Month: June 2011

Introducing…

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This is the post that I have been waiting 1 year, 4 months, and 3 weeks to write…
Livi (and Mommy and Daddy) has a VERY big announcement to make….
That’s right… Jon and I are legally the parents to Sofie Adina Diyana B****l!

I just happened to check my email from my phone up here camping in Summerland and found that the order has been miraculously granted!!!!!


 This was the first picture we got of her. 

The rest of these photos were take by our Bulgarian agency when they went to get information for us.
They were terrible with focusing the camera but there is a good video on our Facebook pages you can see!

Sofie is a version of the Greek name Sofia. It means Wisdom. 

We chose this name because we liked it and it seemed to fit. We preferred the “f” spelling instead of the “ph” because it is the European way to spell it (English and French spell it with a ‘ph’). Since she is Eastern European we thought that was appropriate. The fact that Sofia also happens to be the capital city of Bulgaria is just an added bonus!

Adina is a combination of our Grandmothers names.
My Grandma is named Agnes and Jon’s Grandma is Dina. 

After we chose it, we realized it was a real name of Hebrew origin meaning Delicate, Noble or Gentle.
Pronounced ah-DEE-nah.

Diyana is Sofie’s Bulgarian birth name. 

From what I can figure, it is a Indo-European variant of Diana which means Divine. 
Pronounced dee-YAH-nah (we think).

2011 Vacation Pt. 1

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This week we are on vacation. Jon has the week off and we are doing some fun and hopefully relaxing things as a family. We just want to enjoy some new experiences and love on each other! Having Livi really understand what we are doing and being able to voice what she thinks is really fun this year! She is so excited to leave for camping tomorrow! I’m excited to see how she does 🙂
We already enjoyed part one of our time off! Saturday we took Livi to Build-A-Bear to make herself and Sofie a special stuffed animal. She chose matching bunnies for both. We had to get some ear bows and flowers in order to tell them apart. We also sprung for the beating hearts. The idea of both my girls having matching toys with a heart that really beat across the world from each other kind of choked me up 🙂 Build-a-Bear was such a fun place. The staff were amazing! Livi was a little overwhelmed but she enjoyed herself! 
She chose two matching bunnies for herself and Sofie 🙂
Then she took them to be stuffed with “cookies and ice cream”.

She gave each bunny a special beating heart that she had to rub on her ears so they would listen, rub on her nose so they wouldn’t snore, and kiss to fill them with love!

Next we took the bunnies to the bath to scrub any extra fluff off them!

All done! Sofie’s bunny got flowers on her ears and Livi’s got bows 🙂

She insisted on carrying them all by herself!
After a failed nap attempt at our friends house, we went off to the Jazz Festival in Gastown! It was quite busy and Livi was running on minimal sleep but she did pretty good until dinner time at 6pm. Her bed time is usually about 7:30pm so we were expecting a meltdown of some sort to come earlier than that. We listened to some sweet music, made a flip book for Livi, and enjoyed a delicious meal at Six Acres in view of one of the stages so we could still hear some great world jazz!

Enjoying a jazz trio.

Family shot!

Silly faces at dinner.

Enjoying? a lime?

We slept over at our friends house and when I woke up 5:30am I found her like this!
Sunday morning we went to see all the fish at the Vancouver Aquarium! Livi was so excited! 

She got to touch sea stars!

Peering in at the dolphins!

The Beluga whales were pretty neat to see too!
We had a pretty fabulous and sleep deprived weekend. We came home after the aquarium and had a 3.5 hour nap! We all needed it. After supper we finished packing and loading up the car for camping tomorrow! Part two of our vacation will come when we get back!

Deflated

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I feel like some one has taken a big brick and popped/squished/scratched/stomped on my balloon. I’m feeling defeated and depressed. Up until this morning I was feeling so much hope and excitement for this week. Court which was going to make Sofie ours was happening this week! I was making plans for traveling, starting to think about packing, and really excited to announce that Sofie is ours!

I got the call this morning that the judge had looked at our file. My heart jumped! I was thinking that this was the call to tell me I “had” a toddler last night 🙂 Unfortunately, the judge wants more papers. She wants an updated proof of income and a statement showing what property we own. My heart sank. It is not a “no” to adopting Sofie. Apparently, she had been happy with our application, but she wants more. I had been warned that Bulgaria was a paper intensive country but this seems so unnecessary.

You may think that two extra documents is not such a big deal, but it is. These two little documents need to be legalized and  authenticated in Ottawa. That takes at least 4 weeks. These documents won’t be in the judges hands for another month. She won’t make a ruling on whether Sofie can be ours or not for another month. Sofie will be stuck in the orphanage, unaware of how much I love her for another month. The judge had our application in her hands! She could have just said yes! We could be parents of two children right now. Why didn’t she just say yes? This is so frustrating. I had a good cry about it earlier… I suspect those were not the only tears that will be shed this month.

I got the documents sent off to our agency today. I couriered them so they get there tomorrow and they should be in Ottawa by the end of the week. We are now looking at getting Sofie in September at the earliest. I feel heartbroken. I just want her home.