One journey ends and a greater one begins.

So, as many of my readers know, the whole reason I started putting my teaching materials on TpT in the first place was in an effort to make a little money to help with the adoption journey my wife and I have been on.

After years of saving and waiting and worrying...I'm happy to announce that our beautiful daughter, Amelia Erin came into the world on July 6th! AND the papers have been signed and the court hearing has happened, so she is finally ours as legally as she has been ours in our hearts for months now!

It has been one of the most stressful things I've endured in my life, and I can't even begin to express how thankful I am that this part of our journey is coming to an end. 

We set out for St. Louis, MO on July 4th in preparation for the birthmother's induction on the 6th. We were really lucky to be matched with a great set of birth parents that made this decision out of love, and did more than they had to to make her birthday special for us. We were even allowed to be in the delivery room for her birth! After she was cleaned up the hospital provided us with a post partum room and we were able to spend the two nights she stayed in the hospital with her in our room. 

After that we had to wait patiently for our court hearing. We were kind of led astray in our understanding of how long the whole process took, and were really disappointed to learn that our court date wasn't happening until July 15th. So, we sat around in our hotel room for DAYS waiting on our hearing (which took 15 minutes and happened 2 hours late!!!) But eventually the hearing happened and everything worked out!

EXCEPT for the fact that there is this crazy law in place that requires an Interstate Agreement to occur between my home state of PA and MO before our baby is allowed to leave the state of her birth to go home. That paperwork can't be sent off until after the hearing. They have told me that it is going to be at least NEXT Wednesday or Thursday before we get the okay to leave the state with our baby. I've already been here for 13 days, and I have at least another 6 to go. Sigh!

To make matters crazier, my wife really needed to return to PA to go back to work, get our dogs out of boarding (to save us the money, especially now that we have over a week more of hotel bills! Aargh), and was actually called to interview for a better job. So she left about an hour after the hearing to return to PA, leaving me and the baby here in St. Louis until we get the go ahead to leave. As soon as I do, we'll be catching the next flight home! 

In the meantime I'm going a little bit stir crazy here in the hotel room. This should be the perfect time for me to catch up on blogging, put the finishing touches on the 8 different products I have in the works, and start planning for the new school year...except I am so tired! With the normal waking up to feed and change Amelia plus the 3 times I'm waking up each night just to make sure she's still breathing...I'm getting about an hour or two of sleep at a time between 1am and 8am. It'll be nice to get on a sharing system with my wife when I get home!

I'm also definitely stressing out a bit about raising a newborn alone in a hotel room in a strange city with no transportation! Aagh! Luckily I've had the support of my blogging buddies who have given me a little parenting advice and support, AND were kind enough to even send me a surprise dinner today! The hotel has breakfast luckily, but dinners have been interesting. Haha. Luckily, little Amelia has been a great baby so far and hasn't been causing too much trouble. I do wish babies came with built in gauges. A temperature gauge, an energy gauge, a diaper gauge, and a sleep gauge would all be really handy right about now...

Either way, despite the challenges of the journey getting here...I've never been happier in all my life. Every day I've had with Amelia so far has been the biggest blessing in my life, and I can't wait for all the rest to come. 

Nursery Reveal!

So...I promised I'd return with an update about our nursery for those that are interested.

This is one side of the room. I made the name bunting on the crib myself. The tree is vinyl, and the walls are gray (a bit lighter than they appear in this picture.) We are going for a modern forest theme. 

The animal art above the crib is from Etsy. We're keeping her name secret for now! I also need to add the crib bumpers and a mobile to the crib, but we haven't gotten them yet.

The changing table here next to the crib has a chalkboard above it that I made myself. Her name is written at the top, and I will be updating the chalkboard each month with stats about her. I got the idea from my BBB over at Where the Wild Things Learn. 

These are the built in shelves that were already in the room. We figured they'd be great for diaper and other supply storage for now. 

This is the other side of the room. Obviously we still need a diaper pail, a clothes hamper, etc. But most of the decorating is done! 

I'm really proud of this frame that I made from scratch! The art inside can be changed out with the mini-clothespins. I made the artwork inside myself as well! 

I have been doing stained glass as a hobby now for a couple months, and I made these two stained glass suncatchers for the nursery. I drew the designs myself too!

I made these little felt animals for the room myself, and my wife and I made the terrarium together. 

It's hard to believe that there are only 2 months to go until we get to meet our daughter. There's a TON left to do, but at least she has a pretty room to sleep in! 

:)

Big News!

So...I've been gone for a little while. BUT I've got the best reason ever!

We are soooo excited. Just about 2 more months to wait before we can hold our little girl! We have to stay in MO for a couple weeks after her birth for the interstate paperwork to go through. Living in a hotel for a couple weeks isn't ideal, but it will be worth it!

I'll be sure to post an update soon to show off the nursery that has been taking up all of my time! And I'll also be sure to make an actual blog post soon too!

Adoption Update for January 2015

I wanted to share a quick update on our adoption progress! We are happy to say that we have reached the point where we are completely qualified to adopt. All the paperwork has gone through, we've received a copy of our finished home study, and we've started applying for birthmother situations. So far we've tried to match with four birthmothers. We haven't been selected yet, but are hopeful that we will be matched soon. It is pretty much out of our hands at this point!

Now that we've kind of reached a waiting point in the process, we decided to go ahead and put some effort into some of the things we can control...like nursery furniture! We emptied out the room we'll be using as our nursery, and plan to paint it soon. We've purchased a crib, dresser, and changing table too. We were wary about "jinxing" ourselves at first, but decided that was silly. And with the sometimes alarmingly close due dates that some of the birthmothers have, we figured we should be prepared at least at a basic level for the potential of a sudden arrival!

I can't promise that our nursery will end up anywhere near as cute as this one, that my friend Amelia set up. But I'm hopeful that our gender-neutral forest theme will be somewhat cute. My wife is not the decorator of the house, which leaves the task to me...so we'll see!

And thank you to all of my readers and to anyone who has ever purchased anything from my store. Every cent of my earnings have gone towards this adoption, and as of right now my earnings have managed to cover about 70% of the total estimated cost! My wife and I literally wouldn't even have had the opportunity to adopt with TpT.

Best Blogging Buddies Ever! - Our Adoption Bundle

I'm super excited to share about this bundle of goodies my blogging buddies have put together for me! The bundle will only be available for a limited time, and many of the products can only be found in this bundle!

You're getting an amazing deal...and doing an amazing thing by helping my family grow! It has made me feel super loved by all the friends I've made through blogging, and I can't thank them enough!

So, what's in the bundle? Well, for just $25 you get a bunch of things you can start using in your classroom right now:

Crazy, right?! What a great deal! It comes out to about $1.30 per product...you'll never be able to get these products at that price again. I hope you'll grab it up and spread the word! :)

Thanks so much to my friends who contributed! I bet you recognize these names, but if one or more of them is new to you...go check out their blogs because they are some amazing teachers!

Elementary AMC 
Ideas by Jivey 
Coffee Cups and Lesson Plans 
Fifth in the Middle 
Head Over Heels for Teaching 
Pinkadots Elementary 
I Love My Classroom 
Fourth Grade Flipper 
Collaboration Cuties 
I {heart} Recess 
Teaching with a Touch of Twang 
Teaching Tales Along the Yellow Brick Road 
Where the Wild Things Learn

Our Adoption Journey Update - September

I thought I'd give an update on our adoption journey progress for those interested (and as a record for ourselves)!

We've been diligently working on the amazing mound of paperwork that is needed to prove to the caseworkers that we are capable of being parents, aren't axe-murderers, and prove that we aren't dirt broke. I was really lucky to get a bunch of the work done before school started back, but once pre-planning started I've been so swamped that our progress came to a screeching halt. 

It's amazing how even with all of the excitement of a new school year, mentoring an intern and two new teachers in our school, and of course meeting a bunch of new kids and seeing my old kids...the adoption paperwork has been hanging over my head the whole time. The good news? After almost a month, we're finally getting a glimpse of light at the end of THIS tunnel. We're finally at the point where we were able to set up our home visit. This is where the caseworker comes to our home and checks it out for safety and space purposes, and also interviews us. The big date for that is October 3rd, so that gives us about a month to finish gathering the paperwork and to get our house in order and clean!

Here's one of the completed pages of
our profile. PLEASE tell me if you
think it looks bad...

All of the legal paperwork aside, there's a much bigger project on our plate right now...the adoption profile. This is the book (or pdf) that birth mothers will look at to help them choose a family to entrust with their child. I have to say that making this profile feels like the biggest and most important homework assignment of my life. We've scoured the internet, and I've done more "how to write a great adoption profile" google searches than is reasonably sane...and still I find myself sitting here at my computer stressing out about it. 

Anything you think we could do to
improve the look of the pages? 

It's pretty obvious that I'm no professional at this, but we really can't afford to hire someone to do it. Luckily, I have some practice with making things for TpT, otherwise I wouldn't even know where to start. 

We want our profile to be reflective of who we are, but we only have about 15 pages to do that. There are so many great things we'd love to share, but we've read over and over again that it's best to include lots of photos. Choosing those photos has been the really hard part. Oh, how I wish that we had taken more photos over the past 7 years! We've managed to get a few from family, but we're starting to hit the point where we just don't have great photos for certain things...

Of course I'm at the point now where I have been staring at it for so long that I can't even tell if I'm doing a good job or not anymore! And of course there's a fine line between taking my time with it and being a perfectionist. After all, this has to be done before we can make a match! 

Unfortunately, most of the pages look
like this right now...missing photos.

We need to come up with about 15 more photos and then I think our first draft will be ready to go! I'm looking forward, but nervous, to share it with friends and family so they can edit and critique it for us. And somehow I need to find the balance between being a 24/7 teacher, obsessively working on this profile, making things for my class and TpT(which is helping to pay for all this), being a good husband, blogging, and taking a little time for myself now and then! Have you ever wanted to flash forward a couple months?!

So yeah, that's it for now...home visit on 10/3, hopefully a completed home study and profile shortly after, and then everyone cross your fingers for a quick match with a birth mother and baby after that! Thanks for letting me vent! 

Big Announcement for Us!

So, this post is purely personal, no great teaching tips, products to share, or book reviews here...but I did want to let all of you know some big news for my little two-person family.

We are finally taking the plunge and have begun the journey to adopt our first (and very possibly only!) child. For the last seven years it's just been the two of us kickin' around in this house and we're hoping to grow our family by one as soon as possible. 

The process is a long, nerve-wracking, and expensive one. A domestic infant adoption can cost between 30-50,000 smackeroos. But every journey starts with a few small steps! And that's where many of you guys came in...

Whether you knew it or not, you guys have been helping us take steps for the last year and a half! Any time you have purchased one of my products, or even given me a good rating on a freebie, you've been helping our journey get started. Every cent of my Teacher pay Teachers earnings have been going into our adoption fund. In fact, that has been my motivation for all the work I've put in since day one! And now I'm proud to share that I recently hit the first TpT milestone! That's an amazing start (we're halfway there!) to the unfortunate high expense involved with this journey. 
So, THANK YOU!

We realized that we didn't have a single
working smoke detector! YIKES!
I'll be installing these new smoke and
CO detectors all over the house soon!

All of the flooding and set backs we've had with our house has been really discouraging. One of the adoption requirements is a home study, and with the state of our flooded house, we had to get that fixed. But last week, as many of you know, my dad and I put in 7 fourteen hour work days to put things back in order! We got most of it corrected, and luckily I only spent about a third of what it would have cost me to hire someone to help. 

It was still a financial setback...but we have decided that if we keep waiting for the "financially right time"...we could be waiting forever. So, we're trusting that God will provide, going into debt a bit, and we've taken the plunge and started the official process this past Saturday! 

We've started working with an agency, and have learned about all the things that we need to get in order to be matched with a birth mother. A lot of it is pretty standard stuff, like getting clearances, but there's also a doctor's appointment to prove we have normal life expectancies, a TON of paperwork to collect, the home visits (which means lots of cleaning and finishing the construction), the interviews by the caseworker, we have to write autobiographies, get letters of recommendation, make our profile(kind of like online-dating), and yada yada yada. It's a bit overwhelming...

This is the first piece of homework,
reading through this massive
information packet, and getting
all of our preliminary paperwork
together.

It's also a bit scary because the timeline is so unsure! We could get everything together, complete our home study, and find a match super quick...or it could take months to a year to find a match. I'm a little jealous of most people's pre-determined 9-month timelines.

But like I said...small steps!

I was wary about sharing my reasons for TpT'ing...but some of my BBBs out there convinced me to share the good news...and I really did want to thank all of you, whether you've bought something from me, or whether you've given a rating, pinned something from my blog, or even if you've just helped motivate me to keep writing this blog by commenting or reading my posts. It still amazes me how blessed we are that TpT is making something like this possible. With our salaries, it frankly wouldn't be possible otherwise. 

I'll be sure to include updates about our journey as we move along it! Thanks for reading!