I'm still here

I'm here and I'm stitching, just haven't had a lot of computer time. Up until Friday we had been crazily cleaning the house for the home study visit which went just fine. I was a little nervous but the social worker was nice. You just never know what to expect though. She didn't even look at a few of the things I was sure we'd be asked to fix (that we're planning on fixing anyway when we have the time/money). So now I have a very clean house and really not much to do but enjoy it for a few weeks until the home study paperwork is done and then we'll be madly rushing to assemble and send out our dossier so we can wait again. If our fingerprints ever get done, that is.
The night before the home study we got a rejection letter from the state saying that our first set of prints was rejected because they were too dark and that we should take these nice, shiny, new cards down to a state police post and have them filled out and printed by someone who is trained in doing that. Um, I thought that was why we took them down to the local state police post the first time. All righty then. We'll just do that again and wait another four weeks for them to be rejected for being too light then? I don't think so. Much as we hate to do it, we're going to make the 3 hour drive down to Indianapolis to the big state police post and get printed there because they will immediately tell us if the prints are good or not. That way we can stay on schedule to be done with paperwork in October and all will be good until the next problem arises.

So that's the adoption update/rant for now. It really is going well though and very quickly according to our coordinator and the social worker. They tell us that our application should be processed very quickly once it gets to Russia since we've not requested a gender preference. It just doesn't seem that way to me but I keep reminding myself that it really is and that I should be enjoying my time as just us before the baby arrives.

I am stitching and stitching a lot apparently. Last month I participated in the Stitching Olympics over on The Wagon BB. I entered Noah's Sub in the Long Jump category for big and solidly stitched projects and actually gold medalled the category. I'm still not sure how that happened, I was so sure I was just barely keeping up with my competitors as I had been most of the month that I had to add up my totals twice just to be sure. There were prizes involved and I'll show pics once they arrive but even without the prize I still would have stitched and I'm very proud of the progress the whole group made. It was a very stitchy August. At this rate we'll have no problems getting Noah up on the wall before the baby gets here.

So here's the before-



And the after-



That adds up to 12,509 stitches for me last month. I'm going to put it down for September though, it's time to work on something else just for a little bit. So far it's been a new start, The Cross Eyed Cricket's Skeleton Crew, but so far there's not much to show there. I've just got a white blob that'll eventually be a sail.

Other than stitching and adoption stuff though, there's not much going on around here. We're really boring people right now. Erich is enjoying his new job though and they've been fabulous working with his schedule to make sure he can be where he needs to for adoption appointments.

I promise I'll be back a little sooner next time and we'll talk awards and maybe some 101 in 1001 list which I think is due to be updated. Have a great Sunday!