Time to focus

Well I did it! I finished writing 13 credits worth of papers for college by April 2. That was my deadline in order to be able to walk in the graduation cermony at Crown on May 19th. Phew!! It's such a relief :) I will still have a couple of credits to finish up after graduation, so I will be taking sign language courses next fall. I'm excited to learn sign language, as we feel that this will help our children to better communicate with us. Plus, it will keep me busy while we wait for a match from the Philippines!
Now that I'm done with school, we will have more time to focus on finishing our dossier. This weekend we will start working on our autobiographies and finding a psychologist for our psych evals. We have about three months until we want to have our dossier finished. We set our deadline as my birthday, since I will turn 27 and we can't turn in the paperwork before then. I'm looking forward to having the paperwork complete and getting that call that we are approved to adopt from the Philippines!! We will see how the waiting goes after that.
So there isn't much new with the adoption process on our end, but we did get an e-mail from the Philippine Program Director with Hand in Hand. It's fun to get these e-mails to see what is happening with the Philippine adoption program, and all that good stuff. Here was what we were excited to read:
"...as most of you know, the Philippines used to have a "two-year nurturance rule" which said families needed to wait two full years after the adoption or birth of a child before their dossier could be submitted to the Philippines for an adoption. Well, recently this rule was changed to a one-year rule. We are very excited that many families who have had such a wonderful adoption experience from the Philippines can now reapply that much sooner!"
Some other news in our household is that our crazy dog, Marley, isn't doing so well. For over three weeks he hasn't been eating or drinking much, he's been very sensitive, and lethargic. Last week he starting yelping when he would jump off of the couch or bed, and also if we try to move him. We took him into the vet this week, and they did some blood work. They found that he was positive for antibodies of anaplasmosis (a form of Lyme disease), but another test the next day showed that he doesn't have the disease in his body yet (kind of like having HIV without AIDS). So we thought we were getting somewhere with a diagnosis, but now the doctor is just as baffled as we are. As most of you know, Marley is a funny little dog - he can open the fridge, likes to play chase (especially with bunnies) and just keep us laughing. Now he sleeps all the time, winces when anyone touches him and isn't super duper gentle with their touch, and he bares his teeth at any dogs that come near him (even his best dog friends!). It's hard to watch him hurting, but there isn't much we can do right now. I don't know what God's view on praying for pets is, but we have been praying for Marley to get better.
Coming up we have our next adoption group training on April 21, so we are looking forward to that. Thanks for all of the prayers and encouragement coming our way, I can't tell you how helpful it will be during our wait!!!

Rachel (for both of us)