Repurposing...For Now...

After my birthday in May, we had a wonderful shower for my son's fiance in June! I had a lot of help from some very dear friends...and it went off without a hitch and she was wonderfully surprised!!!

Then there was July...

I was supposed to go to Washington DC for the National Down Syndrome Conference to meet a friend and help her out watching her two sons while she attended the conference. I was so totally looking forward to going, even had my ticket to go, but ended up not going at the last minute due to a severe migraine...Day 3 of 5 that particular month :(  . I could see myself on the bus for 3 hours, getting sick or lost in NYC and then facing another 5 hours to DC, only to have to walk a few blocks to the hotel and then to still have a headache and nausea the next morning. Not my idea of being any kind of help or company. I just prayed she would understand. Disappointment #1 in July.

Disappointment #2 came a week later when Tony lost his job. So, here we find ourselves, once again, with our adoption ON HOLD. This is one heck of a test of our faith, let me tell you!

Our August was difficult as unemployment is tough, going without any kind of pay for a month. Our oldest son Chris was married to Terri on August 18th with Tony officiating! That was a blessing as were all of our friends that participated.

We just finished getting through September, and I have been trying to decide how to use our blog to bless others while we wait on our Lord to bless us with our adoption. So, since it is October 1st and October is Down Syndrome Awareness Month, I think I will try to blog everyday. I have decided to focus on at least 2 moms I know that have agreed to allow me to share their story. I will start tomorrow!

Today is just to update you and ask for your prayers for our beautiful girls in Serbia. Pray that either they have been scooped up already and are living with a family that cherishes them as much as we do (and that He has just the right child waiting there for us), or that God is protecting them from harm, preserving them for us on that day that we can scoop them up in our arms to love and protect them with our love.

Thanks and God Bless!

And Yet Another Celebration!

We just celebrated a landmark in our history on May 20th, and will again on September 19th...a 50th Birthday! We really can't wait to celebrate another landmark in our family history other than anniversaries and 50th birthdays, the celebration of new editions to our family! So these are the times we celebrate until then...

My Birthday was Sunday. My parents and sister planned a party for me...for years I said I was 29, or 39 depending on how old my oldest was...I am only going to admit this one time...from now on "age is just a number and mines unlisted!" Just remember that next time you think to ask! ;D

Here is the table setting at my parents home

My cake and balloon holder :)
here is a close up of my cake...notice the Pink Panther? Mom said he was looking for my youth!


Here is my gift from Tony, a cordless drill and bits!!! Yes, I LOVED that!!! I was not the least bit offended...


Small gift from mom...'How the #*@!! did i get to be 50!!' is what it says!!! Way too funny!!! And some money that will be used at Hobby Lobby!!!


Here is my beautiful stained glass Tiffany Butterfly lamp from my sister!!! It is absolutely gorgeous! I always wanted a Tiffany lamp!


Here is a plate to commemorate my day!


And blowing out the candles...can any of you guess what my wish was???? Starts with a g and ends with irls!! And remember, I am now 43...for the moment anyway! :)

More Things We Celebrate...While Waiting!

We celebrated our 27th Anniversary on May 10th! This is quite exciting for us! I am just hoping that we can celebrate our anniversary together with our (almost) complete family sometime in the near future! I would love to have our sons and soon to be daughter(s) accompanying us to renew our vows!! What a wonderful day that will be!!

Until then, this is what happened...

We have started attending a church in Hartford called Redeemer Hill. It's a church plant which, if you know Tony and I at all, church planting is in our hearts. So they have a 'small group' ministry they call community groups. We attend one that meets in East Hartford. It's a great group...it's small and intimate, one where you really get to know the others well. We had no idea, and neither did another couple, that they decided to bless us and the other couple, Brad and Taylor, with gift cards to our favorite restaurants to help us celebrate our anniversaries!!

That was a huge blessing for us and enabled us to go to dinner to USS Chowder Pot on our anniversary! Here are some pics...



We really can't wait to really celebrate our anniversary in the future with vow renewal and everything...in a couple of years!

Things We Celebrate...

So our son Chris is now engaged to his girlfriend Terri and they are supposed to be married in August. Along with gaining a daughter in law we will be gaining a grandson too! His name is Alex. We were invited to Alex's birthday party last weekend...I thought I'd share some pics...and yes we are excited!

We had a great time meeting new people and getting to see what Alex is like...

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Helping Friends...

This post is to help a friend of mine, Gillian Marchenko, to get her book published! Here is Gillian's intro on her blog.

 My name is Gillian. I am a Christian, wife, mother, writer, and speaker. I’m also a small town girl from Michigan who has spent the majority of her married life in big cities; Kiev, Ukraine for three and a half years church planting, and now Chicago, where I live with my husband Sergei and our four daughters; Elaina, Zoya, Polly and Evangeline. Polly and Evangeline both have Down syndrome. Evie, the youngest of the girls, came to us through international adoption from Ukraine in 2009.
Most Sundays, you’ll find me there in the back row of the church Sergei pastors, bouncing a toddler on my knee and giving the older girls /the look/. It’s been said that wives of clergy live in fish bowls. Let me be the first to tell you that my bowl is cracked and most of the water has seeped out.
I love good reads, yoga, stringing words together, speaking Russian, eating peanut butter out of the can with a spoon, and advocating for my girls with special needs.

She is quite an amazing woman with a wonderful story of adoption just waiting to be published. Please help her to become published by just clicking the link below and hit the like button!

 http://www.facebook.com/GillianMarchenkoPage

And here is her blog page:

 http://www.gillianmarchenko.com/

I cannot wait to read her book! Please help her out by liking her blog...

This Seems Fun!

As we are planning our homestudy details, dossier, and travels, we are also trying to plan for their arrival. We are looking into furniture and clothing.

I came across Zulily, a website of all kinds of items for children. By sending invites, all you have to do is to sign up for a free account. I thought if you were interested, here is a link that may, at least for today, help me earn $15 toward my purchases for the girls. Here is my personal link:

http://www.zulily.com/invite/jstancil229

Thanks for reading and considering!

Welcome To Holland

I love this poem, and I can truly say we are ready if God wants us to be in Holland instead of Italy...

"Welcome to Holland"
I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this: When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland." "Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy." But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place. So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts. But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned." And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss. But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland. - Emily Pearl Kingsley

And Again...The Journey Begins!

So, over the past week some information has come to light regarding the adoption process. Some good, some not so good. I will get into details perhaps when we go private on this blog...which will be soon, we'll see.

I have been in contact with the country that we are beginning our process with and we have been 'invited' to complete and send our homestudy to them.

So here is the plan:

The hiccup with unemployment and job change will hold us up for a bit...so hopefully we will begin our international homestudy in June or July. The social worker stated it will take around 3 months to complete it and get us a copy. That is fine because the country we are adopting from closes from June through September. That will be plenty of time for us to complete it and then send it.

In the meantime:

 File for our passports

We need to file a I600 or I600-A, I can't remember, with the USCIS.

Federal finger prints

Compiling all of our documents together, have necessary documents appostilled.

Compile documents into a dossier format.

Send dossier to country for translation and approval.

And in between all that, we need to choose a child or sibling set (or group).

Our hope and prayer is to have a child/children in our house by this time next year...whether it is the set of twins that brought us this far, and it can be, or a little girl with DS...we really do want add to our family!

I am planning on going private soon, so if you are interested in following along, please let me know so I can send you an invite!

God Bless!

New Year, New Changes, New Promises...

I can't believe how long it's been since I blogged. Way too long, I know. Many changes are on the horizon...and they all promise to be very exciting...but let me catch you up.

First, in July, we went to Louisville to see our son Cale and for Tony to have an interview. The interview went well but the guy wouldn't commit to a job until Tony moved. Well, we aren't going to move unless he has a job, soooo...we didn't move. We had a good visit with Cale and learned we missed living there, a little.

Then, we've been patiently waiting on God to make necessary changes to complete our adoption plans.

October:

We had the worst blizzard in Connecticut and power was out for 6 days.

Tony was asked if he would move back to the Manchester Monro store to straighten it out. His RM fired the manager of that store, manager for over 25 years, and the store went down hill from there. They wanted him to turn the store around to make it a million dollar store asap, that is what it was when they fired the manager. Tony tried.

We found out that our landlord was a worse person than we originally thought...we started looking at housing changes quickly after that.

November:

Although Tony moved back to Manchester to work, it was a lesson in futility...he kept trying to bring that store back, the pressure to succeed was huge, stress was increased. We just kept praying and trusting...

Kept looking for an apartment. Kept praying for safety and peace, trusting that God would see us through...

December:

Found our new apartment home! We met with our future landlords on the 15th and signed the lease and spent the next 4 days moving, with the help of my son Chris, his girlfriend and a couple of longtime friends. We were fully moved in on December 18.

On the 20th, a new friend, someone who read and followed my blog, contacted me to tell me she had seen our girls listed on another site! So, when Tony got home, I told him and we discussed it, for about one minute, and we knew we needed to start the process and go get them. WHAT A GREAT CHRISTMAS GIFT!!! Merry Christmas to us!!! Thank you Christine!

We had a quiet Christmas morning, missing our sons, hoping that next year we will have little ones again in our house to enjoy Christmas morning...then we spent the rest of the day at my parents house, enjoying a small Christmas there too. We really do hope next year is more noisy!

January:

Happy New Year!! Tony worked, I didn't do very much...

5th-asked for prayer for the future...received more response than expected. So blessed beyond words!

Pressure continues for Tony as he tried to turn his store around.

Still enjoying living in our new place!

February:

Early in the month, nothing to report.

Tony applied for quite a few jobs through the month, he receives a couple of call backs, two interviews. One job, at a dealership, seemed promising. It wouldn't be until March 19th. Tony would have loved to be out of Monro by the 16th because of the worsening pressure on him and other managers. We continued to pray.

Tony received a call for a second interview at the dealership on the 22nd, they wanted to hire him.

Saturday, 25th, Tony was laid off. Seems they wanted the store to become a million dollar store in less than 4 months...yeah, sure, in this economy? Good bye Monro...

The girls turned 9 years old on the 27th, Happy Birthday Sweethearts!!

29th-Happy Leap Day! Tony was told that they wanted him to start at the dealership but they had to find out exactly when the guy that Tony is replacing is leaving. They would let him know by the end of the week.

March:

Friday, 2nd, Tony was told he was starting his new job on March 12th! Praise God!!!


So...you are up to date! God is so Faithful! In a matter of a couple of months, we have a safe home, on a quiet street with nice landlords. Tony now has a new job! Here are the highlights of his new job:

He will work 44 hours a week, 4 days working with 3 days off- was working 65 hours with 1 1/2 days off. That means that he will be home enough to be a dad to them! And he has ALL holidays off!!!

He will make enough, like 'an additional income', as if I was working, which means I only have to focus on temp work to help bring the girls home. When they get here, I won't have to work so I can focus all my energy on them!

God is so full of Blessings! We are now focusing our prayers on starting the process to get those beautiful girls home...so they can know the love and blessing of a family! If you are a pray-er, please pray for us, and them!!

Thanks!!!