LOG-IN DATE!!!!!!!!!!! (& Christmas pics!)

I have been HORRIBLE about blogging recently! Yikes! It's my crazy busy work season but I have had some really stunning newborn sessions recently!

Anywho, back to the personal stuff. We got our LID on Friday - we were officially logged-in on 12.7.10! I was so happy when I saw the social worker's email that I wanted to cry ... I felt like I did when I found out I was pregnant both times. It was a very surreal feeling because we have been working toward these last few goals for *so* long. I finally feel like we're almost there.

For those of you that aren't a part of the adoption world - our LID is notification that our dossier has been received in China. It hasn't been "approved," but it's there. This is a huge milestone for us because it means we can finally start receiving files to look at! A new shared list comes out once a month - this is a list of new orphans added to the special needs program that all adoption agencies share. Files are pulled from the new list for adoptive parents to look at. Only one file can be "locked" at a time for a family - we'll have 72 hours to review any given file and decide whether the little one in that file is our daughter. Fortunately we received our LID just in time for the next shared list release, which is this coming Monday night! Our adoption social workers will stay through the night because that's when the new kiddos are added to the list - as new children are added, they will work on locking files for the families that are currently waiting with their adoption agency. They will have our special needs checklist to refer to ... and will hopefully lock-in a file for us that meets what we're looking for. I hope that super-long-winded explanation made sense. LOL.

Soooooo ... the bottom line is that we are *very* hopeful that we may have a file of a baby girl to review on Tuesday morning. What an amazing Christmas gift that would be .... wow.

I have been praying around the clock (or it seems so anyway) that God directs our adoption social workers to our daughter. I would love for us to be led to her before Christmas but also understand that this will happen in God's time. Please, please keep us in your prayers! Pray for guidance for our social workers - pray that they are led to our daughter - and please pray that everything can fall into place so that we can bring her home as quickly as possible! This is such an exciting time ... sooooooo close to our family of 5!

Last little note - these were our Christmas portraits of the kids. I shot a *ton* to get a few winners, but I really LOVE the first 3. I already have them printed and framed, just need to get them back up on the walls. They look really beautiful! It gets easier and easier to get pictures of them together, although I am really happy to say that it will most likely be quite difficult next Christmas! LOL.