One More Step Closer to Carter

Hello Everyone. It has been a busy, busy month; Why is it that so much always happens during the shortest month of the year? As I mentioned in my previous post; at the end of January I had a second hip surgery, so far everything has progressed very well. As the calendar changed to February we experienced back-to-back snow storms resulting in 50 inches of snow!! I felt really bad for Paige that I was not able to help her shovel all of that snow but we are very fortunate to have really great neighbors who helped clear it all away.

Over the Valentine's/President's Day weekend we went to Connecticut for Paige's Baby Shower. It was a crazy quick trip; we drove up on Friday afternoon and came back on Sunday. Paige's Mom surprised her with her Aunt Leslie from Florida and she had a great time visiting with her close friends and our families. Everyone was quite generous; our car was packed to the "hilt"; we had to leave a bunch of stuff at her parent's because it wouldn't all fit in our car. The plan was for Bainie to come to the Virginia Shower this weekend and she could bring the rest of the gifts to us ; now the Northeast is getting clobbered by a snow storm so she is not going to make it.

I have spent the past two weeks traveling on business; last week was a planning meeting in Scottsdale with our largest supplier on 2010 initiatives; the weather was amazing, sunny and 80 everyday. Thank goodness we had some downtime by the pool. While I was out there I was able to go check-in on my grandmother who is in a nursing home in Glendale. She has suffered from Alzheimer's for many years and it has been 3 years since I saw her last. I expected that she would not know me; I was surprised at how talkative she was and how happy she appeared to be. I truly expected her to to be non-responsive so to see her happy and talkative allowed me to leave her feeling better than I did when I walked in to see her.

This week was pretty much the opposite to the previous week; meetings in Seattle, not much sun there...... but the end of this trip has taken us one more step closer to Carter.

Today we received in the mail our approval letter for our I-600 from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. For those of you who have not gone thru this process; the I-600 gives us the approval to bring in a foreign orphan as an immediate family member. This is an major step closer to bring Carter home! What this means is we will more-than-likely receive our travel call in the next 2 weeks!! So now it looks like we are in the "home stretch".

On another note; the furniture is in and it will be delivered next week. Carter's room is ready and just waiting for that furniture so we can put the finishing touches on it and have it ready for his arrival home. - John