I’m debating about taking up blogging again. Who is still here to read it? Please raise your hand in the comments! SO MUCH happening in our lives I want to tell you about!  ..read more

 Adell and I struggle to communicate, but we manage to somehow get our point across. Here is how we do it. She has been waiting and waiting for airplane day, and it’s finally just two sleeps away! https://youtu.be/tAwOh-Oco_E ..read more

  Adopting teens from hard places is hard. So far I have seen nothing that surprises me or that was unexpected. That does not make it less hard. It means, thankfully, I have to tools in my toolkit to address what is presented to me. It is still mentally exhausting.  When a child is bounced from one foster home to the next, sometimes it happens the child becomes very ….indulged. The foster families know it is a temporary placement, and don’t want to use their energy in the constant battle, when the child is just going to leave days or weeks later only to start all over again. This c ..read more

 Our time in Bulgaria is coming to an end.  Our sweet girl will be saying goodbye to her country of birth. Her home. Her language. Her everything. It is a bittersweet time, for sure. Like we did and continue to do with our Serbian and Ukrainian born kids, we will do our best to keep her culture part of her life. Personally I’m thankful many of the major holidays in the two countries are very similar, if not the same.  Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, is a beautiful city in the foothills of Vitosha Mountain, with the Cherni Vrah  (which means “Black Peak”) visible from most o ..read more

 So, how does a parent spend two weeks in Bulgaria with their newly adopted child, especially when the child is a teenager who is VERY active and really needs to keep moving all day. We have averaged 6-8 miles of walking every day, that’s how! On rainy days we’re stuck in the apartment doing creative activities.  First, we work together on understanding one another’s language. I brushed up on some of my survival words, plus learned many others. Adell learned some of the names of items along with the ASL sign for them. We. Have found sign to be a very good bridge between being able to ..read more

 On February 18, 2022, in a court room in Sofia, Bulgaria, Adell Nesil became our daughter! The most difficult wait in our entire Bulgarian process started on that day as well. That’s when we started waiting for an invite to travel. Our wait for an invite to travel was extended a bit due to our new daughter’s age and the US requirement that she receive the full Covid vaccine series. Being “fully vaccinated” for Covid means two weeks following the second shot.  Finally, I was invited to arrive in Bulgaria on April 2nd. So exciting! We had three weeks notice, so I spent that time ge ..read more

 During the process to adopt from Bulgaria there are lots of steps that require waiting. It feels like you’re always waiting for something!  1) Homestudy. This can take anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months. Ours was estimated to be 6 months but Bulgarian gives a time limit once you’ve made a request. So, since we had not yet started our homestudy we needed to pay a fee to expedite the process. This increases the cost of the homestudy significantly. My suggestion is to have your homestudy mostly done before making a request for a specific child.  2) i800a: This must be applied for o ..read more

 November 2021: Trip 1 Adopting from Bulgaria is a long process, made longer when the potential adoptive parent drags their feet getting things done. That was me. During pre-pandemic times, Bulgaria was a two-trip process, requiring one parent to travel to Bulgaria twice. The first trip is to meet the child, spend a week getting to know them, and determine if you will accept or refuse the referral. Due to the pandemic many families were required have a virtual first trip. However, families adopting older children could choose to do in-person, and parents adopting teens were often required ..read more

 I have a rule of 3. If three people make a request, then I’ll consider doing something. This morning the 3rd person asked if I would consider starting to blog again, since our family is changing. If you’ve been around awhile, you know I’ve attempted to restart many times, only to quickly fall back to Facebook or other social media. But, I’m willing to give it a shot again.  Let me bring you up to speed: In June 2020, we moved, fairly suddenly, to a new home. We moved out of the suburban “everyone has a patch of green grasse” space that we loved, to our dream home in rural Minnesota ..read more

"Ableism. discrimination. Ableism, type of discrimination in which able-bodied individuals are viewed as normal and superior to those with a disability, resulting in prejudice toward the latter." source: Britanica.com ............................................... marginalized /ˈmärjənəˌlīzd/ Learn to pronounce adjective (of a person, group, or concept) treated as insignificant or peripheral. "members of marginalized cultural groups" Let me preface this by saying I LOVE our school district. Our district has provided amazing services to the students in our household, during i ..read more