we will try to update this at least once a week!

Sorry we have not been updating as much as we want to! We have been busy though it is summer and that means i have my two little buddies Madison and Dexter during the day :) but Madison will be going to summer school so I guess I will only have her half the day lol. This week Madelynn is visiting us :-D she has gotten soo much bigger since the last time we saw her. We will be having her brother Braxton for a few days some time soon. Seeing how much they have grown just shows how fast time goes by. We took Madelynn to do some really fun things this weekend and I have some really cute picture that I will get around to posting some time today or tomorrow. Yesterday was fathers day happy fathers day to any fathers out there!
         We have our final home-study soon and we are very excited about that we can not wait to be a waiting family. We have decided to make new photo books since we now have to have two in case we get a sibling set because each child needs one to look at. So we are just going to do two smaller books and have decided to just do pictures of Jon and I, our dogs, a few pictures of our house, the elementary school, early learning center, and the two parks by our house. They look at the books before they meet us and then when we go to meet them we will bring the big book along so we can look at it together and they can see pictures of our family and friends and so on. So we are going to work on and finish the new books this week and then i will post pictures of them.
        June 7th was our 3 year anniversary :) it is crazy to think that we have been married that long. We just had our parents over for dinner and then Jon took off work the next day and we went out to eat and saw a movie it was fun :).
       Well I am off to do some more laundry and see what the kids are up to and try to find something for us to do today since it has been raining on and off..... maybe the art center or something.

Cleaning closets!

So today I am cleaning out the closet in our future child/children's room have some stuff for the big garage sale we have at my parents house every year and some stuff that needs to get put into totes. We also have stuff that we bought to repair for our placement and that stuff will be put in there on the shelves. Its getting closer and we just want to be all ready :-D. Well back to cleaning at least its a good day to clean its nasty and raining out side! Hope every one is having a good day!

Its been awhile..

So it has been awhile since we did an update. We are now done with everything we are just waiting for our final home study where we will be licensed :). We have been very busy lately most of our weekends are packed with things to do. This weekend we got to spend some time with my brother and my adorable niece Lily she is getting so big. She will be 1 in the beginning of July time just goes by way to fast. We have been doing the last touches on our house to be ready for our placement and we have been cleaning up the yard and out side around the house. We even planted some flowers :) and my mom helped :-D. We are so excited about becoming a waiting family! Well I need to head back out side and help Jon finish picking up sticks and weeds here are some cute pictures that i took of my niece today!

Training

Today we had our first training class! It went really good :). There were a few speakers and we watched a few movies. We came up here tonight and are staying in a hotel. Our second class is tomorrow they are each 8 hours long. There are only 5 other couples in our class and everyone is very nice. After class we went to the mall in Appleton and then went out to eat. We are off to bed now we have to get up bright and early for class tomorrow :). Here are a few pictures we took. We will add more tomorrow! Hope everyone is having a good weekend!

Home Visit update

This past weeek, we have had our social worker come out and ask us more questions about why we want to adopt, what we do for fun, how we get along with other people, what our families think of our adoption, etc.  In the next 1-2 weeks, we plan to go and do our two, 8 hour classes in Neenah, WI.  I hope that these classes go good and that we can get our Foster care license soon because I'm starting to get anxious.

Look for more updates from us in the next week or two and wish us luck in our classes.

UPDATE!!

Sorry we have not updated in awhile... Jon had his interview and it went really good I will have him post about his some time this week. I also had mine it was on Monday and it went really well too. I was just asked questions about my childhood and family like where i grew up and where I went to school and so on. Also what my hobbies are. I also had my physical Jon needs to have his done yet and we both need to get TB tests and finger printed. Our first training class is on May 14th and then we will have one more the following Saturday. After that we will meet with our CW one more time and we will then be a waiting family yay!!!
We spent last weekend in Door County and it was a lot of fun :) and on Saturday we went to my parents house for Easter and got to spend time with a lot of family :) :). I will post some pictures from the weekend when I'm done with this post. We also added a few things to child's bedroom I will try to get some pictures of that later this week and post it. And we got some wooden puzzles (we have decided to get rid of cardboard children's puzzles we have) the puzzles we got are soo cool one you fish for the pieces and another one talks. We also got some more books :). We are going to be buying a sand table because we have purple sand in a small pool for the kids I baby sit to play with but it takes up a lot of room so we were going to get rid of the sand but decided we would buy one of those sand tables that are off the ground and have a cover for our foster to adopt child (madison and dex and any other kids who come to play can play in it too :D) instead of getting rid of it that way it would give Jon another way to bond with the child because from the books we read it can be harder for the father to bond then the mother. So we are taking ideas from the books and research on the net for ways that Jon can bond quicker :). Legos and fun things to play with them are good ways to bond so we figure the sand will be a good bonding tool they can build castles and what ever the child can imagine to build in the sand. I am trying to think if there is anything else.... well if I think of anything else I will do another update later. Watch for Jon's post he will probably post tonight or tomorrow. Hope everyone had a great Easter weekend!!! We did but we missed all of our family from out of state :( we love all of you guys too!

                                                one of our God Daughters (Madison 7yo)

                                                   My cousin's son Isaac :) he is 3yo(almost 4)

                                                   Easter egg hunt at my parents house

                                                       What did you get???????

                                                           Mmmmm chocolate!

                                                        My mom and her sisters (my aunties)

                                                        Madison and one of her prizes

                                  Madison in Door County dyeing Easter eggs with Jon's mom :)

                                                            She beat us in Mexican Train!

                                            Madison and her Jon Jon playing with the itouch :)

                          Maddie and the Easter Bunny at one of the Easter egg hunts in Door County

                                                            All of the eggs she collected!!

                                                  Madison and our Siberian Husky Akira!                

Maddie with her face painted like a bunny :)

Home Visit & Training

We are awaiting Jon's interview with our social worker next Friday morning and the 2nd of 3 home visits.  We are excited to continue our home visits and hopefully, we will be able to complete our training classes by the end of May if not before.  We also have to do an additional 8 hrs of learning about different social issues, how to handle diffferent situations, etc & write a brief 2-3 sentence paragraph about what we learned that we didn't already know.  We can do this by reading, watching videos, volunteering, etc.  We did receive a recommendation from our worker to do 4 hours of video or reading, but use the other 4 hours to learn about the potential childs issues and understand how to work with them, which I feel is a great idea!

We are happy to know that when we cleaned our house and showed it to our social worker, she was happy with it.  We do need to put some things out of a childs reach and purchase a couple more door locks, but aside from that, our house is looking good.  Oh, and with this new law in Wisconsin, about the carbon monixide detector, we are unsure if we need one for the upstairs & downstairs, but we will find out soon enough and get a 2nd one if we need to. 

Started reading the first book and love it

So we were given homework we have to read 4 hours worth of books from a list we were given (she brought one that i decided i would read even though it will take more then 4 hours) and then after we get a placement we have to read some sort of book that goes with the child in our placement for another 4 hours we can also do an online class or watch a video I chose the book and Jon is going to attempt to read it to but he is not a big reader. So he might do the Internet class instead. The book I am reading right now is called Parenting the Hurt Child helping adoptive families heal and grow. It is really good so far and I am only on page 50. It has all kinds of stories and tells you different situations and why the child acts the way they do. I have done a lot of research on attachment disorders because most children that are in foster care have some sort of attachment disorder and this book really tells you how those attachment disorders come about and how you can help the child heal. I think this is a great book for everyone to read. People might think twice before staring at a child in public that is throwing a tantrum because if you do not know them they you do not know where they came from. They could have been a foster child or not in a good home. Or even children adopted internationally and where in an orphanage. It is so sad to think of what happened to these children that make them the way they are and it really is not their fault the way they act. It is not them just being naughty it confuses them but it is how they have learned to respond. Any ways I would recommend this book to everyone if you know someone who is doing foster to adopt, fostering, or just straight adopting or already has this book can help you to better understand the way their child might act and why and also help you so you can support the parents and the child in the right way. We will be buying a copy of this book so if any of our friends or family want to borrow it and read it just let us know! There are a few other books I'm going to read one is called Parenting with Love and Logic and I am not sure what the other one is called I will let you guys know how those are when I'm done with them. If anyone has any other ideas for books that we should read let us know!

First homestudy!

We had our first home study last night! It went really good our social worker is very nice. She asked us a few questions and went over her check list to look at stuff like our birth certificates and proof of insurance and so on. Then she looked around our house a little bit. The only thing we have to do to our house is to take some brackets down in the bathroom that are for a towel bar that fell down so we either have to take the brackets down or put the bar back up. We also have to take our classes probably in early May and we have a few hours that we have to read a book about children in foster care, do a program on the Internet about it or watch a video. And we have to get finger printed. We also have another 2-3 home studies and now we are excited for them :). Home studies and the process of foster to adopt it different in every state. If you have already been through the home study and so on what was it like in your state?

Lifebook

We have to make a lifebook for our future foster to adopt child/children to look at before they are placed with us so they know some things about us and our family and friends and so on. I am posting these in case anyone needs any ideas to make one of their own. So here is what we have so far! We are not totally done yet.

Pictures of bedroom and living room

Here they are! Pictures of our future foster to adopt child/children's room and some of our living room (with our new couch and chair)! The bedroom was pink and purple when we moved in we repainted it blue and brown a few months ago and the room theme is beach/surfing. There are a few pink and purple things left in the room the light and a rug if we get placed with boys those will be replaced with blue and white ones. Also there are Hannah Montana stickers and they will be taken down if we get placed with boy. Let us know what you think!

 Bedroom door

 Entrance to the room (the curtain will also be replaced if we get boys)

 art work

 cubical storage :) its all quiet stuff to do

 bunk beds with surfer stickers

 closet

 more storage and drawers and those are gloe bears

 new couch and chair

 living room

that's the other side of our living room