Smurfy's Blog

We moved our son’s furniture into his bedroom. It includes his bed, dresser, corner bookshelf and horizontal bookshelf. I am not quite agreeing with the furniture arrangement but I can figure that out later on. The bedroom furniture were taken from the baby girl’s room. Good thing the wood color of the furniture can be for a boy’s or girl’s room. We bought these furniture from Ikea. Ikea has good furniture at reasonable prices. His bed is a junior bed which can be extended as he grows. I also bought this small table with matching two small chairs from Ikea for $20. Since he is only one, he won’t get a good use of the table now but he eventually will when he’s old enough. I still need to paint the table and two chairs though. I can’t decide on which paint color yet.

Even though his furniture are all in his room, there are still some paint touch-up we have to take care of… And I still need to clear out some of my other junk in his closet… And since I moved some other junk into the baby girl’s room, I have to re-organize everything in that room!

Once I feel his room is ready, I can start decorating his room with toys, childrens books, his framed poster (whenever Michaels is done with them), etc…

My husband installed the new window coverings in Nathan’s room. Before we converted it into Nathan’s bedroom, I had long curtains to cover the windows. The curtains pretty much touched all the way to the floor. With the new window covers or blinds installed, I can still see the entire wall. It’s kinda weird seeing that wall especially when it has been hidden with my old, cheap Ikea curtains for many years. Now I can actually place some furniture near the windows without some long curtains in the way.

I was supposed to pick up two of my custom frames from Michaels today. Unfortunately, my frames are still NOT ready! First of all, they told me that it was ready on Oct 17, but when I got there they said they need more time to place the frames together and allow the frames to set or whatever that means. So they told me it will be ready on Tues Oct 19. Today when I called them after work, this woman told me one of the frames broke and they need to get new parts! Can’t they do anything right in their framing dept? So what was supposed to be a two weeks wait for my frames, it is now a three weeks wait! Since they are taking so long and breaking things, I am afraid that my posters might get all messed up too!

It was my third session for my cake decorating class tonight. We actually used most of the decorating tips to make flowers, leaves, etc. We also learned how to fill in our cupcakes with our own fillings. But since I didn’t have time to make my own filling, I just filled my cupcakes with icing.

For our next class and last class next Monday night, we have to bring a cake with icing on it already. Then in class we will be decorating it using any decorating techniques we’ve learned so far.

I am trying to think what decorations I should do. I am thinking I should decorate a birthday cake for our son since he was born in Oct. Or perhaps decorate a welcome cake for him. Good thing I have a whole week to think about it.

A week ago, it felt like summer and it was very warm. Today, my area was hit with so much rain! I didn’t realized it was going to rain at all today. It really feels like Fall season now. Plus it’s cold!

In our son’s room, my husband took the blue tape out from the wall trims, windows and ceiling. He also screwed the covers back onto the outlet. I didn’t do too much today in his room since I was busy baking plain yellow cupcakes for my decorating class tomorrow and red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting for my sister in law.

I was looking forward to getting two custom frames (Finding Nemo and Up) from Michaels today for Nathan’s room. But all I got from them was disappointment. Firstly, they had two weeks to do simple custom framing on two posters. Secondly, I called them 3 days ago to ask if my frames will be ready soon and the person told me it will be ready today! So when we arrived at Michaels, they told me that my two frames are not ready! They said they need extra more days to finish them! Well the good part is that I got 60% discount during their custom frames sale even though they were not on time in finishing my frames.

Since my husband woke up early on a Saturday morning to go to work, I decided to get up early as well to get started on things I needed to do today. This morning, I did more furniture arrangement upstairs. Since my husband had to work today, I did the rest of the furniture arrangement myself. My furniture sliders really helped a lot! We bought them last year for $9.99 at Walmart and it works really great when moving furniture on carpet.

Afterwards, I took my toy collection out from my son’s bedroom closet and stored them elsewhere. Then I put some last touches on the clouds I painted on one side of his wall. Since I am not a professional painter, it took me a while to get the clouds to look like clouds! To make the clouds, mix white paint with glaze. Afterwards, use a damp sponge and lightly dip it on the mixed paint. Create the shape of the cloud using the damp sponge. Then use a damp cheesecloth to make your cloud more cloudy looking.

Even though we’re done painting our son’s room, we still have more work to do in his room like install the new window coverings, remove the blue tape that we used to cover certain areas we didn’t want to paint over, vacuum his room and lastly move his bedroom furniture into his room.

I have been shopping for infant clothes for our son. Once his foster home gives him to us, he will need some new clothes for almost two weeks while we’re in China.

I love looking for bargains. A week ago, Gap Kids was having an additional 40% off of sale items. So I got our son some pants, PJs and tops.

I thought the additional 40% off of sale items at Gap Kids was a good sale. But my bargain hunt doesn’t stop there. Currently at Old Navy, the sale items are an additional 50% off. I found these Old Navy t-shirts for infants at $0.47 each. With additional 50% off, I paid about $0.26 each including tax!! So I bought three t-shirts since they come in three different colors! What a bargain!

Ok, now I thought this was a great bargain! But my luck doesn’t stop there. While I was in line at Old Navy, all of their cash register systems failed. So the store manager handed out $5 coupon for next purchase to make up for this inconvenience. This coupon is good for both regular and sale items. Now I can get other sale items with additional 50% off plus use my $5 coupon!!! Now that’s a bargain!!! Old Navy might as well give me the clothes for free!

We sent our LOI (letter of intent to adopt) on Sept 26 via email to our coordinator.   Today, our coordinator told us that CCAA (China Center of Adoption Affairs) now requires parents to sign the LOI.  This means that our TA (travel approval) will not be issued until we send our signed LOI back to CCAA.  Our coordinator told us to either send the signed LOI via Fedex today or hand it to her by driving over to her house then she will mail it to CCAA tomorrow. Of course, we drove to her house instead because Fedex may not deliver the LOI to her by tomorrow. C’mon CCAA, issue our TA!! We’re almost there! We hope to hear good news soon!

Upstairs of our house, we have three bedrooms and an office loft.  One of the bedrooms is our master bedroom.  Initially, when we started our adoption, we wanted to adopt a baby girl because back in 2007 we thought that girls were faster to adopt than boys.  Since we thought we were going to adopt a baby girl, we had decorated one of the smaller bedrooms with girly stuff like pink paint and Disney princess wallpaper.  Since we decided to adopt a baby boy first, the baby girl room remains.  Why?  We still would love to adopt a baby girl.  Our coordinator told us that we can begin a second adoption for a baby girl 6 months after we adopt our baby boy.  So hopefully after 6 months or 1 year, we can begin our adoption process again and adopt a baby girl also with minor correctable needs.

Since we will be keeping the baby girl room, our son will be occupying the second largest bedroom upstairs.  This bedroom used to be my home office. Since I will be a full-time mom for our first child, I have no need for a home office for myself.

I had already moved my office furniture out from our son’s future bedroom.  Now the question is, where will my office stuff go?  We have a guest bedroom downstairs but we want to keep it as is.  I can move my desk into my husband’s office loft upstairs but I am sure he wants that loft for himself.  So our solution is to move my office desk and glass displays into our master bedroom.  To create spaces, we rearranged existing furniture in our master bedroom.  Then we moved my desk and glass displays into the open spaces.   Our bedroom still needs some rearranging but we will leave it for now.  We have other furniture upstairs we still need to rearrange.  We sure do have a whole lot of work ahead of us before we travel to China.

Since our son has a cleft palate, it’s best that he doesn’t use a baby bottle that comes with a regular bottle nipple. He needs a specialized feeder bottle to help him drink his milk without problems such as the Special Needs Feeder (made by Medela) formerly known as Haberman Feeder. This special needs feeder is not only for babies with cleft lip/palate but also for babies that has problems sucking milk on their own.

Special Needs Feeder has a bottle nipple or teat that allows me to control the flow of liquid going into his mouth. It has three settings: low, medium and high. All I need to do is turn the bottle to the proper flow rate. For instance, if I notice that he is drinking too slow, I would turn the bottle on the low setting to prevent him from choking.  Or if he is really thirsty, I would turn it to either medium or high flow.  On his end, he just needs to squeeze or bite the bottle nipple in his mouth and the right amount of milk will flow out.

After doing research on how to feed our baby, I found this good online store (babytalkstore.com) that not only sells the complete feeder but also sells replacement parts for the feeder. Since I can use any standard bottle container, I mainly ordered parts for the bottle nipple and just one container that is 150ml.  In the mail today, I received some parts that goes with the bottle nipple such as the valve disc and valve membrane. In few days, I should receive the teat (nipple) and collar (part that connects to the bottle container).

Even after our son has surgery on his cleft palate, I will continue to have him drink his milk using the Special Needs Feeder to prevent any damage on his repaired palate.

In USA time, today is our baby’s 1st birthday! I wonder what his foster home did for him on this special day. Did he have some cake or get a new toy? I hope he is well and we can’t wait to celebrate the upcoming Thanksgiving Day and Christmas holiday with him.