We interrupt this regular blog.....

Hi all - I am very excited my sweet husband is letting me guest blog on his Tri for Hope blog! Who wants to read about all that training stuff all the time anyways??!!?? Anyhoo, as Ted mentioned, we are officially on the road to Ethiopia for our second child. We have been telling everyone we are paper pregnant, and in the spirit of our pregnancy, I have been working hard packing on some pregnancy weight with cheesecake and chocolate while Ted works his hardest training for all these events! In reality, "my" bike is in the shop. Ok, it is really Ted's old bike from college. It is a heavy mountain bike that I have retrofitted with all the doohickeys (is that how you spell that?) I need to commute to work day or night. Ted can't stand it. I must admit, my first experience with the bike was less than favorable when we decided to do a little off roading and crossed a stream, when I attempted to get up the bank, the weight of the bike was too much and I crashed, nearly impaled on a nearby branch, but from that point, it has been a love hate relationship. Sure you can hear me coming about a block away with all the clunking and squeaking it makes, but I never need a bell to signal people to move out of the way, and sure it takes twice the effort of any other bike to pedal, I chalk that up to additional strength training, and granted, one of the shifters went bad a couple years back, who needed those gears anyway? Gosh, I love that big purple hunk of metal!

Back to our Ethiopian adoption journey, we found out this weekend that we aren't criminals and don't have TB! Yah!!! We have most of the paperwork together for our homestudy. With the update interview out of the way, we are just waiting on the DCFS CANTS clearance and the State Police clearance and we are on our way to having our updated homestudy. Word from Adoption Advocates (AAI) is that we might be off the dossier preparation waiting list in July! Though we are itching to get our dossier started, we know once that is finished, it is out of our hands and we will have to settle in for a long wait for a referral. At this time, we feel we are making progress and moving ahead. It is a great feeling!