Hi! Have I ever been busy! Whew!
[Takes deep breath, and big sip of coffee.]
How are you? How is everything going out there? Good? Thank you EVER so much for the ornament kit orders. Oh me oh my. I am so thrilled. It's been a fantastic week of crazy work, lots of help, late nights, many trips to the post office, lots of laughing, lots of ordering in dinner and lunch, lots of snacks (as you know), lots of felt, lots of labels, oh, just everything. It's been a lot of fun, actually. But I literally haven't had time to talk. Usually we have this project done by the end of October; here we are, one month early, though we started at the same time we usually do. It was awesome. Thank you very much for every single one of your orders — they mean so much to us. We still have lots of kits left (though the Sweet Homes are going faster than the others, so I think those will definitely run out first), but everything is assembled now, and I am completely caught up on orders. So I'm very happy.
We have had one problem that I know of so far, and the fault is all mine. In the Sweet Home kits, I discovered after several hundred were already assembled and shipped that I never even ordered the Red #321 embroidery floss for the French knots and the hanger on the wreath. That was not a good moment!!! After I discovered this, we bought all of the red floss they had at our local fabric stores and cut those skeins into lengths of floss and included a length in each kit, so watch for that piece of floss, tucked in near the lace and rick-rack. You need very little of the red — just enough for a few stitches in decoration — so if you have received a Sweet Home kit that doesn't have a piece of red floss included in it you can totally use a few plies (I would double or triple it) from a spool of red sewing thread and you'll never know the difference. If you don't have an easy way to get a hold of any red thread or red embroidery floss, don't worry for even a second — just email me with your address and I will send you a piece of red floss ASAP.
Thank you also for all of the super-sweet and hilarious comments on Andy's post. He was home all day the day he posted, and he was checking the computer every few minutes and giggling over all of the funny things people said. It was seriously adorable. Thank you for that.
Oh, these days! They're intense! The adoption plans seem to be on track and going well so far! The baby's due date is November 11, but there are reasons to be concerned that she may arrive early, so we are living in a state of high anticipation, waiting for the phone to ring and feathering the nest in the meantime. I think we have everything we're supposed to have, which feels really good. It's sort of challenging to make sure that we have everything we'll need to have in Illinois as well as in Oregon. But I think I will finally have some time today to put together a box of things to ship out to Andy's parents' house, where we'll be staying for several weeks.
I'm so glad we've had this time to prepare. It's all still kind of surreal, I have to tell you. I say my prayers every night, and think about the baby and her beautiful mother pretty much all day long every day, and write my letters, and try to send all of my love and good energy to them both across all of the long miles between us now. I truly hope they can feel what I am thinking and feeling. With any adoption there is a lot of uncertainty. There's uncertainty with any pregnancy, as well, of course. But adoption seems to take baby uncertainty to a whole new level, since there are so many different kinds of uncertainty happening all that the exact same time. I try not to live in the uncertainty, and try to let myself truly cherish and enjoy every single minute of this preparation time. I really want to just enjoy it all.
Because oh man. WOW. We are thrilled. Words simply fail.