Adoption update and nature study...

Adoption update:

WooHoo!

We had our very first home study visit this morning.....phew... Done! Check!
So glad to have gotten that done.  We were nervous but it seemed to go fine.   Also spent quite awhile this morning on the phone with our international agency getting all our check lists squared away as far as what we should be working on right now.  We're in a rush right now to get all our commitment paperwork into our little man's country so they can officially recognize us as the adoptive family that will be coming to get him.  The agency says he's ours...now we just need to make sure his country realizes it, too :)

I'm all emotions lately...at any given time I could just start to cry...I kind of don't know what to do with myself!  We've prayed, we've discerned, we've stepped out in faith to welcome this little boy into our family and now my heart is getting all wrapped up with a child that will be far from my arms for a long, long time.  It's hard...I'm a Mother Hen kind of mama...and this is very, very different.  I'm going to learn a lot about fully trusting in God through this process...I can just tell.

So....on another topic, we had a bit of unplanned nature study going on at our house yesterday.
My kids begged me to post these photos...

Remember this guy?  We found him last November and tried identifying him.  This picture was taken in November.  I blogged about it back then.   We were pretty certain it was a Lunar Moth Caterpillar. 

We put him in a tank to watch for a little bit and he automatically went to work making a caccoon.  We knew they were endangered in some areas and a pretty special thing to find so we kept him in the aquarium hoping that he'd emerge in the spring.  We had started to think that he was never going to come out.  Until two nights ago, when Dan heard something banging on the aquarium in the school room.

173 Days later....that's practically half a year...this emerged....

Huge, amazing-looking moth but it didn't really look like the Lunar Moth caterpillars we'd since in field guides.  We did online searching and realized that we really had a Polyphemus Moth...in the same family of large silk worm moths but still a different kind.   It only flys at night and it only lives a short time.

So basically instead of having a quick school morning and cleaning my house for our first official adoption home study visit the next day, we ended up researching moths all morning.  And we just couldn't let her go without drawing her in our nature notebooks.  And then releasing her...

We just can't pass up nature study...its a favorite here at our house.

Blessings,
Kimberly