Only Five Days until we travel. I am so excited I can barely stand it. I imagine this is what all mothers feel like days before they deliver their child. Only I do have the added bonus that I don't have to worry about the pain of labor right before the meeting. Believe me I have had "labor" to get to this day, just in a different form. Even though I know that Isabella will not be coming home with us on this trip, I know that in a matter of days my whole world is going to change. My view on life, my way of life, everything about life is going to change. "I" am going to be a "mother", somebody's mamma. What a wonderful feeling!

We have worked so hard to get here and I'm finally going to be holding my child in my arms for the first time. I'm SO EXCITED. I can't wait to get off that plane and get to the hotel on Friday. I can't wait to see John hold his daughter for the first time. Did I mention that I am VERY EXCITED?

I have tried to wait until the last few days to prepare everything so I'll have something to keep me busy. Tonight I took all Isabella's clothes off the hangers, carefully took the tags off, and washed her clothes. It was the most enjoyable load of laundry I've ever washed! All those little pink, and lavender, and yellow dresses. I'm really trying not to over pack, but I don't want to get there and not have enough for ten days. I'm usually such a savvy traveler and can often do a week's trip with just a carry on. But I think I'll be using the full limit of free luggage allowance on this trip. Fortunately, I have some "friends" and colleagues at the airport. :-)

Well I don't want to make this post too long because the good lord knows I could go on and on at this point talking about this trip. I think I've driven everyone around me nuts because I've been so giddy. I wish I could be close to my family during this time. I miss you guys SO much.

Be sure to check in over the next few days. I'll try to post new photos daily of the baby while we are down there. We're also taking a web cam for with us :-)

By the way we received a medical report on Monday, but it was all in Spanish. Our caseworker is out of town until Feb 1 so John and I tried to translate it. Our understanding is that Isabella is already up to 9.5 lbs. Sounds like she's doing great. We can't wait to see.

Our sleepy little girl :-)

We received a few new photos today so I wanted to get them online for you guys as soon as possible. I do have a couple more but I have to work with my photos software to get them formatted correctly for this blog. John and I had a wonderful weekend visiting his mother in California and I'm a little tired from the trip so this is short and sweet.

These photos were taken on her medical appointment Jan 20, 2006. Looks like she was more interested in some good sleep than that silly camera in her face. At least she's got her priorities straight. hehe Check in again Tuesday evening for a full update :-)

The Good Stuff- You know that country music song....The good Stuff? Since I left Kentucky I'm totally out of tune with country music so I have no idea who sings it. But it sure is stuck in my head this week. Because we are finally getting to...the good stuf.....

I've noticed a lot of my post are so serious and kind of a downer...so from now on I'm going to try to lighten it up a little. So here goes some good news...

John and I are going to spend 10 wonderful days with our daughter on February 3-13th. We will get to keep the baby with us the entire time! I am excited beyond words. I spend about half of my day daydreaming about meeting her for the first time. What it's going to be like to hold her...and see her in person. I'll be borrowing a friends laptop and we booked a room with high speed internet so you can expect photos of her every day.

Yesterday we went BABY SHOPPING. Wow...was that weird and wondeful at the same time. We bought cute little pink outfits and a couple of toys to take with us. We're well stocked on baby blankets, but will still have to pick up some bottles and such to take down there. We have to take most of the supplies we need because when they drop her off we get her and one bottle and that's it! There is a pharmacy near our hotel though, and the Marriott we're staying at caters to adoptive families. We should be in good hands and have the company of many other adoptive families on our stay.

Okay I can't get though this blog without daydreaming so I'm signing off for now. Just wanted to share some of my excitement with everyone else. :-)

Love,
Janine

Information about Guatemala- We all know that on average more than half of Americans flunk geography and world knowledge quiz. I'm a geography buff and I have to admit that I know much more about Europe and Asia than I do central America. So I thought I'd add some information about our daugther's birth country and culture. Below you'll find a map and some basic facts. If you look at the southwestern part of the country you'll see Retalhuleu which is where Isabella was born. More fact at the bottom of this post...

Updates- Today we are very excited because we found out that we will probably be able to go and meet our daughter the first week of February! Yep...that's right just over two weeks from now. We are so excited and nervous! I can't imagine the sensation of holding my daughter for the first time after all we have been through this past year. What a magical moment that will be!
We're just waiting on the okay from both of our jobs to have the time off. We will take TONS of photos and will try to update the blog when we are there. We're hoping to stay for about ten days. I know it is going to be so EXTREMELY hard to leave her but I'm not going to let that stop us from seeing her when she is this young. I am sure it will be worth every minute of heartache we feel when we leave. We'll update more on this as we start planning.

Special Thanks- So many of you deserve special thank for all your support so far. This week I want to say a HUGE THANK YOU to our military family Adam and Sandy S. They really went out on a limb this week to help us with an obstacle we were facing with our adoption. We asked a huge favor of them and they didn't even think twice before helping us. Thank you for your constant support and for being so excited with us! I could never survive being away from my family without you guys.

Leave Your Comments: I love to know when you guys are checking in so please leave comments when you stop in. Someday this will be a sort of journal for our daughter so she can read our journey and I know she would enjoy reading your comments. You don't have to register- just click on the comments button at the bottom of the post and select anonymous as your ID. That way I won't email some of you with news you've already read :-)


Geography
The northernmost of the Central American nations, Guatemala is the size of Tennessee. Its neighbors are Mexico on the north and west, and Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador on the east. The country consists of three main regions—the cool highlands with the heaviest population, the tropical area along the Pacific and Caribbean coasts, and the tropical jungle in the northern lowlands (known as the Petén).

Government
Constitutional democratic republic.

National name: República de Guatemala
President: Oscar Berger (2004)
Area: 42,042 sq mi (108,890 sq km)
Population (2005 est.): 14,655,189 (growth rate: 2.6%); birth rate: 34.1/1000; infant mortality rate: 35.9/1000; life expectancy: 65.1; density per sq mi: 349

Capital and largest city (2003 est.): Guatemala City, 2,655,900 (metro. area), 1,128,800 (city proper)
Other large cities: Mixco, 287,600; Villa Nueva, 138,900
Monetary unit: Quetzal
Languages: Spanish 60%, Amerindian languages 40% (23 officially recognized Amerindian languages, including Quiche, Cakchiquel, Kekchi, Mam, Garifuna, and Xinca)
Ethnicity/race: Mestizo (Ladino)—mixed Amerindian-Spanish ancestry—55%, Amerindian (Mayan) or predominantly Amerindian 43%, whites and others 2%
Religions: Roman Catholic, Protestant, indigenous Mayan beliefs


History

Once the site of the impressive ancient Mayan civilization, Guatemala was conquered by Spanish conquistador Pedro de Alvarado in 1524 and became a republic in 1839 after the United Provinces of Central America collapsed. From 1898 to 1920, dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera ran the country, and from 1931 to 1944, Gen. Jorge Ubico Castaneda served as strongman.After Ubico's overthrow in 1944 by the “October Revolutionaries,” a group of left-leaning students and professionals, liberal-democratic coalitions led by Juan José Arévalo (1945–1951) and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (1951–1954) instituted social and political reforms that strengthened the peasantry and urban workers at the expense of the military and big landowners, like the U.S.-owned United Fruit Company. With covert U.S. backing, Col. Carlos Castillo Armas led a coup in 1954, and Arbenz took refuge in Mexico. A series of repressive regimes followed, and by 1960 the country was plunged into a civil war between military governments, right-wing vigilante groups, and leftist rebels that would last 36 years, the longest civil war in Latin American history. Death squads murdered an estimated 50,000 leftists and political opponents during the 1970s. In 1977, the U.S. cut off military aid to the country because of its egregious human rights abuses. The indigenous Mayan Indians were singled out for special brutality by the right-wing death squads. By the end of the war, 200,000 citizens were dead.A succession of military juntas dominated during the civil war, until a new constitution was passed and civilian Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo was elected and took office in 1986. He was followed by Jorge Serrano Elías in 1991. In 1993, Serrano moved to dissolve Congress and the Supreme Court and suspend constitutional rights, but the military deposed Serrano and allowed the inauguration of Ramiro de Leon Carpio, the former attorney general for human rights. A peace agreement was finally signed in Dec. 1996 by President Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen. In 1999, a Guatemalan truth commission blamed the army for 93% of the atrocities and the rebels (the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit) for 3%. The former guerrillas apologized for their crimes, and President Clinton apologized for U.S. support of the right-wing military governments. The army has not acknowledged its guilt. Alfonso Portillo Cabrera, closely associated with the former dictatorship of Efrain Rios Montt (1982–1983), became president in Jan. 2000. In Aug. 2000, Portillo apologized for the former government's human rights abuses and pledged to prosecute those responsible and compensate victims. To stimulate the economy, Guatemala, along with El Salvador and Honduras, signed a free trade agreement with Mexico in June 2000. In Aug. 2001, plans for tax increases prompted widespread, and often violent, protests.In July 2003, the country's highest court ruled that former coup leader and military dictator Rios Montt, responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians during the civil war, was eligible to run for president in November. The ruling conflicted with the constitution, which bans anyone who seized power in a coup from running for the presidency. But in November, Rios Montt was soundly defeated by two candidates, conservative Oscar Berger and center-leftist Alvaro Colom. In the runoff election in December, Berger was elected president. In 2004, Guatemala experienced an alarmingly violent crime wave. More than 2,000 murders took place, which were blamed on crime gangs and bands of teenagers.

Happy New Year- Well this is my first post of the new year so I'd like to wish everyone a Happy New Year. I know time is so precious but I have to say that I am SO VERY glad that 2005 is over. It was a very hard year for me emotionally with so many ups and downs in our adoption. Christmas with my family was wonderful, but it was also sad. A few months before Christmas 2004 John and I started our adoption journey and I was so sure that we would be sharing Christmas 2005 with our new child.

As we celebrated the birth of our savior this year, John and I also celebrated the birth and referral of our baby girl Isabella. My heart aches that I can not bring her home right now, and to know that I'm missing her first smiles, tears, and tiny milestones. Each day I'm torn between letting myself fall in love with her totally, or to play it safe in fear that something will happen to stop this adoption as well. I've grown so much emotionally this year and I've learned that when other adoptive parents warned me that this journey was not for the faint of heart, they certainly were not kidding.

We are starting to make progress though. Our dossier has reached our attorney in Guatemala (whose name is Roberto) and I'm assuming that by now he's started translating everything. We learned that we needed to re-do John's letter of employment from the navy to show his gross annual salary instead of his monthly salary. (Guess they can't multiply by 12 ..hehe). That of course has to go through the SC Sec of State's office and the consulate's office of Guatemala in Miami to get their seals applied to make it an official legal document. The new letter should reach our agency by Wed and hopefully Guatemala by the end of this week. Then our case can officially be submitted to Family Court in Guatemala. Then we just wait until the order for the DNA test is placed. After that John and I can go and meet our baby girl. :-)

I can not tell you how hard the waiting actually is. Each month that passes feels like a HUGE accomplishment for me and I want to celelbrate the first day of each new month. When I packed up my Christmas ornaments this year I left an angel ornament out that has a verse written on it. "Faith makes all things possible." That is what I'll be reminded of each day until our baby girl is home forever.