Happy New Year!

Well, we have just returned from our holiday travels. It was a real mix of joy and sadness this year, as Rob lost both his grandmother and a cousin on the same day (Grandma from illness and Ted from a car accident). Our time in Canada was mostly spent preparing for the arrival of relatives and putting together funeral plans, a picture collage, etc. It was good family time, for which we are thankful. We are also comforted that both Grandma and Ted had committed their lives to Christ and are now with him. After our time in Canada, we headed to Minnesota to see my family, which was wonderfully relaxing and (thankfully) uneventful.

But even though our holidays are over, the holidays in Russia will not be over until January 14. This is when we hope that our packet can be submitted to the Department of Education in our region in Siberia. (By the way, for those who know the exact region we are going to, please do not post it in your comments, as we are supposed to avoid posting such detailed info on the web.) We only had to re-do one document, but the copy of it that we sent before leaving town on December 22 was actually sent to an outdated address in Russia (long story, not our fault), so we are sending another one. It is on its way to Tallahassee to be apostilled and we will get that back next week and send it along to the RIGHT address in Russia. I hope to be writing an update here soon when we confirm that the document has arrived and is ready to be submitted with our packet in Russia! Then it is just a matter of waiting for the Department of Education to give us an invitation to travel (when they have a child in mind for us), which could be weeks or maybe a couple of months from our submission.

Wishing you all a happy and blessed New Year! I suppose you can guess what our hope and prayer is for this year (same one as last year and the year before, since we started all this in January 2006!). We believe this WILL be the year, and we'll be sure to post if there's any news!