Nursery

We are starting on Molly's nursery.. we painted the walls a pale yellow and the ceiling blue. We are having a mural painted on the wall next month. It is going to be a tree, with little lady bugs (for good luck) and bunnies and birds, then over her crib will be two birds carring a red thread( which Chinese folklore says that an invisible red thread connects those people destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break) with her name on the red thread. This is a drawing of what the mural will look like but she is going to add some lady bugs and other details.

March, 2007

We decided on a name for the baby, it is going to be Molly Renee Merritt. I have changed my mind so many times. First we were going to name her Kaylee, Emily, Riley, but I wanted something different. Then my sister said why not Molly, she said if I ever had a girl (she has two boys) that is the name I would choose. I really like the name Molly too and I am going to give her my middle name Renee because Madison has Gene's middle name Leigh.

Madison is so funny we talk about the baby everyday and we have changed her name so many times she gets confused and calls her one of the names we were going to name her. It is very cute!

She cannot wait to meet her little sister. She is so excited, she told me Mom, I do not want to see the picture of Molly, I want you to suprise me when you come home with her. I thought that was very sweet. She is going to be such a good big sister!

January 2006

We completed our homestudy and it went great! Our social worker, did a friend of ours homestudy as well, she is great! We completed all of our paperwork and had to have all of it authenicated, we completed our fingerprints... It was a lot of work, it took us about 4 months to get everything together and complete our dossier. I was sooo excited to send it in to our agency, we sent it in the last of April and we did not get our DTC date until May 25th because they had to wait to have a few others to send in together...I was so anxious to get it there, Gene always says I am on a mission! When I start something I am focused until it is finished, and it was killing me that our dossier was sitting at our agency and not on the way to China.

We received our LID and it was JUNE 5, 2005! I was so excited to have that date! The paperchase was over!! YEA!! Now the wait begins!

December, 2005

We have been thinking about adoption for awhile, we really wanted another child and for Madison to have a sibling. We just kept praying about it and everywhere we went we would see asian girls, with their new families. Gene kept running in to people at work who adopted from China. Everything just fell in place, and we knew this was meant to be for us to adopt a little girl from China. So on Dec.15, 2005, we started our adoption journey. A friend of ours told us about the agency she used in Iowa called Gift of Love International Adoptions, so we started the process.