With Great Hope

Have great hopes and dare to go all out for them.
Have great dreams and dare to live them.
Have tremendous expectations and believe in them.
--- Norman Vincent Peale

A new journey, a new blog!

In 2006, our family was blessed to welcome our first child - Maya. We adopted Maya from Kolkata, India. Our process began in early 2005, and Maya came home with us in June of 2006.

Today, the first day of June, we can't help but remember where we were one year ago at this time. We had just received word that Maya's passport process was completed and we were given the green light to travel. Amazingly, we were able to find tickets on Singapore Airlines at a great price, we were able to tie up loose ends with our jobs, and we were set to fly to India on June 6th! What an insanely crazy, overly joyous time that was!
Now, almost one year later (and it is almost impossible to believe it has been a year), we have an adorable, happy, zany toddler running our lives! :) Being a parent has proven to be everything that I had dared to hope that it would... and more. Maya is a loving child with soo much personality! Our previously-quiet house is now filled with the sounds of baby laughter, babbling in a language I (somewhat frighteningly) understand more of every day, and, more recently, resounding 'NO!'s.
Now, as a family, our lives have changed to include the Children's Museum, Gymboree (tho I'm done with that now.. I think it gets very annoying after ~6 months), family-friendly restaurants and family-friendly resort vacations (we just returned from Mexico, where Maya learned a new fav word - HOLA!). What a change it has been!

Suddenly I am forced to {gasp} cook nutritous MEALS for my family. Meals? Wow.. this was something very new for me. Aj travels pretty much every week, so it used to be just myself and our yellow lab. My meals usually consisted of one thing - a fruit.. a vegetable.. occasionally an entree if I felt hideously motivated.. and now they need to consist of all three! What a change! My weight and overall health are benefiting greatly from this change, but it has taken quite a bit of getting used to! The pizza deliveries have become scarce, and the sushi deliveries even more so. {sniff..sniff..}

All of you who followed my previous blog know that my life has definately become more busy! No more daily blog entries. Good god, I think it's been literally months since I posted my farewell entry on the old blog.
Overwhelmed as a new mom? Well of course! .. but that isn't the reason for the lack of blog posts. I also run two small businesses, which keeps me completely insane. One I am in the process of ramping up, and the other I am in the process of ramping down. I am a professional photographer and am trying to change the focus of my business to Adoption Story DVD videos. This portion of my business is beginning to take off, and it is very exciting. I LOVE to create DVD videos telling the story of a family's journey to their Forever Family. I obviously have a close connection with these families to begin with, and every story is an inspiration. By the way - if you are an adoptive family and potentially interested in this, feel free to request some further info. You can also check out my website: www.akportrait.com.

So on top of everyday life, we are also in the process of adopting our second child. Yippee!! Yes, we are adopting through the same wonderful agency, and the same wonderful orphanage in India. Boy or girl? We aren't specifying! We let God handle the details the first time - he did a great job, so we thought we'd let him handle the second. ;)
We recently completed our home study - other than the fact that we are still awaiting our completed background checks. They are running ~10+ weeks right now, so we should be nearing completion. After that I guess it's Dossier time again and then waiting for a referral! Wow.. feels like things are moving quickly. It would be so amazing if we could get a referral by the end of the year!

And so we continue daring to go all out for our great hopes'.. daring to live our great dreams.. and never, ever, ceasing our belief in our tremendous expectations!