I found this super cute pattern for kids t-shirt pants on rookiemoms.com
I like it b/c you don't even have to sew in a hem! It is already there!

Activity #361: Make some easy kids pants
The whole project was about 40 minutes. The full tutorial is here.

1. Identify an appropriate t-shirt or sweatshirt.

2. Fold a pair of baby’s pants with crotch sticking out and trace. I have outlined what it should look like for you. With this placement of the cut, you will not need to hem the bottom.

3. Cut on your traced line.
4. Cut a second pant leg from the other side of the shirt. Look for the arrow on the left in this picture to see how I used my first pant leg as a guide.

5. You have two pant legs now, right?

6. Place right sides facing each other and pin. Sew along curves.
7. Reorient the pants and you’ll see that you just have a crotch to sew up and a waist to fold over and sew. Leave a space to thread the elastic through.
8. Insert elastic, sew waist closed, and you are done!

I-171H is here!

On saturday our I-171H came. I was jumping and screaming all the way back to the house. Our neighbors probably think I'm crazy. Well, they probably already know I'm crazy so it's not really a surprise. So tomorrow we will drop off our completely completed dossier, and soon we will be DTV!

Thanks to Jenn for this response to my previous post

"The difference you see in travel times is because each province is different. In many countries there is a centeral authority or set amount of time in between of things. In Vietnam all the provinces a a fair amount of control over adoptions in their orphanages. Some move much quicker than others.The difference you see in travel times is because each province is different. In many countries there is a centeral authority or set amount of time in between of things. In Vietnam all the provinces a a fair amount of control over adoptions in their orphanages. Some move much quicker than others. "

That makes a lot of sense. Does anyone have any experience wtih the Quang Nam province? Hopefully they are known country wide as the speedy province.

Otherwise an uneventful weekend. I sewed a new little dress, and also a little pair of pants. Unfortunately the pants bear a strong resemblance to MC Hammer pants (and to make it worse they are tie-dyed, which in my mind seemed cute but in real life is a little strange) sooooo.... maybe those will just be her Hammer Pajama pants. Or maybe Hammer pants will become cool again this year.

Adoption Meeting

I haven't posted in a while because i was waiting until after our meeting today in case there was exciting news. Unfortunately nothing too exciting. We turned in our dossier, except for the I-171H, which is supposed to come next week. I was hoping we would get more info on our possible referral. This is what we found out:

Our agency basically sponsers 1 orphanage in the Quang Nam provence. The referrals come from this orphange. There are 3 new infants, 2 boys and 1 girl. They anticipate the little girl will be our baby, but they aren't 100% sure, so they don't want to give us her info yet. I really really want to see her, but i know they are doing the right thing to wait until it is more final to give us her info.

So, next steps:
Next week our dossier will be complete and will be taken for certification (takes 1 week)
Then it goes to the Lt Governer in Hawaii (1-2 weeks)
Then it goes to D.C. (2 weeks) AFTER THIS STEP WE ARE DTV. Our coordinator said this will be no later than March 1.
Then to Lilian (our in country facilitor) for translation
Then to the Vietnamese govt and then round and round through many steps leading us to our Juneau.

It seems so long, but I am still trying o be optimistic. Our coordinator said the 1st family from our agency to apply to Vietnam was DTV in January, and they will be traveling in 1 to 1 1/2 months. So if we are DTV in March we should be travelling sometime in May??!! I don't really know. I know it is all just speculation, adn I am driving Cris crazy with my insane speculations. He gave me a little pep talk today about just focusing on the good things, and not worrying about the things out of our control.

I don't understand the difference in timelines for different agencies. Seems like some agencies have families through so fast, and some take months from the time of referral to travel (i read one blog that has been like 7 months!) I don't know why this is. I thought it should all take about the same time b/c everyone goes through the same steps.

Wish there was more exciting news here. Everything else is pretty good. I'm looking forward to a weekend completely off work! I will work on some of our different projects. Maybe some new dresses. I got the little crochet hat in the mail and it i soooooo cute!

Sewing Fun

I tend to be a litle bit obsessive about things. For instance, when we decided to get a dog I spent hours and hours on the internet researching breeds and looking at pictures. I thought about it all the time. Same thing with buying our house. I obsessed over looking at real estate sites. When we got married I spent hours on the internet, looking at decorations and flowers. It gets a little crazy. Now that we are pretty much paperwork ready, I can't think of anything but Juneau. I think about what she will look like, what her pesonality will be. I think about how fun it will be to discover what she loves in life, and what she is good at. I think about our trip, and visiting the orphanage, and the first time we see her. I decided I better use some of this obsessive energy to do something productive, so I'm starting some little projects.

I got a sewing machine for Christmas, and so I started some sewing projects. I made 2 cute little dresses. Cris picked out the surboard fabric, and I made that one first. Then I made the other one. I added the little embellishment on the front, but then after I was done I saw it was totally crooked! Well, maybe people will think it's supposed to look that way, cuz I'm not about to redo it!

Hopefully one day these dresses will fit her. I just don't know how big she is so I made them a little big so she could grow into them. I have a bunch more fabric that I can't wait to make some stuff out of!

We decided on a dragonfly nursery. I wanted to have some bright colors with lots of contrast, but i found this adorable crib set for a great deal, so light green it is! I can't wait to get it in the mail!

I also bought this cute little crochet hat (inspired by lucy www.vietnamlucy.blogspot.com)

January in Hawaii

So I am going to start working on the nursery. I am thinking either bumblebees or dragonflies, or maybe a garden theme with bumblebees, dragonflies, ladybugs, butterflies.....

i thought i would put up some Hawaii pictures, for all of you that live in the coldness, you can think about sunny Hawaii and maybe it will bring you a little warmth


these are my parents, brothers and sisters, and my niece and nephew when they came for our wedding in 2005



This is a picure of my sweetest little neice and nephew, Kaleb and Hope. they are so excited about Juneau. My sister said they were having a pretend church service (their daddy is a preacher), and Kaleb was pretending to be the preacher. He held one of hopey's dolls in the air and said "lord, we present this baby to you for adoption, please bless her and her family", so my sister said "kaleb, don't you mean dedication?", but he insisted that he did mean adoption. They are so cute.


Anyway, guess that's about all for now. Hopefully next time I post I'll have more adoption news (we have a meeting on Friday!)

My eyes

Nothing new on the adoption front. Thought I would post about something else exciting. Last month I had Lasik on my eyes. This is the absolute most amazing thing ever. The procedure itself was really fast (less than 5 minutes per eye), although it was really weird and freaky to have my eyeballs held open wih a metal speculum and watch them coming at me with weird instruments. Anyway, I made it through the surgery (with just a little bit of whimpering), and now I am the happiest person ever. I was really really blind. in fact one time i washed my hair with gel instead of shampoo for an entire week because I couldn't see the bottle. Pretty gross, huh? Now I am contact and glasses free! If anyone is considering havig this done I HIGHLY recommend it.

the days are dragging along

Seems like every day lasts so long now that we have so much to look forward to. The adoption world has been rather eventful over the last few days. I'll try to not ramble on too much about the drama, but basically I called the facilitor I had been working with to get the actual scoop on what is going on. Our dossier is finished and ready to go to vietnam, but as it turns out, the 2 referrals that the agency has been given have been matched to families, but their dossier's have not acutally been approved by the government. Well, that affects us because if their dossier's have something wrong with them (1 of the families hasn't even finished their dossier yet), our agency might not get more referrals. This is information I kind of uncovered on my own, and asked the coordinator about. When she agreed that yes, this was indeed true, I said that I thought maybe we had better switch agencies to one that already had referrals coming in, since our dossier is ready to go. She said ok. Well, like 5 minutes later the China coordinator called. She said the Vietnam coordinator is new, and she is very unfamiliar with international adoption (great), but from now on she (the china coordinator-with many years of experience) was going to handle our case, as long as we felt comfortable staying with the agency. She said they would basically do whatever it took to keep us to stay, but if we wanted to switch she would understand. She was very upfront with the situation. So she called the in country guy, Charlie, and basically told him the situation. He apparantly talked to the government (whatever that means), and arranged for the agency to be promised the referral of a baby girl for us. Soooooo, according to the new coordinator lady, they have the referral of a baby girl. They have her picture (she looks to be 6-8 months she said), but her medicals aren't ready yet since she just arrived at the orphange. She said the medical should be ready in about 2 weeks, and at that time, as long as there is nothing concerning on her medicals, we will get to see her picture.

I'm not sure how to feel. I want to be excited, but I am still so hesitant about it, because it is still in the preliminary stages. I haven't even told our families yet that our referral will be in the next 2 weeks, just in case something falls through. There is so much unknown. So scary. My biggest fear right now is that we will get the referral, and then have to wait months and months and months to travel while we wait for our dossier to be processed.

we went shopping today, but we don't want to buy anything yet, since we aren't sure how old she is, or how old she will be when we finally get there.

So that's about all the excitement. I have to work all day tomorrow, and I'm sure that the day will seem so long. I am in my 2nd year of OB/GYN residency at an Army hospital here in Hawaii. Usually Sundays in labor and delivery are a little slow, but we do 24 hour shifts on the weekends, so the day literally seems to last forever.

Hope everyone is well, and you guys that have your babies are ejoying loving on them. hopefully those of us who are still waiting will not ourselves insane!

Homestudy Done!

Some good and not so good news today.

In good news I got my first comments on my blog! Thanks Jenn and Susan for checking out our site! Can't wait until I have lots of internet-adoption-blog friends!

Other good news. We finished our home study today! It should be written up by Friday. One step closer

The bad news isn't really all that bad, but I sent in our CPS clearance form like 2 months ago, and the still didn't send it back to the agency. I guess it's a big problem with Hawaii CPS, and it's super annoying because I have done EVERYTHING in my power to get all of our paperwork done fast, and now there's nothing i can do to get them to hurry up!

So other things we are contemplating - this is kind of a big one, but we are sort of thinking about about looking into a different agency. I LOVE our agency. I love everyone i have come across, adn they are hard workers and wonderful people. I feel very comfortable with them. HOWEVER, there is another agency I have seen alot of vietnam families go through (VORF). this agency is in my home state, and even though i'm not there right now, i feel like it would be farily easy to switch over to them. The main reason i'm thinking of switching is because our agency just got licensed in October. We will be only like the 3rd or 4th family to adopt from Vietnam. I don't know how long referrals will take (and neither do they since they are really just getting started), and I don't know if we will be able to get as young of a baby as we would like. Those might be bad reasons to consider switching, i don't know what to do. I have just seen so many families get their babies from VORF soooo quickly, and many of them are under 6 months. i want to give our agency a chance, adn i really like them, but i also believe in the power of experience, and am a little nervous about only being the 4th family to go to Vietnam from the agency. Anyway, lots of rambling, mostly to get my thoughts straight. I might be in the trap of "the grass is alwasy greener", so i want to be really careful.

So that's pretty much it, guess. Here's a cute pick of my husband with our neices and nephew. The girls are 8 and our nephew is 4. They left on saturday to go back to the cold ohio winter, and we miss them already!!!

Wow wow wow

Yesterday I emailed my agency because I had a couple of questions. The main things was that it seems like some people get a referral before they submit their Dossier, but most people submit their dossier and then get a referral, so i wanted to know what to expect. Turns out since our agency was just recently licensed in Sept 2006 they had to do a trial run with a couple of referrals to be sure that things would go smoothly, so they were given 2 children to place before they sent out those dossiers. Both children were placed (congrats to the new families!!), so now they will be doing things the more traditional way. So I wanted to just know a ballpark figure of how long to expect to wait. We were planning to hopefully have Juneau home by the end of the year, but we had no idea. Turns out my program coordinator said once the Vietnamese embassy recieves our Dossier we should plan to be travelling to Vietnam in 2-3 months! Whoa. 2-3 months??? that is sooooo soon. I thought I was tired of waiting already, but now I'm scared. We don't have anything ready for her! I still am waiting to buy anything until we have a referral (which is really really hard), but it looks like our referral will be here SOON!! I also found out there is 1 other family ahead of us, so we are number 2 right now! I am so excited.

Really no other news from Hawaii. Cris' family is in town and it has been a blast. I had a few days off work, so we have been running aroud the island, hiking and kayaking and sightseeing. They leave tomorrow, and it will be really sad to see them go. We don't get to see our families nearly enough now that it costs over a thousand dollars for a visit home! Cris starts back at the university on monday, so it will be back to the usual for us. But now the usual is a little more exiciting knowing Juneau will be here sooner than I thought!

New Year, New Blog

We are in the process of finishing our paperwork for our Vietnam adoption. I haven't even started the official "waiting process", and I am already tired of waiting! We have our final homestudy meeting Jan 10th. I have already filed the I-600A, and already been fingerprinted, so all we need to do to get it processed is send in the homestudy. I am working on our dossier documents. Seems like there is always some document to request, or form to get notarized.

while I am waiting I have been enjoying reading everyone's adoption blogs. I have LOVED following your journey's to your little ones, and I am so excited to be in that stage. I am hoping that this blog will occupy some of my energy until Juneau finally gets here.

I guess some basic info to get the blog started might be good.


Cris and I got married in 2005. We have both been excited to start a family since we got married, but also wanted to be able to enjoy some time for just the 2 of us. We were going to wait even longer to start having kids...waiting for a good time, but it just seemed like the perfect time would never come. There was always something we were waiting for. Finally we decided we would just go for it, and deal with circumstances as they came up. We started talking about adoption a couple of years ago. I have always wanted to build a family through adoption, and hopefully biological children also one day. Cris had not really considered adoption, but it didn't take much convincing for him to be on board. So here we are.


We didn't really have a preference for where to adopt from. The agency we are working with here in Hawaii adopts from China, Kazakhstan, and now Vietnam since Sept 2006. Since I am not yet 30 we did not qualify for China, and the long stay in Kazakhstan made us hesitant apply to that program. Vietnam seemed like a perfect fit, and now that I have done more research into the country and the people and children I am so excited that this will be our Country! Since the program just recently re-opened I am sure there will be a few obstacles and a few wrinkles in the way it goes, but I am prepared (I think) for the unknown


Other things about us....we are both originally from Ohio. We moved to Hawaii in 2005 for my job, and we love it here. Thank goodness Cris loved me enough to leave his job and everything he had in Ohio to follow me to the middle of the Pacific Ocean! We have 2 spoiled dogs, our Siberian Husky, Sherpa, and our little poodle/chihuahua mix, Summit.

This is Summit with her new haircut. She got a red mohawk in prepratino for the Ohio State Championship bowl game next week

This picture is when summit was just a baby and she was meeting Sherpa for the first time. Now they are the best of friends!

So, I hope I will find some good friends to travel along this scary but exciting Journey with. I have already read about some wonderful families, and I am excited to get to know some of you.