Cleaning Out...But Not Out of the Woods

School's in for all FOUR of my chickadees! Ryan is in law school at Chicago Kent School of Law. He fnished his summer term the week after he got married (talk about multi-tasking!) and began fall orientation and classes this week. So far so good...he is finding that his philosophy major at Wheaton was excellent preparation for law.

Marissa, Lindsay and Kristen started back to school this week. Although they had the choice to stay home, I think it is a good thing for them to be at school. They have their friends and activities, and I have no excuses for not getting the rest of the house sorted out and packed up. I am making good progress!

So the cleaning out continues at a good pace. I would say 90% of the sorting is done. Everything to be sold (probably by an auction house that will come and take it all away) has been identified and moved to one room. The rest will either be boxed up for storage or packed for China. I think the China piles are still too large, so a final round of weeding out may have to occur. It's hard!!

While the cleaning out is going very well, the house is in limbo again. Our buyer had a buyer...who backed out. Wah! We were pretty close to setting a date for travel, and everything seemed to finally be falling into place. Please continue to pray that a committed buyer with a good offer will come through for either their house or mine  as soon as possible. Both houses are really priced well, so it will just take the right person to come along (now).

Our China kids are doing well. The measles outbreak is long past and it's almost time for school to start. Many of the children will be changing houses over the next few weeks, which is not ideal but sometimes necessary. More about that at the Eagles Wings blog in the coming weeks. (If you have not been following that blog, I hope you will. I have put up a few articles on adoption and institutionalization that I found insightful. I also received a lot of photos that I will post this weekend.) I wish I could be there to help with the changes, but I am doing all I can from here to help get the kids assigned to the right house for their needs. One really exciting thing about the changes is that I am hopeful we can reduce the number of children in each house slightly. This has been one of my goals as I believe that each child will be able to get more one-on-one attention with slightly lower numbers.

Gotta go meet the bus....more soon.

Donna