July 12

Well, here's teh insanity explained a bit more. We knew our social worker would be coming for our safety inspection this Wed. We realized there was NO WAY we'd pass. I had started ages ago to refinish our cabinet doors in our kitchen but burned way out and never finished. As a result, we had no doors on most of our cabinets. Also, DH had started to replace the floor and had never finished, so we had two floors. It was basically atrocious, so we had a gate keeping DS out and never worried. Yeah, that was NOT going to fly. So, I spent EIGHTEEN hours Sat/Sun painting and my cousin came Mon/Tues and replaced the floor. In the meantime, Dh emptied out our back master bedroom which we've been using as sotrage because we hadn't replaced the red shag carpet that was put in in the 70s. So, all in all, we spent Sat 10AM-midnight working. Sunday 10AM-5PM, Monday 9AM-midnight, Tuesday on and off all day for me and then 4PM-midnight for DH, and Wed 9AM-2PM. We literally put our last bag of clothes we hadn't had chance to fold in my backseat TEN MINUTES before our social worker arrived!!!!! The visit went great. The house looked good and passed fine. Our social worker is really really great nad even brought roses! We're now officially done except we need the stupid criminal record board to send our records. They're really taking their time, which is annoying, because otherwise it would be done and notarized by today, but whatever...

In other news, as we were going INSANE, our Russian agency sent us all of our dossier paperwork to get started on! We went on Wed and notarized the paperwork that didn't require work and we started to work on teh other stuff today, but really, we just needed a BREAK! We'll go great guns tomorrow, but today we just needed a rest. It's really moving along now, though!!!

Oh, also, we have an appt with INS to submit our homestudy and apply for our I-600A on July 23rd - wish us luck that it will move quickly!!!!!

In the meantime, some before and afters of my kitchen...

The ugly ass cabinets


The lovely green (sorry for the swatch of yellow)The NEW kitchen!!!!!


The same backwall ALL yellow! It looks really dark, but it really isn't that dark yellow.