Sooner? We'll see...

Now that China has the online system of submitting papers for special needs children, I was hoping things would go faster. I forgot to tell you yesterday what our case manager told me. The usual timeframe for pre-approval (PA) is 6-8 weeks. However, with the new system, one couple was just pre-approved in 2 days! That shaves 1.5-2 months off the possible timing! Whew! Who knows?

We do have some papers to acquire before we travel, including the homestudy amendment and new fingerprints (and I'm not sure how to go about this!) So, we'll have to figure these out still. But, things are still looking good.

In the meantime, I'm nesting. :-) I warned Mike I would be. I'm freecycling lots of stuff ("Get it out of here! No time for a garage sale!") I'm also trying to imagine the new rooms. We have to move Tommy from his room into Ben's room so that we can begin preparing Gracelynn's room. Tommy's bed is all set... we just need to transfer clothes and new dressers into that room. Gracelynn's room will be easy too... that shouldn't take much other than throwing a few pink things in there. :-) I want to get a pink comforter for the bed and put Reagan's pink curtains in there too, and paint over a yellow stripe to make it pink. Reagan will get different curtains. Her room is pink top to bottom, so a change of curtains would be a refreshing change.

One good thing occurred last week with PERFECT timing. Tommy FINALLY was potty-trained. For a 3.5 year old boy who was plain stubborn, something just finally clicked. He has always had amazing control, but just didn't want to use the bathroom and didn't care what happened. Last week, he was home from school 2 days due to sickness, and the other day due to the fact that our timing didn't work since the doctor was calling with Gracelynn's information. So, he had a full week at home in big boy pants. It worked. In the last 7 days, he had one accident (Tuesday after school), and was clearly distraught over it. He even sleeps through the night in big boy pants with no accidents! Woo Hoo! I guess my telling him that he couldn't go to the big bed (twin) in Ben's room unless he was potty-trained really worked. YAY! I'm not a horrible mommy after all. (How embarrassing to tell people that my 3 year, 8 month old son is not potty-trained... but I don't have to do it any longer!) OK, enough about this... this story belongs on the other blog, but I just thought the timing was perfect since we can now carry through with moving Tommy into Ben's room soon.