Back to the Land of the Living

Long time no post, eh? I am still living and started to feel better this weekend. Sunday afternoon I got out and took Joshua to his baseball practice along with cleaning on the house some. It was the first time I'd been out of the house in two weeks except to go to the doctor. Feeling "all about myself" I went all out today and worked in the field inspecting houses from 8:30-5:30, headed to the ballpark to test out a lens on my camera and now think I've obviously WAY overdone myself, have lost what little voice I had, have a horrific headache and am flat out ready to sleep for about 24 hours. UGH!!!! Why does getting my strength back take so long???

Oh well, no time for whining. Maybe tomorrow I'll stay home, enter the work I did in the field today and try to rest a little more. I'm such a wimp!

In the meantime, more adoption updates. We are officially "half way" through our referral window that I predicted (March 10 - May 5). Earlier, I was thinking we'd get an early referral. Now, I'm thinking we might be a bit outside the window. However, a referral within four or five months in the international adoption world is unheard of so we are still very happy. Our preference is to be able to travel right after school is out. However, Joshua just got the a part in the children's play at church and their production is June 1, so timing is just everything at this point.

We anticipate getting our I171H within the next four weeks which might just coincide with our referral. We have heard from one of the grants that we applied for that they will be reviewing our application this month. We also anticipate hearing from another source sometime in the next two weeks as their application indicated 4-6 weeks and it's been four. We continue to pray that God will use these vehicles to help us fund the rest of the adoption.

We were disappointed, again, this weekend that the ball tournament was cancelled due to rain. This is the second one that was cancelled. I know God has it under control and this weekend, I surely did not need to be working in a concession stand, and I would have had terrible guilt if others had been there working and I wasn't. I will say, however, that "The Girls" had it all planned out and were going to go buy the food and be there for the entire weekend. I can't imagine what my life would be like without them. I'm glad I don't have to.

We hope to be able to plan out a yard sale for the weekend of April 25-26. It might be that we have to plan it a little later as there is so much going on and with my energy not being what it needs to be, I'm not sure I can get this all together.

Today I received an email from our social worker with our China agency that it is time to renew our I171H there as well so I've begun filling out more paperwork for that. I'm about "paperworked" out.

So... I got my camera back from Canon and took it out to the park on Sunday to see if it was "good to go". I really ran pictures through it to see. Out of the 281 I took, only 104 weren't totally blurry. UGH!!! So my mom suggested using another lens to see if it was the lens. Today, I took the other lens and there were only a few that were blurry -- definitely user error on those. I suppose NOW I have to send the lens back to Sigma to see if they can fix it. If they can't I'm going to be really upset, because my other lens, while great for just regular photos, just can't compare to my Sigma telephoto lens. I would have liked to have had it for our first game this Thursday night, but I'm guessing that's out of the question now.

Here are a few photos of Joshua from the past two practices. By the way, look for a whole lot LESS hair on Joshua tomorrow. We've let him grow it out -- at his request -- but we just can't stand how "moppy-headed" he looks anymore. Since we have baseball photos tomorrow night and church directory photos on Friday, it is TIME to have his little head sheared down some.