys, Jacob who is 8, Jesse who is 4, and Jeremiah is about to turn 3. I have just begun to realize that our family, as wonderful as it is, was incomplete. Unbeknown to me, the child that will one day complete our family is already 17 months old and living in an orphanage half way around the world.

3 years ago

We have just submitted our first set of paperwork to Ukraine. On the day it is done being translated to be turned in to the NAC, the government shuts down it's adoption program for some updating . We are told it will only be a couple of months. We do not have months. We are scheduled to transfer again and our paperwork will be invalid once we change states in the upcoming summer. We don't know where we will be going just that our time in California is over.

1 year ago

We have moved to Duluth, Minnesota, bought a house gotten our three boys settled into good schools and they are thriving. I have gotten a job as a director of a preschool and day care that I love. Ukraine has been open and accepting adoption requests since the beginning of the year. We are back in the same spot with our adoption as we were three years ago only this time it is our third set of paper work and we are hoping the third times the charm and that we will get an appointment soon. It will be just three weeks from now that we learn we have a date for an appointment with the SDA in Ukraine on December 13, 2007.

Yesterday

Well as every Thursday now Jeremiah has Cub Scouts that Jacob is the Den Chief for. Jesse has Tae kwan doe and we hope to find a half hour to eat dinner together. Juliyana has been going to Kindergarten for a few weeks now and seems to be doing great. She is a strong and independent little girl.

Today was a full day of getting four children off to school going to work as the Site Manager for a preschool and day care and being oh so happy that it is Friday. Well probably grab some pizza and a movie and have a family evening.

Tomorrow is Saturday and the boys have hockey practice and we need to start selling popcorn for Scouts.

Kindergarten Here we come

Well this was Juliyana's first week of Kindergarten and like most things with our wonderful daughter it was an adventure. Juliyana goes to a Music Magnet School that is about an twenty minutes from our house. She is ridding the bus since she is going for ESL and so the bus picked her up at 8am and Mom needing to know she made it safely went up to school and waited for the bus to arrive at 9 she still had not gotten off one of the buses. Mom was getting abit nervous.

So the principle decided to see what he could find out and found that she had been dropped off at another of the Magnet schools. I had no ieda they stopped at different ones so I had not made sure to tell the driver she didn't know where to get off and he didn't check out each kids so she got off at the first school not reallizing she was not at the right place. So an hour late Juliyana made it to her first day of Kindergarten. As you can see from the pictures she is totally thrilled with being a big kid. All the kids seem to be doing well with the first week of school and mom will be happy that we can now get into a routine again.

All the b0ys seem to be happy with their teachers. Jesse is in Third, Jeremiah is in Second and Jacob is in eighth this year. It will be very entertaining trying to juggle three different schools.