Favorite Foto Friday

After weeks of providing moral support (and HTML programming know-how), I've decided to step out from behind Kristen's shadow. I know she set up Friday as "Favorite Foto Friday", but I needed to one up her this week. So grab some popcorn and enjoy the movie.

This week's theme is lions. While Andy has been starting to imitate all sorts of animal noises, Kristen and I get the biggest kick out of his lion "roar". The facial expressions are priceless. Here are a couple action photos along with our first video upload.

Lion or Rock Star?

Lion or Male Model?

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Andy's Screen Debut

Favorite Foto Friday

This week's FFF pics are from our 1st Annual Andy's Family Day, celebrating the day we brought Andy home. We decided to spend the day at Brookfield Zoo and we had a great time. He was really interested in all the animals we saw, but I think his favorite parts were petting the goats in the children's zoo and riding on the carousel. He always loves petting zoos, so it was no surprise that he spent literally 15 minutes petting a goat and laughing hysterically. The carousel did mark his 1st experience w/any sort of amusement park type ride and he loved it. He kept saying "whooooa" every time the ride went up and thought it was really funny that Chris was riding a turtle right next to him. As the designated event planner for the Gorski Family, I don't mind saying the day was a smashing success - except that I didn't make it into any of the day's best pictures! Oh well, any "1st Annual..."anything always needs a bit of tweaking, next year I'll be sure to review all photos before leaving the day's scheduled activities :)

Andy walking like a "big boy" with Daddy
Laughing after petting a goatRiding the carousel

Favorite Foto Friday (1 Day Late)

Yes, I know...its only week 2 of FFF and I've already forgotten to do it!

This week's theme is 4th of July. With all the excitement of getting Aidan's referral, I haven't had a chance to post pictures from the weekend. Anyway, we spent the weekend up in Lake Geneva with my parents, sisters & some family friends. It was really fun for me to watch Andy get to know people that I grew up with. We also let him stay up late to watch fireworks and he loved them. I wasn't sure how he'd react to the noise, but it didn't bother him. He kept saying "ooooh" and then halfway through stood up and said "i touch it!". Too cute!

Here's a few of my favorite pictures.

Andy enjoying a boat ride with Daddy

Making new friends

Catching a quick nap

Watching fireworks for the 1st time with Grammy

1 Year Ago Today...

Chris & I were boarding a plane to Houston to spend the night & then fly to Guatemala the next morning to bring Andy home. Its hard to believe its been a year already, yet at the same time we cannot imagine our lives without him. Andy has been such a blessing and we are so lucky to have him in our lives.

I put together this video of some of the special moments we've shared this last year. Enjoy!

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Favorite Foto Friday

(If you're just checking our site today, read the post right underneath this one to find out what is going on)

Here's the pictures we received of Aidan. In the 1st one he is 1 month old, in the 2nd he is 5 months & the last one is a picture of him with his foster mom. Naturally the 1st thing I did was go out shopping yesterday, so there's also 2 pictures of Andy showing off his new Big Brother t-shirt.

Surprise Call

You know how last week in my first post I said we expected to receive a referral in late fall or early winter...well, The Call came early!

Yesterday our social worker called me at home to tell me DCFS had approved our homestudy and we had been matched with a baby! Although we are completely shocked things are moving so quickly, we are absolutely thrilled. We went to our social worker's office late yesterday afternoon to go over all the referral information and are happy to announce that we are the proud parents of a baby boy whom we will name Aidan Lee Gorski.

Aidan was born Jan. 25, 2008 and is 5 1/2 months old. He weighs 15 lbs and is doing great. He lives with his foster family in Seoul and has been with them since he was 3 weeks old. We feel so fortunate to know he is being loved and cared for by a family during our wait. We currently expect to have him home between November & January and pray the process goes quickly because we are so excited to have him here. We cannot believe that just two years ago, we didn't know when or even if we'd ever be parents and now we are lucky enough to have not one but two little boys...and if you haven't done the math yet, they are 15 months apart, so they will definitely keep us busy!

Chris will be scanning the photos later today. We'll post them in a bit, which actually works out perfectly since I plan to do a weekly post called "Favorite Foto Friday" - what a great 1st entry!

Welcome & An Announcement

Welcome to our blog! I have been meaning to put this together since we started Andy's adoption process over two years ago and today I finally decided to stop procrastinating and just do it. Chris & I have been so fortunate to have friends and family all over the country supporting us through the ups and downs of becoming parents. We hope this gives us a way to share all the fun we are having with Andy and also keep everyone updated on our plans to add to our family...

Speaking of adding to our family, you can obviously see from this blog that we have decided to adopt a baby from South Korea. Many of you are already aware that we started the process again, but we've held off on making an "official" announcement until we had a better idea of when we can expect to receive a referral. We have been on the wait list since October of 2007 and we are currently waiting for the state to approve our homestudy. Then we will forward it on for federal approval. Right now it looks like we will receive a referral in late fall or early winter of this year & have our baby home with us within a year...though as we learned the 1st time around, nothing is guaranteed!

We are so excited to become parents again and to make Andy a big brother. Check back soon for the latest Andy adventures and news on our adoption!