Two years and counting

Wow where has the time gone. Juliyana celebrated her second Gotcha day on Sunday January 31, 2010. She has grown and changed so much its hard to remember the quiet little 5 year old we broght home in 2008. For those who did not know us before Juliyana they have no idea she is adopted unless we tell them. She is doing great in the first grade. This little being that the orphanage said was mentally retarted is already reading. She loves Hockey and has already scored five goals in her first season on the ice. She also figure skates but that takes a back seat in her mind to hockey. you'd never guess she has three older brothers.

How Time Flies

Here we are over a year later and our daughter is blossoming like you wouldn't believe. We are visiting Donna's Mom and Dad in Bluffton, SC. It's been a big winter and fall with several "road trips" to the east and west coasts to visit family and friends. We just finished Juliyana's parent-teacher conference last week and the verdict is awesome. We are switching her to an elementary school nearer the house because she does not need any more ESL help. In her teacher's opinion if we kept her where she is and continued her ESL services she would just fall behind because she would miss 45+ minutes of classroom instruction 3X/week. At this point in her language development ESL is harming her more than helping her! We are very proud of her and the way she and her brothers are getting along and growing every day.

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.