A Great Couple of Days!

No time for real blogging, but the last three days have been great ones!

Sunday, my oldest sweet girl was baptized!  Both girls told me several months ago that they had asked Jesus into their hearts, what a blessed momma I am.  Big Sis has been talking about being baptized and this Sunday we finally went with it.  She is the one I struggle with the most, I can't wait to watch God work amazing things in her life.  Her heart is as big as they come.

Monday, in my hands, fresh from the mail....THE FINISHED HOMESTUDY!!!!!!
I went into overdrive adoption paperwork mode last night, so much I can now finish up with this wonderful piece of the puzzle finished!  Little boy, your momma wishes you were here NOW, but I'm comin' as fast as I can.

Today, Tuesday Sept. 27th, my sweet niece was born.  Just three hours ago.  We have prayed for this little life for years and then for very different reasons we have prayed for her over the past months and weeks.  She comes into this very broken world, with her life, very different than it should be.  But, today and in a week (physically), I will be praying over her for God to do a miracle in her mother's life and then in her life.  In Jesus's name I claim this sweet girl for His Kingdom.  What God has planned, the enemy is trying to snatch away and turn into evil.  I will not stand by and idly watch, no I will not.  I am an aunt for the first time for real!  Not that I don't have a special place for all my by-law nieces and nephews, I do love them.  But, it's so exciting that my baby brother is a daddy, I pray he does it well.

Homestudy Approved!

I have been quiet on here, pondering life ;) Some know what's up, some don't. Sorry, not telling yet.

But...in the mean time, we received 2 pieces of the puzzle in the mail this week! Kelly got his employment letter, yay!

AND we have our notarized homestudy tucked away into the adoption folder with all the other paperwork! Hurray!!!! That combined with some donations that blessed our socks off, it's been a great couple of weeks.

Next comes an appointment on Friday and we will see where we head from there!

We are seriously trying not to melt in the sweltering heat. Our air conditioner is set on 78 and can barely keep the house at a unbearable 82 degrees! What can you expect when we are over 100 outside? YUK!

a surprise blessing

Aren't those the best kind?

I have felt a little discouraged/worried lately about the adoption costs, since we haven't had a huge fundraiser (like the multiple yard sales) and because we have received so few responses to our support letters.

My surprise came when a sweet mom from our swim team unexpectedly handed me a check. The only reason that she knew we were adopting was because a couple weeks ago I had asked about her children, she has 2 older boys that were both adopted years ago. I was so surprised when she handed it to me as we left practice that I automatically reached out and took what she handed me and then had to back up and say, what...what...oh...is this for the adoption...oh thank you so much! You know when your headed in one direction and it takes your brain a few seconds to catch up....(okay, so maybe I'm the slow one!)

I got a chance to see her then again last night and give her a hug and properly thank her. She said the thing that sent my mind into thinking mode. She said that she was so excited and that she wished that it could be a million dollars, but she was happy to help.

I know that the Lord could pay for this adoption all at once if He wanted to, but...

what would I learn in that process?

How would that grow my faith in Him?

How many more people's lives can be touched this way?

I was reminded again that God's ways are higher than mine.

That He is going to pay for this adoption.

Even if that means He's going to pay for it $50 at a time....$15 at a time....

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if wedo not give up.

Galatians 6:9

_______________________

In adoption news, our homestudy was emailed to AWAA for the final OKAY, and then hopefully in a week it will be certified and we will be homestudy approved! (That means it will be time to start filling out all of those adoption grant applications....papers, papers, and more papers!) I am putting the final touches on the I-600A form which will get us a fingerprint appointment and a paper from immigration stating that we can bring a child into the US.

From there will start getting our paperwork notarized and waiting for these final documents. Once we have all of them, we can put them together for the dossier (the official, huge packet of papers that will actually go to Ethiopia). In order to submit the dossier, we will have our next large payment to our agency....$7,750

It's big,

it's a little scary,

but God says He will provide.

_______________

To my sweet Caleb, I am wishing you were already with us so that we could show just how much fun summer can be. Hot, sandy beach days, playing in the pool, yummy summer food, watermelon, hamburgers, and watching daddy light fireworks in front of the house. Next summer, baby, next summer....

Crazy Paperchasin!!!!

Oh yeah....I feel like I am up to my eye balls in papers! I was doing so good because I was messing with "adoption stuff" just about ever day or every other day. Well, I took a break and now I feel like I am losing grip on stuff.

Like our homestudy is almost completely finished and ready to be reviewed by who knows how many people and then certified. And then the other day I noticed a little paragraph that I am sure I read before, that said we needed to also have out employment letter, non-employment letter, medical forms (whoo, done!), financial statement, and Ethiopia application letters all finished before our homestudy would be reviewed and finalized. Yikes! Now, I am not a total slacker, I have started these letters, and then you, sat on them a bit to marinade...you know, to see if I wanted to change or add anything.

One GREAT thing about our international agency is that they have given us our dossier list before we started on the homestudy. The reason this has been so great, is that a lot of the same info is needed for both the homestudy and the international side of things.

I'll go into what all we need for the international side of things later, but for now, here is an idea of what all we needed for the homestudy.

• We had to both fill out an autobiography questionnaire that was 6 pages long.
• Both of us had blood drawn (yuk!) and had a medical check-up to say that we are healthy.
• Financial Statement -Tells us just how much we are worth ;)
• References - For this, we had 3 wonderful friends write glowing recommendations telling of how we met them, how they think we are as a married couple and as parents.
• Medical Insurance Info
• Birth Certificates of all the family members
• Marriage License
• Military Discharge papers
• Verification of income

Wow, all that, plus 3 visits with the social worker that lasted a total of 7 hours, and $1800 later, we will have a 15 page report of our life. Aaahh, how sweet! It was completely less stressful that I thought it would be, but from what I hear of others, our homestudy was a piece of cake.

On my "paper break" we have been having some fun as a family! We went to the lake with some friends on Friday and then the pool with more friends on the 4th....finished it off with some fireworks in front of the house (we had our closest almost injury to date and needless to say, this mamma will be laying down the fireworks law until these children are legal and can buy their own fireworks!)

Fireworks!!

Yes, that's 4 kids on that jet ski...Mr. Jim is such a patient guy!

The Homestudy

Okay, so...I want to first off say that I should have made this appointment weeks ago! Yes, people, weeks! But, you know, we had a ton of things going on, we had yard sales galore and my house was a wreck and the idea of some lady coming to "inspect" our home and "interview" us seemed a little intimidating. We didn't think we were ready.

Ha!

So, I have been spreading mulch like crazy (okay, so I would have done that anyway) and we cleaned like crazy(so, I would have done that anyway, also...but maybe not quite as thoroughly.) Do you know, our homestudy social worker barley glimpsed my sparkling kitchen and only sat in one room the whole time!(the living room!) She didn't even see the clean, but bathing suit and beach towel laden bathroom! We scoured for a lot of nothing.....it's all good, I have a clean house....at least till....well, at least Monday because we'll be gone all day with church and a pool day tomorrow....yes! clean house for 3 days!

The other part I didn't really stress about, but probably deep down inside; I was wondering about the "interview" part.

Ha! (again)

What was I thinking?! Kelly and I love to talk! And we got to talk the whole time...about ourselves, he, he, he. JK! No, really, isn't that the point ;) It was really great getting to tell all about what brought us to adoption, how we met (almost 9 years ago!), telling all about our family and what we like to do together. We got to tell her how we are opposites, but that we get along so well and how much we love each other. We are not shy or bashful, so this was easy! The time flew by and the kids were great! We just finished the second Harry Potter 2 weeks ago, so they watched the movie while we had our interview.

I am looking forward to Thursday where she and I will get together again to chat about my childhood (we didn't get to that today) and I am so excited to have this homestudy typed up so that we can get it finalized!!!!

And....just so I am not the only one enjoying my clean living room, I thought I'd share ;)

Yard Work, Paper Work, and Cleaning

Well, we have been pretty busy around here lately and I really wanted to do a post about all the happenings..........

with pictures..........

but it seems blogger thinks otherwise.

So, you will have to just take my word for it. If I figure what is the deal I'll get some pictures on here later.....hopefully!

First off, I have been getting the gardening itch out of my system with some much needed mulch for my flower beds. The beds are beautiful after several days of spreading! Plus, my vegetable garden that the kids and I planted a few weeks ago is GREAT! We will have squash to pick any day now!

Next, we have been working hard on ordering all of our certificates for the paperwork for the adoption. I sent off for my report of a birth abroad (since I have a privilege of being born outside of the US, I got to pay Uncle Sam $50 plus FedX there and back!), and we signed papers that we will be mailing to our homestudy agency tomorrow. Our first home visit is scheduled for Saturday so I wanted everything organized. I read an idea on a message board to have all the paperwork in a large 3-ring binder and put all the papers in page protectors separated by tabs. That way the papers wouldn't get bent corners and a minor spill will not result in mom's heart attack. The tabs are separating different parts of the adoption; i.e. dossier(this is the official packet of papers that will actually go to Ethiopia), homestudy, our copies, and receipts. So I headed out to Office Max and got to organizing papers into the binder on Saturday. I have a nice picture of it....oh wait...pictures aren't working...maybe later ;) Naturally, big sis asked if I was going to make a cover for it (she's a daughter after her scrapbooking mother's own heart), so I may have to make a pretty cover to slip into the front of the binder.

Lastly, we are trying to finish up our Hague International training. Even though Ethiopia is not part of the Hague treaty, our agency required parents to take this course. Kelly was able to sit at work on Friday and finish up the last 3 or 4 hours, so I have a little catching up to do. But, I am happy to say that I am more than half way finished...we will be glad to have that part checked off. It's been very informative, but a lot is specific to other countries.