She has several words that she can say, these include: light, button, kitty, doggie, duckie, Daddy, Mama, Nana, hi, yeah, necklace, monkey, kick and ball. She can also meow like a cat. She understands a ton more than what she can actually say, and will happily fetch a book, or one of her toys when asked to get them. She can point to her head, feet, and ears when asked where they are, and points to our nose when asked where that is. She can also sign “all finished” and “more”, and is working on “milk” and”water”

She is a walking maniac. She started walking about a month ago, and it is now her main means of getting around. She loves to walk so much that when we set her down on the floor, she starts to laugh.

She’s also an excellent dancer, and will sway back and forth or bounce up and down whether there is music playing or not, she’ll often sing to herself and dance along with the song she is making up. When she wants us to play something, she will sing and dance, then look at us.

She prefers finger food to pureed baby food now, and makes it clear that she is ready to eat on her own, usually by bursting into tears when she sees the jar of baby food. She’ll eat almost anything, and will try any new food we put in front of her. she may not always like it, but she’ll always give it a taste at least once.

She is a very happy girl, but she is also highly opinionated, and if she isn’t getting what she wants she’ll let you know in no uncertain terms. But she is easily pleased and it really doesn’t take much to make her happy, a book, a toy, or several kisses to the belly usually does the trick.

She loves people and will wave and say “hi” to perfect strangers on the street. She loves animals and gets wiggly and excited whenever she sees one, whether it be a cat, dog, or even pigeons.

Books are her favorite toy, and she will frequently ask to be read to. She likes to flip the pages herself, and points to the pictures and asks “Dah?”, to which we dutifully answer “pig”, “dog”, “flower”, etc.

Holly is a joy and we are so happy she is in our lives. Here are a few pictures of the last year.

Holly continues to be a joy. She is talking like crazy, all kinds of great coos and gurgles. She will have conversations, responding to a question with a sweet noise, just like people She is getting so big, over 12 pounds, and we think she’s getting longer every day. She sits up with the assistance of pillows or the corner of the couch and likes to be held in a standing position. She hates tummy time with a passion and is very clear about her feelings on that subject. She’s happy and healthy, and we couldn’t ask for more.

Now, what you really want, pictures

Jeans and t-shirt photoshoot (Sept. 14th):

Peacock outfit (Sept. 17th):

Baby’s first IKEA. Yes, we got the puppets for her (Sept. 19th):

Morning smiles and her birth marks on back of head (Sept. 22nd):

“One million dollars!” (Sept. 22nd):

Grasping her first object (a shoe, which makes Mom very happy), plus a cute outfit on Kate’s birthday (Sept. 25th):

Baby’s first swing is all a blur. She loves it by the way (Sept. 28th):

Holly checks out the baby in the mirror. Cue “You’re so Vain” (Oct. 5th):

Kangaroo-style with Dad (Oct. 9th):

Official two-month photo, plus outtakes (Oct. 10th):

Born July 28th, 2010. 8lbs, 14oz. Healthy and gorgeous, with all 10 fingers and toes. And she’s ours!

How it all happened: Today at about 4pm we got a call from our social worker telling us that there was an “instant baby” born yesterday. This means that the birth mother hadn’t contacted the agency until after the baby was born. We agreed to show her our family book, and about two hours later, she’d picked us and we were on our way to the hospital. We meet her birth mom and family and got to hold her. Man, did I mention she’s gorgeous? We don’t get to bring her home until Saturday, but we’ll get to spend all day tomorrow with her at the hospital. We’re very much in shock and so happy!

More later when things have calmed down a bit. As of right now, it’s 2:00 AM and this is how we feel:

Dear friends and family,

Hello! We’re writing now for two reasons:

1. To give everyone a brief update on the status of our adoption
2. More importantly, we need just 15 minutes of your day to help us get $12,000 for the adoption. Seriously, no joke.

Status update

As you know, we are currently in the process of adopting our first child. We started in the Spring of 2007, and have been hoping and waiting ever since. We experienced a major setback when Vietnam closed their doors to American adoptive families. We quickly rebounded and moved on to domestic (aka American) adoption. We apparently have terrible luck since domestic adoptions have slowed dramatically in the last year, and there is still no end in sight as we enter year four of our journey.

So basically our status update is “everything is the same as it has been for the last year and a half.” Kind of anticlimactic, we know. People often ask “what’s going on with the adoption?” Here it is: we’re simply waiting to be matched with a birthmother. No more, no less. There is just a major shortage of birthmothers which is causing the long wait.

15 minutes of your day

We are hoping that 2010 will be the year that we become parents. Three years is a long time, and we are worn out with waiting. But more importantly, 2010 is the last year that adoptive families will be eligible for the Adoption Tax Credit. This is a tax credit given to adoptive families after they have completed an adoption. It currently covers costs up to $12,000. Considering that our adoption bill will add up to somewhere near $25,000 when it’s all said and done, the tax credit is basically our financial lifeline. Unfortunately, if we don’t complete an adoption by December 31st, 2010, we may not be able to take advantage of the credit. Without the credit, completing our adoption will be extremely difficult, and perhaps impossible.

Fortunately, there are two bills in the House and Senate – H.R. 213 and S2816 – that will reinstate the credit if passed. If you would like to help not only us, but thousands of families and children throughout the country, we’re asking that you take just a few minutes to contact your Senators and Congressmen and let them know that you support these bills.

We’ve been informed that e-mail or telephone are the best way to let our reps know that you support the bill. Snail-mail tends to take a long time and often doesn’t even make it to the right people. Don’t worry, we’ve made it ridiculously easy. Please follow these steps:

Easy Peasy

1. Copy the pre-written letter of support from this Web site:

   http://adoptiontaxcredit.wetpaint.com/page/Letter+or+Phone+Call+Script+to+Representive+from+Adoption+Supporter

2. Go to the contact Web pages for your representatives:
   http://www.contactingthecongress.org/
3. For each representative: paste in the pre-written letter, edit the letter to add your name (both in the first sentence, and the sign-off!), and click send
4. Done! The entire process should take no more than 15 minutes and means the world to us.

Thank you for all your love and support throughout this process. We can’t wait to send you the e-mail letting you know we’ve completed our journey!

Thank you,
Kate and Joel

P.S.
For the law nerds, here is more info on the bills:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-2816
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-213

Well, this is not a happy post to write. It has officially been one year since we entered the waiting family pool at our agency, and it feels like we are starting to prune up. We knew that it could easily be a year before we were matched with a birthmother, but we were hopeful that it would not take that long.

Unlike our Vietnam disaster, nothing is shutting down. Things are still working, just painfully slowly. Our agency is doing what they know how to do to get all of their families matched, but the fact of the matter is there are not very many birthmothers and there are a lot of waiting families. In the past year we have not seen nearly as many birthmother profiles as we thought we would. Along with a general shortage of women choosing adoption for their child, we have chosen not to show our family book to some women because it just didn’t feel like a good fit for us. We have shown to probably 8 women in the past year, none of whom decided to work with us. And while we are happy for the families that were matched this year, we are feeling pretty blue about the whole situation.

We have not lost hope, we will eventually bring our child home. It is just taking so much longer than we ever imagined it would. We are ready to bring our child home now, but we have not found them yet. Here’s hoping our next blog entry will bring happy news.

We’ve shown our book to 2 expectant mothers so far, and neither one chose us to parent their child. We were officially “in the pool” in early July, that puts us at about 6 months in right now. So if we are consistent with the agency’s timeline of 3-12 months to be matched, we should find our birth mother within the next 6 months.

We are constantly feeling a strange mix of excitement, anticipation, hope, confusion, and disappointment. What a wild journey this has been so far! We are still feeling optimistic most of the time and are looking forward to meeting our mystery child. We’re also very anxious to know when it will actually happen.

I want to thank all of you who inquire about our progress and have given us support through this whole crazy thing. Here’s to good news in ’09!

We did, however, spend some of this time shopping for our “instant baby” bag. In the event that we get a midnight phone call that there is a baby available and we get chosen by the birthmom, we have to be ready to go and pick the baby up at a moments notice.  If this occurs, we have an emergency baby kit. Thanks to our friends Rian and Amanda, we have a great infant car seat. We also have diapers, wipes, formula, bottles, blankets, and clothes.  And of course, my favorite piece to shop for were the clothes.

I LOVE baby clothes!  It’s not just the fact that I’m in baby fever mode right now, I have always loved baby clothes, even back when I was going to be a rebel and not have kids.  It’s just that whole miniature thing. So, for your viewing enjoyment, here are the outfits we bought the baby for the emergency kit.  Those of you who know me best will understand the gray outfits, and why I actually squealed in Old Navy when I saw them. These are the first official clothes we have purchased for the baby.

For the last several months our cat, Gary, has been the worst cat ever. He has been jumping on counters, swatting at us, scratching on the couch, running around like an idiot, yowling at 4 am, and being overly needy and annoying. This may sound like normal cat behavior to you dog folks out there, but in reality Gary is a pretty cool kitty. He is a bit needier than the average cat, but he is extremely well behaved and mellow.  He knows what surfaces are his to jump on and which aren’t; he is quiet when we sleep, and usually only talks when he’s hungry; he never scratches the furniture, only his post. We couldn’t figure out what was going on, it was really quite disturbing to us.  Then, the behavior stopped abruptly, he was good old good Gary again. Why the sudden change? Was he sick? Was it the weather change? And then we figured it out, Gary had been reacting to his people’s stress, our adoption stress. And now we aren’t feeling that any more, and neither is he.  Why, you may ask, has our stress level gone down? We are feeling good about our baby again.

We have made the shift towards anticipating a different and mysterious little person who will soon complete our family. There are so many great things to look forward to. We get to meet this person’s biological mother, that is really cool. We’ll know what she looks like and talks like, we’ll be able to answer all of those tough “where did I come from” questions. We will potentially be at the hospital when this little creature is born! That wasn’t even a remote possibility before. We’ll be bringing home a newborn rather than a 6-9 month old, which means we’ll get to experience all those wonderful changes that happen in those first important months. And most of all, we are feeling confident for the first time that our child, whoever she or he may be, will finally be coming home to us.

Joel and I have been much happier people the last month or so. I put that all down to one word, hope. We have spent a long time without it, and now that it’s back we are ecstatic.  So, much thanks to our soon to be child, for giving your mom and dad hope again.

We started out making decisions about what the most important things in our lives were.  We settled on; our relationship, us as individuals, our families, and our close friends.  This settled, we began the great search for photographs depicting all of these things in the best light.  Most of our photos are digitized, so this wasn’t too difficult.  We also dug into our family and friends’ stashes.  The search for the best photos took about two weeks.Our biggest challenge was finding photos of Joel.  He is behind the camera 90% of the time.  We managed to get enough after much searching.  Having a photographer in the family means lots to sort through   I, as token English teacher in the house, was in charge of the birthmother letter and captions.  Joel, as token graphics designer in the house, was in charge of layout.  One might look at these qualifications and say that we had it in the bag.  Not that easy.

We wanted to make sure that everyone was similarly represented, that we had serious and crazy times, that we showed the full gamut of our lives. We spent the majority of two full days on the task.  After several versions and updates, the first draft is complete and we’ve sent it off to our social worker today.  Phew!

She gave us a little advice and her seal of approval, we’ll be ready to print up a few copies of the book and send them to the agency by the end of the week, then we’re in the pool!