She's REALLY Ours

Today was a very big day for the Stoll Family. At last we managed to jump through all of the right hoops for the powers that reside in the Weld County Courthouse. At 9:22 a.m today, Judge John J. Althoff granted our petition to re-adopt Luo Ya Jing of Xiangyin, Hunan, China and make her Samara Jing Stoll of Greeley, Colorado, USA. Of course, the People's Republic of China and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service had already said she was ours, 10 months ago, complete with a letter from President Bush welcoming her as a U.S. Citizen. But, then, Weld County has never been on the cutting edge. On hand to help us commemorate the big event were big sister Katelynn, Grandma and Grandpa Kemis and our dear friends who have been huge supporters throughout the adoption process, Kristen, Thomas, Samuel and Isabel Mettlen. (Well, Isabel has only been around the last two months and Randy was only able to be there in spirit.) It was a happy group that posed with the judge afterward.

Nikki had to miss the court date today as she had signed up to be an Election Judge. Somehow she and I did not put together that election day would be November 1st. (What in the world is Colorado doing having elections one week early?) By the time we realized the conflict she felt badly backing out on her commitment and it would have cost us more than a month to change the court date. She said it was almost fun being at the polls all day though they paid the kids less than the adults for the same job. I'm proud of her for being such a good citizen, however.

We had a blast introducing Mara to the joys of free candy just for showing up at a stranger's house last night. She is now a huge fan of trick-or-treating and asked Dad first thing this morning if she could do it some more. She was a very cute "bumbeebee," though she had grown enough since I purchased the costume a few months ago to make it a bit snug. We started out at Nikki's school where the Interact Club had their annual "Trick or Treat Street" event for safe candy collection. We really only went there so Nikki could show off her adorable sister to all of her friends. After that we did some "unsafe candy collection" in the neighborhood and Mara, being a true Stoll, enjoyed this MUCH more than the school event. Always living on the edge of danger! We wrapped up the evening with our traditional cider and doughnuts at Grandma's house. A good time was had by all.

Mara is finally showing every sign of being potty trained! Hallelujah! After a long, rough start, she apparently decided about 3 days ago that it just wasn't worth the rebellion and has been great at staying dry. The final frontier had been getting her to tell us when she wanted to go rather than waiting for us to take her. Today I came up from the basement to find her settling onto the toilet with the casual comment, "Mara going potty." Woo-Hoo!! I think she's got it.

As for adoption number 2, we are still waiting on our holy grail, the I-171H. This is made even more frustrating by the fact that a Denver couple who did their second filing only one day before we did ours, received their document in 9 days. I think that is our confirmation that our application is on the slow desk. Bummer. But we did get word from CCAI that the rest of our dossier has been critically reviewed and "looks great." That is good news, we don't have to fix any errors or redo anything. So we just sit and wait as we try to sincerely accept that God's timing is crucial.

Well, it has been an exciting but long day. I'm ready for a good night's sleep. I'll add a few pictures from last night and today then off to bed.