The PACKET!

Today marks the momentous occassion that we officially mailed off THE packet back to our PRIDE trainer! YEAH! What a great weight has already been lifted off of us as we continue to take baby-steps towards that day when we bring home our first foster child. It has seemed like such a short journey that has taken a really long time. Does that make sense to anyone else but me??!? :)

We also finished cleaning out the garage and moving most of the stuff from the computer room into the garage (or just getting rid of what we don't need to keep). Mission Arlington came by yesterday and picked up an entire truck load of stuff! We are so glad to be rid of those things for sure. We are going to start painting the base coat on the nursery so our creative and artistic family can come over and paint the cute animals on the walls. I do beads and base coats, the rest of my famiy has developed a talent for artistic painting! We are very excited about what they will be able to do in that room.

We are also preparing for our CPR/First Aid class on 3/29/08. We have an instructor coming to our house to train all of us on Pediatric and Infant first aid and CPR. We are looking forward to it. We are using Lifeline CPR in Arlington (www.lifelinecpr4life.com) to get our certification. It's pretty cool they will come to our house!

Well, that's it for now. Hopefully we will hear back soon about our packet (I sent it insured with a signature receipt requested of course! :) )

T-minus 17 days until our first day of PRIDE training!

Inch thick Packet

Hello all! Patrick and I got a packet in the mail last week that was definitely an inch thick with all kinds of paperwork and documents to bring and things for us to begin doing to prepare for the home study. Here I thought the next couple of weeks would be boring while we waited for the PRIDE training to begin! I was way wrong! Between getting CPR/First aid certified and having fingerprints done we also have to have a fire and health inspection done of our home, take pictures of the outside areas of the house the child might be using, make sure all things like prescription drugs, etc are locked up and agree to not take the infant child hunting or put them on a trampolene unsupervised we have a lot to do! You would think some of these things would be common sense (um the baby crying would scare away the hogs while we were hunting, duh, you don't take a baby hunting! :) Ok, for those of you who didn't get that - it was a joke!) but isn't it interesting the level they have to go through to really "weed" out those people who really shouldn't be participating in this process? Anyways, we are anxiously preparing our home and working on the nursery as the first day of PRIDE training rapidly approaches.

We have also decided another major decision about this process - we are going to adopt a GIRL!!!!! I am way excited and NO, I did NOT hold Patrick down and threaten him with his life to say he wanted a girl. It was actually his idea! So, that being said, the nursery colors are now confirmed - pale yellow, pale green and P-I-N-K!!!!! We are going with a Noah's Ark theme to compliment the PINK nicely (Noah brought along pink famingos I am sure!). So keep your eyes out for any cute Noah's ark themed baby stuff and let me know where you see the good deals!
The next few weeks will be a bustle of paperwork, painting, sewing (once I find the power cable to the sewing machine of course) cleaning, moving furniture, shopping, baby showers, Training class and inspection after inspection. We will be keeping you updated through the website, so keep checking back - that is if we can ever get out from underneath the pile of paper and training manuals! :)

T-minus 26 days before PRIDE training starts!