Bad Blogger - No Biscuit!

I apologize to all my faithful followers - I've been a terrible blogger lately!! I know how disappointing it is when you find a smart, witty, funny, interesting blog but the blogger doesn't post for days and days. Each day you check it in the hopes of finding a new wonderful and interesting post to brighten your day, but see nothing except a old post about Christmas, Hanukkah, or National Arbor Day. Disapointment, sadness, frustration....I feel your pain! But I'm back and I promise I will try to do better to keep you all updated!

I do have a good excuse for not blogging lately, we got our travel dates last week and I've been in a whirlwind of booking flights, packing, and trying to tie up loose ends at work before we leave. We'll be leaving on 2/17 and "Livvie Day" will be 2/21. I'm excited we're finally getting to the end of this process, but also incredibly nervous too. The "what the heck have we gotten ourselves into" is creeping in.

For those of you who know (and love me), you know that I could be the love child of Martha Stewart and Ikea. Organizing is my passion...I LOVE it. Eveything in my life is organized to the 100th degree. But even Martha would struggle with trying to pack for 4 people, 16 days, with a luggage weight limit of 44 lbs each. I am using every packing trick in the book and I am still overweight (luggage people...well okay, luggage and me. Note to self, stop eating ho-ho's while packing). Bottom line, I have too much stuff and not enough space. It's like a giant jigsaw puzzle! I sit on the floor in Livvie's room every night and stare at the chaos around me. I move stuff around, fold it smaller, pack it tighter and still not enough space. So I get frustrated, give up and go eat more ho-ho's. My friend Annie has told me to give up, wear sweatpants, and call it good (I'm starting to wonder if she's talking about the packing or my diet issues????).

On to a happier subject....we requested one last update on Livvie from the adoption agency. Since Chinese New Year is this week, everything is closed, so we may not get one before we leave. But we figured it couldn't hurt to ask. They were going to submit our request on Friday and with any luck, we'll get some new pictures and measurments before we go. If we get new pics, I'll make sure to post them.

Our Princess

We got the best surprise last week...a fellow "mom-in-waiting" emailed me and said she may have pictures of Livvie and asked if I'd be interested in seeing them. Ummm..YES PLEASE! She emailed me pictures of her daughters birthday party at the orphanage and there was our little Livvie, wearing a princess crown and eating birthday cake. These pictures are the best Christmas present we could have asked for!

Family Pictures with a 3 year old (and a dog)

Those of you with toddlers will see the title of this posting and probably groan out loud. You know what I am going to say and will take a secret amount of comfort knowing that I have gone through the same horror you have. Let me start out by saying that I was looking forward to having our family pictures taken all week. I shopped and bought coordinated outfits (taking great care to try to create a cohesive theme without being too "matchy-matchy"), made sure Lucky stayed free of lumps, bumps, and bruises all week (not an easy feat with a fearless three year old who seems to have some sort of super magnet in his head that attracts wooden tables, concrete stairs, and the undersides of most counter tops), and carefully planned our schedule out to make sure Lucky would get a good nap before the pictures, thus ensuring a happy, cooperative, perfect little boy for the pictures (I can already hear you snickering).

I could see the perfect pictures in my head -- happy, smiling, all-american family...the kind the photography studios put on their websites and flyers to entice customers. Well, I'm quite certain we won't end up on any flyers or websites, unless our pictures happen to make it over to AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com (which by the way is an awesome site).

The photos went something like this..."Lucky stop jumping around", "Lucky, stop rolling on the floor", "Lucky, stop touching that!", "I'm serious stop touching that!", "Lucky, smile"..."please buddy, smile",... "just one smile?", "Fine, don't smile, but at least look at the camera!" "Fine, you're done - me and Dad are having pictures all by ourselves then!" (insert toddler meltdown here).

And that my friends is family pictures with a three year old. Oh, and if you remember the title of my post also included (and a dog). Well, in all the chaos, we pretty much forgot Penny even came along with us and she didn't end up in any of the pictures.....She's going to be quite upset with us when she sees the proofs.

LOA = WOO-HOO

Hooray, Hooray, Hooray - our LOA came today!!! This means we can start the next step in the travel process. Traveling in February is looking pretty realistic!