A year in retrospect

Boy this year flew by, it only felt like a few days. Oh wait, it's January 3, 2008! Never mind.

2007 was the fastest year in the history of my life. For almost the first half T-Daddy was on active duty, thus not home. The middle was spent in Hawaii and the end was in China picking up CiBaby and getting adjusted to toddlerhood.

January started out quiet until I called our agency inquiring about the Waiting International Children (WIC). My heart was telling me that this was our path. After a brief discussion we were sent information on one little girl, whom I lovingly refer to as the paper-ripper. A few days later I was on a plane to visit T-Daddy where we sat and mulled over the paper-ripper, but we had some reservations about the timing of picking her up. It was to be 4-5 months, however T-Daddy would still be on active-duty and wouldn't be able to travel. As this was something that we really wanted to do together we had to release her information. If she was meant to be ours, she would be there in a few months.

Paper-ripper sat on the WIC page for months. The longer she sat there the more we thought she was the one. When the day came that we could say "Yes, we want her!" she was gone. My heart broke but that little voice inside me said that if she was truly the one then she would have still been there. She was someone else's "one." A month and a half went by and just before I was about to fly out to road-trip back with T-Daddy I got a call. It was late Friday evening (May 11, 2007) and the call came to work. As I was a "single" work geek at that point I was still there. Our "one" found us! CiBaby found us. We accepted our referral, did more paperwork and hurried up and waited.

Summer came and so was our Hawaii vacation. The week before we were to leave I found out that my job was possibly going away as our office was merging with another. Not something you tend to like to hear right before you leave on vacation. Our vacation was absolutely wonderful, a great time to reconnect as a couple in a beautiful setting.

Life returned to normal. We kept waiting to hear when we would travel to pick-up CiBaby. During this time I found out that I wasn't going to have a job as of the beginning of December, but they weren't leaving me out in the cold. This also made a very hard decision, to go back to work or not, much easier.

September came and we were contacted by our coordinator asking us if we could travel the following weekend...Ummm huh??? As it turns out, that didn't work for the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou anyway. It was like early/false labor! We were able to get our appointment for October 23rd. Of course it couldn't be too easy though, our fingerprints were going to expire a couple of days shy of our appointment! After much hustling on our part and our agency's part we got our fingerprinting appointment, then we could relax and get ready for the trip.

October was a blur. I finished up working and got us ready to leave for China. We spent one fun evening with friends in San Francisco before jetting off to China. The first real day in Beijing we went to see the Great Wall, which was an awesome experience. The next day we flew to Wuhan in the Hubei Province where we met and picked-up CiBaby. Our semi-rocky start softened and we had a wonderful time getting to know our new daughter while experiencing an amazing culture.

November and December were months of routine making and celebrating.

2007 was a fast, crazy and amazing year. Here's to another great year!