NEW Updates - FINALLY!

Fall has arrived and the kids have been having a lot of fun. (Although our backs are aching from all of the raking.)

Trick-or-Treating Around the World

The university in town had an event called Trick-or-Treating Around the World. The offices at the student center went all out and decorated their rooms. The kids were able to trick-or-treat in Disney World, Hollywood, Paris, Japan, China, Antartica, Italy, Finland and more. What a safe way to have some funny .. and without all the "spookiness" associated with Halloween.




Woody and Bullseye from Toy Story

I can't believe how the summer flew by! We spent the end of June and beginning of July in Wausau, Wisconsin visiting my family. While we were there, we attended a huge family reunion (my mom is one of 10 kids), we spent time at my family's lakehouse (it was a new purchase for my sisters this year), we went strawberry picking and we went to a hot air balloon festival. Below are several pictures of the kids from our time there.

ELLA

I can't believe that she'll be four next week. My little girl is growing up so fast!

ADLAI

Our little guy turned 2 a couple of weeks ago. He is such a silly and happy kid. He's usually content doing whatever his big sister is doing. HE IS STILL HEAVILY INFLUENCED BY EVERYTHING THAT ELLA LIKES!! As you can guess, his daddy isn't crazy about this.






Big boy bed

I have a funny story about Adlai. We are in the process of potty training him. We started right around his birthday and he has been doing great. However, if he is busy, he could care less when he has an accident. It doesn't bother him one bit if his underwear are wet and urine is dripping down his legs. (This bothered Ella so much that she was completely potty trained in 2 days.) So, I have resorted to using pull-ups at times. I was very anti pull-ups with Ella, but I still bought a pack for trips, etc. But, most of the package of pink Cinderella pull-ups was still left over. Why waste them, right? Although I bought some Buzz lightyear boy pull ups, Adlai often chooses to wear a Cinderella one.

Many people have assured me that this is normal and he'll turn out okay. So, I'm not worried. In fact, Case bought hime a plastic sword and I actually had to take it away because he was being much too agressive with it.

CUTE PICTURES
While we were in Wisconsin, I tried to get some photos of the kiddos together. However, they were being attacked by killer mosquitos during our mini unsuccessful phot shoot.



If you look closely, you can see the little bugger on Ella's thumb .. thus the look of terror!



Another mosquito is biting her arm in this photo.



Now she's mad, because she got blood on her pretty dress!

ADOPTION UPDATES - THE LATEST NEWS

What a process this has been! A draft of our homestudy is complete, our training is done, our pockets are empty AND we are officially on the waiting list to receive a referral to adopt a baby from Taiwan (as of August 5th). That's the good news. However, our agency is now quoting a wait time of 18 months for a referral of a baby boy and 2 years for a baby girl. (When we first started the process, the wait time was expected to be only 6 months for a boy.) This is not our agency's fault, however. The requirements to adopt a baby from China became very strict in May of this year and the wait time that China is quoting is 3 YEARS for a baby girl. Thus, there has been an enormous flood of people moving over to Taiwan's program. It looks like we won't be traveling to Taiwan to pick up our baby until at least 2009.

ADOPTION UPDATES - WE'RE MOVING FORWARD:

We had our first homestudy appointment yesterday. So far, so good. Our social worker spent about two hours at our house asking us questions related to our motivation for adopting. She also briefly toured of our house. And to think, we spent all weekend getting our house ready for her first visit. We knew that it was probably going to be like this .. but having a social worker come to your home is definitely motivation to get the things that we've wanted to get done for years. She was glad that she was the source of our motivation, but she insisted that we don't need to worry about having our house clean for her next visits.

We have two more visits next week, then hopefully our social worker can get our homestudy written up quickly. As soon as we submit a draft of our homestudy to our agency, we are officially on the waiting list for a referral! How exciting!

IS THERE ANY HOPE FOR OUR SON??

Adlai LOVES to imitate his sister. I think that it's hillarious, but Case isn't so thrilled. I'm supposed to be buying a Rambo outfit for him as I write this.

It is so fun to watch Ella and Adlai play together. They certainly are best buddies! Even with Ella's strong influence, it has been fun to see how differently God created girls and boys. Adlai often carries around his baby (like his sister) but he also insists on carrying his John Deere tractor too.

The other day I found Adlai playing in the yard with his toy dinosaurs. He was acting out that these toy dinosaurs were fighting and eating eachother up. I never taught him how to play like that. He's all boy!

Case's Genes are the Dominant Genes in this family:

This is a picture of Case (no it's not Adlai) when he was about 1 year old.

Ella posing for the Camera:

ADOPTION UPDATES

We have completed the overwhelming process of collecting all of the necessary paperwork to start our homestudy. The homestudy is the process where a social worker visits our home (the state of Colorado requires three separate visits), examines our home and interviews us. He/she then writes up a long report that is submitted to our agency and to the orphanage in Taiwan. Hopefully we will be able to get our homestudy started this week.

We have been fingerprinted, have had background checks run on us, we've provided our complete financial history, we have completed detailed questionairres about our life history (thankfully the state of Colorado allows us to do this in place of writing and autobiography), we've had physicals performed for our whole family, we've had to go through training, we've had to provide copies of every significant document we have (birth certificates, passports, marriage liscense, tax returns, etc.), we've provided proof of health insurance for our adopted child & proof of employment, we've written a dear birthmother letter (which the birthmother in Taiwan may see), and we have put together a scrapbook of our family. We've already spent thousands of dollars and we're not even close to being finished (the entire adoption will cost us about $25,000). Sometimes the whole process is so overwhelming. I've struggled with not growing bitter over all that is required of us. But, we are confident that this is where God is leading us, so I'm willing to coninue providing what is required.

As soon as we get a draft of our homestudy into our agency we will officially be on the waiting list for our child. How exciting!! At that point we expect the wait for a referral to be close to 12 months.

P.S. If anyone has any unique fundraising ideas for our adoption let me know. We won't have to pay most of the money until after we get a referral, so we have a little while to raise some money.

MEMORIAL DAY IN TEXAS

We spent the past week in Texas with our friend Fondly and her son Erik. She has a great slideshow of our trip on her blog. Check it out at:

www.wucooper.blogspot.com

It's kind of official .. we're adopting!

We are so excited to announce our plans to adopt. Presently we're preparing to adopt a baby from Taiwan. We have applied with an agency and we're moving forward with the process to have our lives evaluated to make sure that we are fit to be adoptive parents. On Saturday, Case and I have our first meeting with the agency that will be doing our homestudy. The homestudy process will take a couple of months, and then, assuming we have a positive homestudy, we will get on a waiting list for a referral of a baby. The wait for a referral will be about 12 months and then another 4 months before we travel to to take our baby back to the US.

We believe that God has lead us to start this process. Even before we had children, we had a heart to adopt. We're taking a break from trying to have more biological children to pursue it now. While we wait for the referral of our child, we will start meeting with an infertility specialist to see if he can determine why we've been miscarrying.

We will keep you updated with our status and we'll include prayer requests regarding the process.

DISNEY WORLD

We took a trip to Orlando in April with Case's family. Ella was so excited to meet Cinderella. Our little girl talks a lot, and most of the conversations leading up to our trip were about Cinderella. Well, after spending $400 on tickets for our family to get into the park for two days, we never did meet her. For $400 there should have been a Cinderella on every corner! Ella did get to go into the castle and decided that we didn't get to meet her because she was taking a nap. Thankfully we were able to wave to her during the Disney parade.

We had a lot of fun on the trip and lots of great memories.

The cousins are having a snack before riding the Dumbo ride

Although the quality of the photo isn't great, this is one of my favorite pictures from the trip. Case and Ella were ahead of us on a kiddy roller coaster. Look at Ella's little hands up in the air.



Adlai enjoying the action (It's great that you don't have to pay for a 1-year-old to enter the park.)

Ella and Madalyn with Granddaddy & Grandmother

In April, my sister Jill and her family visited us for the week. Of course, the weather was awful (as it always is when my family visits) but we hope that they'll come back again. Here's a picture of my kids with their cousin Mattea. Mattea is going to be 1 already on May 11th.

In Loving Memory ...

This is an ultrasound we had shortly before we miscarried. This isn't a very good picture of our baby, but you can see it's head, body, arms and legs. Our little one was moving all over the place.

Case and I were due to have another baby on September 17th. However, after almost 13 weeks of pregnancy we sadly miscarried our small, but perfectly formed little angel. We were just about into the second trimester, we daily listened to our baby's heartbeat and I had been feeling our little one move for a week. We were so hopeful that everything was moving along perfectly that we even purchased a new car that would be large enough to hold a third car seat. However, God had a different plan for this child.

Please pray for our family as we go through another difficult loss.

This was our seventh devastating miscarriage. I have been tested for so many different things and I appear to be completely healthy. We will probably start going to the infertility clinic in town when we are ready AND when/if God leads us. We are truly hopeful that He will someday allow us to give birth to one more child.

Thank you to all of our family and friends who have remembered us in this time. Your thoughtfulness has encouraged us so much as we have greived the loss of our baby.

IT'S BEEN WAY TOO LONG!

Well, I've missed Thanksgiving, the Colorado Snowstorm and Christmas. Sorry about that! Instead of posting photos that are months old, here are a couple of recent photos of the kids from a trip that we took to Wisconsin at the end of January.

SLEDDING IN WISCONSIN

My parents live at the bottom of a big hill, and during a snow storm we took advantage of it:





He can barely walk, but he's warm!

ADLAI'S FIRST HAIRCUT


Before: (bye-bye curls - but it had to be done, especially when a lady behind me in line at the store said to me: "I don't even know if that's a boy or girl". Once I told Case the story, the haircut was a must!)



During: (that's Grandma cutting his hair)





AFTER: "I'm not going to show anyone .. I don't like it."


Just kidding - Our handsome boy.

Many attempts were made at getting a picture of all of the cousins together. This was the best that we could do:

Ella the gymnast

Recently we were back in Wisconsin. Ella's aunt Jill is a gymnastics coach for a high school team and we got to tag along at one of her practices. Ella was fearless. She kept climbing the high beam and would walk the whole way across with confidence!