It Won't Be Long Now!

Well, it won't be long now. In less than 72 hours I will holding my little girl in my arms! I am so excited, nervous, overjoyed, overwhelmed and every possible emotion in between!


This weekend has proved to be challenging for our 10 year old who is becoming increasingly more anxious about giving up her status as an only child. The other night, she asked me "What if I want to be an only child again?" I said, "We'll I'm afraid that will just be too bad!" She is very excited, but there is definately some apprehension that has surfaced in the last few days. We've been doing lots of talking, and getting ready for the baby. I've let her help with as much as possible because we definately want her to be a part of all of these new changes. Most of all, it seems she's afraid that the baby will touch her stuffed animals or slobber on them. :O) I guess if that's what the worry all boils down to, we can handle that. (LOL)


If any of you who are adopting also have older siblings, here are some things we've done to try to include our oldest:

1) She will be traveling with us to get the baby. We homeschool, so that will be easy to do, she won't miss any school work, and this will be an exciting field trip. We've been studying volcanoes, and the geography of Guatemala, Spanish, etc... preparing for our trip.

2) I made her a hot pink tote bag (using our computer, printer and iron on sheets) that says in big brown letters, "I'm the BIG sister!" to carry on our trip. Since I gave it to her several weeks ago (at the Baby Shower), she's been carrying it everywhere!

3) I made her a pink shirt that has an airplane on it in green, and has "I'm on the way to get my baby sister!" printed on it, for her to wear the day we travel to Guatemala.

4) I also purchased a shirt that has "Big Sister" on it with a picture from a website. She's got several items like this to take to wear while we're on our trip. She loves anything with words on it!

5) I have been looking at photo style adoption announcements online and have narrowed my search down to http://www.purplestork.com/. I'm going to include in the wording, "Anna McGuire is proud to announce the arrival of her new baby sister, Sarah Beth." The style I've picked out has a total of 6 photos (1 large and 5 small), so I'm going to use the large one for a picture of the girls together, and for the smaller ones - 1 of the whole family, 1- of the girls together, 3 individual pictures of Sarah Beth chosen from our favorites from referral 'til now.


Also, Anna and I are going to make a "LifeBook" for Sarah Beth to tell her about Guatemala and where she lived for the past year until she came home to us. I hope that this will prove to help Sarah Beth see where she came from and not have a lot of wondering and what if's when she gets older. I want to peice together for her as much as we know.


I'll try to get Anna in her shirt and post a picture to the blog later. So you can see it.

Keep praying for us. My packing is all done for the baby, now I've just got to finish up laundry and get things packed for the rest of us.

P.S. Please remember that we welcome any friends and family who wish to "see us home" to join us at the B'ham airport next Saturday, 12/22/07. Our plane is scheduled to land at 3:09 p.m. We would be so happy to see you there. A precious friend of ours (who does professional videography and website design for a living) asked us yesterday if it would be okay if they came and videotaped our arrival. I was stuned! "Well, yeah!" How amazing is that! Todd asked if they could just tag along with us to GC to capture everything there. :O)

Keep us in your prayers, as we are till trying to wrap things up with the company. We close our offices between Christmas Eve and reopen on January 2 each year, and we are really busy right now, so trying to figure out how all of that is going to work out. The great part is that this gives Todd another week once we're home to bond with the baby. We will definately have a lot to do when we get "back at it" on the 2nd of January.

God's richest blessings to you,
Lori