Monday, April 25, 2011

Since my Last Post...

We had our homestudy interview
We attended our homestudy class
I cleaned like a crazy woman
We had the home visit portion of our homestudy
Ben and I (mostly I) built a cardboard city for Kindermusik
Matt successfully pulled off a surprise 30th birthday party for me
And last but not least, we spent Easter weekend with lots of family

Whew! It was a busy couple of weeks!

Hopefully within a month or so our homestudy report and our bio will be complete and we will officially be active with our agency. We are SO excited to bring another baby into our family! I think I'm still in a little bit of shock over how quickly everything went after we registered with our agency. I can so easily get into this mode of moving quickly and forget that we may very well have to wait a while before we are chosen by a birth family, but I know that God already knows the child He has for us, so I don't want to be impatient.

This week is Ben's last week of Kindermusik. It's been fun watching him interact with other kids in more of a class-like setting and listening to all the songs he's learned. I don't know that we will continue next year, but it was a good experience for him. The theme this year was cities and the end of the year project was building a city out of whatever materials you wanted. We used a lot of cardboard and Ben loved it. It was a little crazy trying to build it in the midst of adoption paperwork and home study preparation, but it got done and he was pretty proud of it.


And here's the part where I shamelessly brag about my amazing husband. He apparently started planning for my 30th birthday party months ago. He worked out every detail, snuck into my e-mail to get addresses for friends he'd never even met, enlisted help getting everything set up, figured out how to get me there without making me the least bit suspicious, and managed to keep it a surprise the whole time. I thought we were going to an combined egg hunt for several of the small groups in our church. I even at the last minute went and got Ben a cute little basket to collect his eggs in. When we walked into the church I thought it was awfully quiet for an egg hunt with lots of little kids involved. Then we walked up the stairs and I heard someone whisper "surprise." right before everyone shouted it. Needless to say I was a bit overwhelmed and felt so blessed to have so many people come to help me celebrate. I'm still a little bit in shock that I'm turning 30 tomorrow. I always thought I would feel grown up and capable of handling life by this age, but I don't. But when I look back over the last ten years of my 20's, I can see how amazing God is as He has pursued me and loved me and convicted me and humbled me and been patient with me and comforted me and blessed me and most of all shown me that He's not finished refining me and that His refining draws me closer to Himself. (sorry for the run-on) There have been some tough things to walk through in my twenties. Sometimes that makes me nervous about my thirties. But it shouldn't, because the tough things have been the things that have made me see that God is the only important One. So I hope that when I get to the end of this next decade, I can look back and see that God was more often my first priority that He was in my twenties.
 Walking into the party
I am one very blessed woman!!

This year was such a great Easter. Ben is asking so many questions and understanding and remembering and I had so many opportunities to talk with him about the reason we celebrate. He walks around the house now saying "Jesus is alive!" I love it!
We never did get a family picture on Easter morning, and Ben is a little washed out by the flash in this one, but he was decked out this year and so grown up looking.

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