A perfect Valentine surprise

Today is Valentine's Day. My husband is of the "stupid, made up, Hallmark holiday" camp. He is notorious for buying cards and then letting them sit around until after the birthday/anniversary/holiday has passed before remembering to fill them out. Seriously...I have a whole drawer full of cards purchased by my husband, that were never actually signed and presented to their intended recipients. So needless to say I was stunned to wake up to not one, but TWO signed and sealed cards on the bathroom counter. Things got better when I headed downstairs to find a bag full of Lia Sophia jewelry and a gift certificate for a massage! Colin and Shelby opened their presents too and were excited as well. Then later on flowers and candy from Shelby were delivered to the house. I was definitely feeling the love!

The best part of the day was my trip to the post office. I had a notice from the Portuguese postal service that there was a certified letter waiting for us downtown. I knew exactly what was there waiting and my eyes welled up with tears. Even though I had no idea if the letter was bringing good news or bad, I was relieved. Relieved to know the suspense would be over and we would have some closure for this step of the process. I knew the letter was from the Portuguese Department of Social Services regarding our adoption application. I called Shelby and told him he had better not be busy at work because I needed him to go to the post office with me. We went downtown and got the letter and I opened it up and tried to decipher the Portuguese the best I could. From what I could make out it looked like we had been approved. We went to the closest person I could think of that I knew and that would translate for me, Sandra and Fernanda,the wonderful ladies that do my nails for me in Praia. They looked it over and confirmed what I thought, as of 8 Feb 2013 we are officially approved candidates for adoption in the Portugal! For the last several months we have been filling out paperwork, obtaining documents, and being interviewed and evaluated. We started this process back in August/September and in October we finally had everything we needed to officially file our application. So far our journey has been a cake walk compared to what my friends have had to go through to adopt both internationally and Stateside. That doesn't make it any less stressful for us though. It was completely nerve wracking to be interviewed and worry that you are going to say the wrong thing or that the language barrier will make something you say translate to something totally wrong. Now that we are approved we get to hurry up and wait, again. The agency has what we are looking for in a child in their database and as children that meet our criteria come available we will be offered their file to read and decide if we would like to meet them. We have no idea if there are any children in any of the Portuguese orphanages that are in the age range we are looking for, and there is no guarantee that any will come available before we leave here in June 2014. There are still a lot of unknowns and we have no idea which direction this will go. But we have faith, we will follow this road and see where it takes us. Hopefully we will be notified of a potential child sooner rather than later. When we picked Colin up from school he had made us this valentine... Later we went out to dinner as a family to celebrate Valentine's Day and the wonderful news we were given today. An awesome day of love for sure!