Happy Wedding Day

Wanted to send out a special wish to my boss today who is in New York getting married. You can check out his wedding site here. I wish I could have been there, but considering that Shelby would of had to have gone with us, the costs involved just didn't make sense. I am sure they had a lovely wedding and I wish them well. Vince deserves all the happiness He can dish out. If it weren't for all of his support this past year during our adoption process, Shelby being here would have not been possible. I am truly grateful to him for being such a great boss and giving me such a great job. Yeah, it sounds like I am sucking up, but I really do mean all of that! So Happy Wedding Day to the Vinman :)

We have been busy around here just trying out some of the indoor play places around for the last few days. We started out on Thursday hanging out at Gymboree with Sheridan. Kim was nice enough to invite my 3 to join them for their free open house on Thursday-FUN and FREE what a great combination. We then went to Monkey Joes on Friday for some play time. It was so much fun watching Shelby run around with the boys acting like she had been on those jumpy things her whole life. It is so hard to believe that this kid was on the other side of the world just 2 months ago. She acts like she has been one of my kids forever. She absolutely loved playing on all that stuff. So since she had so much fun yesterday, we went over to Kangaroo Bobs today for some play time. Again she enjoyed every minute. The boys love to go too so it looks like we have found the perfect thing to do on cold or rainy days to get some of that energy out of my 3.

I spent Friday morning at the Social Security office since I recently received that wonderful COC (Certificate of Citizenship). It wasn't too bad, I only waited about an hour. The procedure was pretty painless actually. We are going to be very excited to get that little number that will give us back alot of money on our taxes. You see we will get back a reimbursement of $11,390 for our adoption expenses. This is ALOT of money that helped make it possible to afford this adoption. I know that some people don't really know how much adoptions costs, so I am going to share this with you all. (Remember this blog is here to educate others interested in adoptions too.) We spent a total of $25K. That includes everything everything everything (all paperwork, travel, orphanage fees, sightseeing, food, spending money, etc.) We will get back this $11,390 from the gov't plus an additional refund of $2K from the state of Georgia. So our net out of pocket was only about $11K. You really need to also consider that it costs us about $3K extra just to take the boys. I would of course recommend that you take your kids with you and spend the extra money, but if you don't already have kids then you would save that $3K. So our net out of pocket comes to about $8K. To me that is not a lot of money considering what we received for our money :) Face it, most people spend that kind of money everyday on silly things like cars and such. If you ask me, I got the biggest return on my 8K than any stock market could ever provide!

So if you ever wanted to ask and just weren't sure how to do it, that is that on the money issue for China adoption-about $8K. I found a video on another site today that speaks openly about how sometimes going special needs adoption can just be "messy" and how sometimes you think about others opinions too much- click here to view. All I can is that Shelby is truly meant to be my daughter and I am so thankful that we took the chance and the leap of faith through Him to bring her home no matter what the co$t!!