Things are moving right along but not quick enough for me. By now I thought we would be DTC, matched and waiting to travel. We are none of those things. We are optimistic that we will be matched soon though! Found in Feb. that we could be matched with certain waiting kiddos but haven't found our daughter...yet!

If you have ever adopted you know how this process goes. Two steps forward, one step back but eventually we will step into an airplane and be on our way to our daughter.

Speaking of daughters you must go to my friend Kim's blog. Her family met their newest daughter in China
just the other day. Kelly is 13 and has waited a long time for a family. They have the neatest Gotcha Day Story. I am sure there will never be another one like it!

One thing my kids (yes, even Lily) LOVE to do is fish. And since spring decided to visit here a little early my kids have been outside a lot. (yay!) Recently it has been all about fishing. Today we loaded up 8 kids, 75 crickets and a whole lotta fishin' poles and headed to our clubhouse to go fishin'. The kids had a blast and caught about 20 fish. And the prize winner belonged to none other than Lily, the only girl in the bunch. She caught the one and only bass and it was about 1.5 pounds.

I am asking for prayer, please!!!

We are having a difficult time getting USCIS approval. We just received notification that they will not approve us at this time without some pretty significant changes to our Homestudy. I don't understand this because it is pretty much the same one we used for Lily. But please pray for this to happen smoothly and to not be costly. Pray for our homestudy, our USCIS caseworker and our approval, thank you!

I am just very anxious over this and would feel better if I knew others were praying. I am just soooo
ready for this part to be over! There is a little girl in CHina waiting on her family!!!

Update: Homestudy corrections have already been made. Now we just need to get another copy and send it on to USCIS and another sheet has to be signed by John. Once that is done we should be fine. Our agency jumped on this quick as well as our Homestudy provider. Thank you for your prayers.

Today is the Birthday of someone special. This someone I love so much I spent 2 hours baking him this...

Lily Made a Valentine for our family. She wrote each of our names and then glued a conversation
heart next to each name. She carefully selected each heart with just the right meaning. Here are her
choices:

Wyatt- Love You
Mason-Too Cool
Mom- First Kiss
Dad-I (heart) you
Sellers-Too Hot
Noah-Hello

My Family- You Rock

This card made me smile, laugh and brought tears to my eyes. My personal favorite is the last one!

This just seems to be Lily's year. Her artwork was selected to be displayed at an exhibit in our community.
I was not sure what to expect when I took her to see it on the opening night. I was stunned at the beauty of this picture. I just love it and am so proud of her.

My kids are hilarious, just regular comedians. I wish I could remember all the funny things they have said because it would make a good book.

Like earlier Lily and I were doing her homework. She had to read a Scholastic News and guess what it was all about? China. While reading I always ask Lily if she understands something that I think she doesn't understand so it went like this...

Lily: Long ago, the Chinese built the Great Wall ...
Mom: Do you know what long ago means?
Lily: Shakes head No.
Mom: Well it means many, many years ago.
Lily: (pause) Oh I know, like when you were born, right Mama?

(Seriously????)

And Mason well he's been on a roll lately. He saw my bra in the bathtub (had fallen in after I lazily laid my clothes on the side of the tub instead of hanging back up, something I never do ;0)) He then looked at me and said mom aren't you going to get your boobies out of the tub? Of course I had no idea what he was talking about until I looked in the tub and saw it. After telling him I would later he said, "aren't you afraid your boobies are going to get wet?". 

That kids just makes me smile.

This morning I was still in bed when Mason came in and turned the bright lights on in my room.
He wanted to show me something.
I said, "Mason turn the lights off I can see".
He said, "is that because you have blue eyes?". (which by the way I don't)

Lily struggles with speech. I can usually understand her just fine but to others it is not so easy. She speaks very fast and doesn't finish her words. Hard consonant sounds at the end of a word are nearly always left off Lily has been receiving 30 min. of speech a week at school and has made great improvement but there is still a lot to accomplishment. Recently we had a conference with everyone at school involved in Lily's education. It was decided that Lily would be evaluated to see if she would qualify for additional speech.

I didn't realize that part of this evaluation was for her to receive a eye exam. Lily has never complained about her sight and she's even passed two wall chart exams with no problem but the schools exam showed a problem and we had to follow up with a doctor in order for her to be evaluated any further for speech.

After a thorough eye exam we found out that our daughter has a very significant eye deficit and needs to wear glasses all the time. She was not very happy about it at first and it took a while to find a pair of glasses she likes but I think she is starting to get used to them. She is asking to take them off less and less. I really like them on her, they suit her just fine. 

Here are some of my hairbows. They are great quality ribbon, all have been heat sealed to prevent fraying. Please pass this along to anyone you know who has little girls. 100% of profit will go to help fund our adoption. They are $7.50 if mailed and $6.00 if delivered in person.




Happy Birthday Hairbow



Heading to Disney soon? This bow would be perfect. It is our Minnie Mouse Bow.



Get Crabby Hairbow



Rock and Roll Hairbow




Watermelon Hairbow They have not been place on a hairclip yet. You can choose snap clip or alligator clip and Left or Right.





This is the Summer Fun Pony-O! It has great summer colors and flip flops.




All about Pink Pony-O!




Just in time for Valentine's Pony-O with hearts!

 Just claim it in comments and leave you email address for me to follow up or email me at theocaincrew@aoldotcom

I wish I could muster up some excitement about our latest snowfall. After a record breaking snowfall last year, snow the day after Christmas and snow this past Monday I am a little tired of snow.

In the south most people love snow, we just like it to all melt away the next day. This snow is still lingering and here we just don't have the ability to keep going. The kids have been out of school all week, finally stores (some) opened back up yesterday but my kids have some serious cabin fever. I've had my fill of tattle-telling, aggravating each other and whininess. And we are so fortunate (insert sarcasm) because hardly any snow has melted which could mean no school tomorrow and we are already scheduled out Friday and Monday for holidays. Yay for us! I think my birthday weekend at the beach with my wonderful sis-in-law and a good friend could not have come at a better time. We are gone all weekend! I cannot wait!
Here are a few pics, I am out of memory so they wouldn't all download...


Lily trying to make a snow angel but with a half an inch ice on top of 5 inches of snow it wouldn't work.




Daddy just before some southern sledding and snow/iceball fight.




Pool floats made for good sleds.



In 10 short days I will hit a milestone...the dreaded 40!!!

But honestly I am not dreading it, I am excited. I think my 40's are going to be the best yet.

Why? Because this decade and beyond I am going to live for my purpose. The purpose God has placed on my heart.

If you know me, you know what that is and if you don't know me you probably could take a good guess.

My mind has been going crazy since I finished RADICAL.

I cannot wait to do RADICAL things for God!

Come on 40, Bring it on......

Now that Christmas is over and we have started a New Year I feel like I finally have time to blog. December was incredibly busy but a good busy. We had a lot of fun with our family and friends and John and I even had the chance to get away for a long weekend the week before Christmas!

This year I am going to borrow the title of a book I read for the motto of my year, RADICAL.

I know many of you have read it and if you haven't and you desire to live your life differently and make a real difference for God's Kingdom then you should. I begin leading a Bible Study on the 10th on this book and I am so excited about it! God blessed me with a wonderful group of ladies that started meeting in my home last October. Being a busy mom I have trouble finding time to spend with other ladies and this Bible Study group has been an answered prayer for me. God place the perfect 5 ladies together and I am so excited about leading them in this study.

Anyway, I want this year for me to be RADICALLY different than how I have lived in the past. Some things are for me personally and others are all about helping others. The first thing I am going to tackle is unnecessary shopping. This is a big problem for me and something I have got to stop. I have tons of clothes I don't wear and things I never used because they seemed like a good idea at the time but I don't really need them. I want to use my money for more important matters like bringing home our daughter from China in 2011. So no more "I'm just killing time in TJMaxx" purchases anymore.

As for the adoption not a lot going on there. Just waiting on the US government to approve us and give us a fingerprint appointment. It should be soon because I got a letter from them yesterday saying we were being processed and would soon get an appointment. That is after of course they sent our I800a back twice. Once was my omission of some important info and then again because they raised the fee and requested 60 more dollars from us. I'm surprised I'm not overly discouraged because I had hoped to have a referral in January but that isn't going to happen! I know God is in control and I guess having gone through this before I know it all works out just fine. I just can't wait to see that little face and get excited about going to China to get her.

And another RADICAL thing I am doing is losing weight, Ok maybe it's not so radical but for me if I do, it will radically change my life. I know I said I was going to do this last year and lost some but gained it all back. I'm really making a commitment, I am tired of being ashamed of my weight and want to be more healthy! So I started back yesterday to working out, today I am trying something new so I better go before I lose motivation and find something to distract me.

Hope you had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!!

When you are adopting and waiting for a little letter to come from USCIS (US citizenship and Immigration)
you are beyond excited when you see an envelope in the mail from them, just like I was yesterday.
My thought was NO WAY, they could not have processed this that fast.

And guess what?

They didn't.

They returned it. BOO. Why? Because I left blank what country we were adopting from on our I800a.
How did I and my agency miss that?? Oh well I wrote CHINA in big ole letters and paid $20 to have that
thing overnighted back to them. Never mind CHINA and our name were written on the outside of the envelope. It also had included a piece of paper for me to have on top to have it expedited so at least they are thoughtful, right?

Well if they finish if as fast as they rejected it I sure better get busy with the last pieces of my Dossier, I had been dragging my feet because I was told it would take them 2 months to approve it. Maybe not!!