Around Thanksgiving, I invited a handful of friends & family who I keep in regular contact to visit this blog. It was the first time that I shared our adoption blog with people who knew us well in real life. I thought a long time about doing it. Would they really be interested in hearing about the wait... week after week after week? Would they think I'm pet-obsessed after seeing the zillion pictures of Thani and Yoshi? I thought it was a good idea since we are now getting more and more questions about our adoption progress. At Christmas, we also shared the blog URL in our holiday cards. As I'm finding with Melinda, this is a great way to keep in touch on a daily or weekly basis so please feel free to leave comments.

As for adoption news, we got in touch with our social worker this past week. We still need to file our mortgage papers with the agency, and one of our reference letters got lost in the mail so we need to get that re-sent. Otherwise we are done! We are hoping to have our homestudy sent in before we leave for Isla Mujeres in a couple of weeks.

On Wednesday evening, we are planning to attend a "Pre-Travel Support Group" meeting at our agency. They will have two families discuss their travel experiences in Russia, and we'll get to ask questions and meet other families who are waiting along with us. The following week they are having a Russian Storytelling Night (in English & Russian) for the kids. I don't know if we'll go to that because we'll be heading off to Mexico the following morning. Please do not egg our house.