New site

I've started a new blog. I find this site very complicated to use and not at all user friendly so I switched over to Babysites. The address is: http:www.babysites.com/sites/ming

It's so much easier to use. I like it much better already. I'm not going to delete this site because I don't want to lose the posts and photos I have archived but no new posts will be added here. Please visit my new site and be sure to sign my guestbook.

Is there such a thing as too many crib bedding sets?

Ming now has 3 sets of crib bedding. Is this excessive? I didn't plan to end up with 3 sets. It just kinda happened. I found the first one around the time we sent in our application in August 2005. It has green and white checks and pink ladybugs. I thought it was the cutest set I had ever seen and I couldn't imagine that I'd ever find anything cuter so I ordered it. Then a few months later my mom found a cute set on Ebay and ordered it. That one has green and black checks with maroon ladybugs. It's also very cute and seemed like a perfect backup set. Finally, when we went to Babies R Us in March to pick out a crib I saw "The" set. It has different shades of green and pink and there are different textures to the fabrics. It's very soft and snuggly. This set also has ladybugs, of course. It has a matching wallpaper border which is what I first noticed. Once we got the border, I realized it looked much better with the matching bedding set than with either of the sets we already had. I wanted it but didn't feel I could justify buying a third set so I added it to the registry. I figured that way the decision was out of my hands. If someone wanted to buy it for us that would be fine and I wouldn't have to feel guilty for buying a third set. My mom is up here visiting us right now (yay!) and yesterday we took a walk around Babies R Us. I showed her the set and she agreed it was adorable and Ming "needed" it so she bought it for us. She's so sweet! Only the best will do for her granddaughter. She's a very excited grandma-to-be. So, we now have 3 sets of crib bedding for one child. Have I lost it?

In other news, referrals came out last week and went up to November 1st. This certainly isn't great news but it's better than the 2 days they did last month. We now have 38 days of LIDs in front of us. I've given up on speculating about when we might get our referral. I've had to readjust my expectations so many times. I'm just trying to focus on other things right now and stay away from rumors.

We're taking a cruise to Bermuda later this month. This will be about our third "last vacation before baby." Hopefully this really will be the last one.

Happy anniversary to us (not!)

Today is a really depressing day. It marks our 16 month anniversary of being logged in and referrals finally came out and only got through 2 DAYS! 2 freakin days! That's it. We've been waiting so long and every time I think we're in the home stretch, it slows down even further. At this point, I feel hopeless. It really seems like it's never going to happen. At this point, I think we'll be really lucky if we get our referral by the end of the year.

Cribs and strollers and highchairs, oh my!

We had a very exciting day today! We ordered the crib, armoire and changing table. They will take a couple of weeks to arrive. We also bought the stroller. They had a matching highchair so we HAD to get that too. It took us awhile to figure out how to put the stroller together but we did it. It also took me awhile to figure out the straps. There were so many and I couldn't figure out how they all fit together. Mario the bear was quite gracious allowing me to practice on him. I figured I better get it worked out now before Ming gets here. I'd hate to be fumbling with the straps with her giving me one of those "you have no idea what you're doing" looks. We had so much fun. I was wishing we had the camcorder set up taping us trying to figure out how to put the stroller together. That would have been hysterical to watch later. I can't wait until Ming is here to use everything.

Yet another anniversary

Today is yet another anniversary we never thought we'd be marking. We have officially been waiting 15 months today from LID. How depressing! We really thought we'd have our little Ming home by September of last year. Now I think we'll be lucky if we have her home by this September.

On a positive note, tomorrow is crib buying day. We're ordering the crib, armoire and changing table we picked out last week. It takes about 2 weeks to arrive. We're hoping we can get the painting done before it arrives. I'm so excited! I've been giddy all week thinking about getting a crib. I'm glad we waited as long as we did to start the nursery. I think it would have been depressing to walk past an empty nursery for a year and a half. This seems to be the perfect time for us to start getting Ming's room ready for her. Hopefully by the time everything is fixed up, we'll only have 2-3 more months to wait.

Ming's Nursery

We've held off on even thinking about starting the nursery since the wait was so long. Now that we're in the home stretch, we finally went looking for furniture last weekend. We picked out Ming's crib, changing table and armoire set. We also chose a stroller. It's the blue one in the picture. We're going back this weekend to order them. We can't wait!

Referrals

The CCAA hasn't updated their website yet but apparently referrals are on the way and they go up to October 24. That's only 11 days so it isn't great but there were rumors last week that they were only going to get up to the 19th or 21st so it could be worse. If they continue at this pace and don't slow down any further, we could still get our referral in June or July. We have 46 LID days ahead of us. We're in the home stretch!

Oh, how naive I was!

I'm really lazy about deleting messages from my sent box for my personal e-mail. Actually, it's more that I just don't think about it often. So, I was going through some old sent mail the other day and deleting messages from 2005. I thought it would be interesting to read a few of them to see what I was thinking about back then. I found some telling my friends that our homestudy was approved and telling them that once our dossier was sent to China we had a "very long wait" ahead of us of 6-7 months. I laughed out loud when I read those. If only it had been 6-7 months. I found that pretty humorous.